No, the title of this blog post is not meant to be ironic or sarcastic. The investigation and revelation by the Telegraph newspaper group into the massive and seemingly endemic abuse of expenses and allowances by our Members of Parliament - leading to resignations, certain de-selections and probable prosecutions, including the first forced resignation of a Commons' Speaker in over 300 years, and the "sting" by the Sunday Times, demonstrating that two Lordships were prepared to amend legislation for money and leading to their suspension from the Upper House, also for the first time in over 300 years - shows that British investigative journalism is alive and well and doing exactly what it should do: holding the powerful to account and exposing corruption, malpractice and abuse of public trust.
Forced out - Speaker Michael Martin. Will Blears, Mandelson, Smith, Straw, etc. follow soon? (copyright: Telegraph group)
It is important to emphasise this because journalism gets a very bad rap and journalists and their various media are often accused by the lazy - thinking and ignorant of being the cause of society's ills. Furthermore, it shows that at least the larger newspaper groups are prepared to put the time and money into such a story. Like the journalists who exposed the Watergate criminal conspiracy they 'followed the money'. Nor was this -- contrary to a typically uninformed, witless comment from a 'Labour luvvie' so-called comedian on last week's News Quiz -- simply a matter of publishing data that was nicely collated and presented on a computer disk for which the Telegraph newspapers successfully bid.
As the Telegraph has explained, 25 journalists have been working non-stop on this for weeks -- some of them have not seen light of day for long time -- poring over some 2 million pieces of data and with painstaking, indeed forensic work, looking at the connections, for example between the date of receipt items in particular homes and the date of those homes were bought and sold. The sort of work, in fact, which Knacker of the Yard would spend years doing before bringing a prosecution (but probably not bother and prosecute the journalists for buying the disks!), has been done by free, independent media, producing something that is overwhelmingly in the public interest and indeed may lead to a change in our constitutional arrangements. Such a process is, in my view, long overdue but to prevent this post being typically over long I will in the future message to the world!
That is not to say of course that there aren't abuses of power and, yes, privileges of journalists and journalism. The prurient revelations of sexual peccadilloes, carried out in private and affecting no one but the fully consenting adults involved -- such as the story about Max Mosley – cannot, in my view, be justified.
Max Mosley - private life should remain just that. Copyright: Press Association
The defence by newspaper editors of this and similar stories to a recent Select Committee that such people are public figures and so there is somehow a justification in exposing behaviour which most of us would think a little - to say the least -unusual, undermines the very important issue of regulation of the press. The combination of development of de facto privacy law and the fact that we still have in Britain probably the most draconian defamation laws of any liberal democracy, plus the increasing use of the courts to suppress legitimate enquiries under the Human Rights Act, as well as the 'time dishonoured' use of injunctions by the High Court, means that our press is in a constant battle to tell the stories that citizens should be told. Still, the doughty Ian Hislop and Private Eye have just won a very important case against a 'gagging order', so we must live in hope!
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