POLICE FORCES in the United Kingdom are imposing too many controls to govern their relationships with the press, the editor of the Belfast Telegraph,Mike Gilson, told the Leveson inquiry into UK press standards.
Questioned about the links between journalists and policemen, Mr Gilson said “chance would be a fine thing”, adding that police forces had consistently increased the size of their press offices, while denying contact with officers on the beat.
“In some areas, press officers outnumber journalists,” he said, adding that his newspaper employed people “to get around press officers” and made no apology for doing so since he believed it was the responsibility of the media.
In the past, he said, a relationship of trust developed between crime/security reporters and police officers, but senior officers now wanted to close down such links, which would not benefit the public because criminal incidents would be downplayed.
“I would want to get back to the old days of trust. That is what used to be called good old-fashioned journalism and we now see that as almost a crime,” he said, adding: “I want reporters who will not stop at a press office, I want to speak with the people who are making the decisions.”
Like the other regional press editors heard by Judge Brian Leveson yesterday, the editor of Irish News Noel Doran said his paper had “never been involved in any form of payments to or from private investigators, police officers or public officials in order to source stories”.
In a statement, he acknowledged that all newspapers were subject to financial pressure, but the Irish News frequently printed those stories that it knew “from experience have a negative or at best neutral impact on sales, but which we consider to be in the public interest”.
“A good example of this would be our recent campaign over scandals within the national health service, which we pursued steadfastly even though it was not of any benefit to our circulation.”
John McLellan, editor of the Scotsman, said the phone-hacking charges against the News of the World were "as much a shock to those of us working outside Fleet Street as for the wider public", adding that regional papers "while not perfect" had "a good reputation for behaving responsibly".
Judge Leveson has frequently expressed concern about the challenges facing the regional press, often voicing fears about the impact a paper’s closure can have on a community.
Revenues for such titles had halved in the last five years, he was told yesterday by Mr McLellan, since advertising provided a much bigger proportion of the revenue of regional newspapers than it did for Fleet Street titles.
Job advertisements had “all but disappeared”, he said.
