A reformed tabloid journalist has created a path for his former employer to follow

Very few people really know who a journalist is. Unless you’re one of the famous personalities like Jeremy Clarkson or Piers Morgan nobody really pays the slightest bit of interest.

One of the lower profiles to give evidence at the Leveson Inquiry was Richard Peppiatt. He didn’t have the celebrity to garner front-page news level of attention but he may have been one of the bigger stories to come to light so far. The tabloids barely put wrote about him at all, but that was for a different reason altogether.

Peppiatt was a ‘journalist’ at the Daily Star, he fell in to the role of a tabloid journalist and was asked to do some wildly unethical things to get stories, things he now regrets, and things he now campaigns against.

“I’m certainly very repentant in the way I conducted journalism.”

Peppiatt spoke to a enthralled Coventry Conversation audience on Thursday about the thing’s he’d done, what giving evidence was like, death threats linked to his former employer and that famous letter of resignation.

The famous Press Baron of the early 20^th Century, Lord Northcliff once said, “News is what someone, somewhere wants to suppress, everything else is just advertising.” According to the ex-Star “The tabloid culture is; seeking out the truth is not an objective. It’s a matter of how aggressively can we frame this story to make the most impact.”

It is for this reason the Select Committee for Culture, media and sport interviewed and re-interviewed nearly every member of the News of the World management, it is why the PCC is on its last legs, and it is for this reason the Leveson Inquiry is being taken seriously to the majority who aren’t in the tabloid media or the Mail.

The reason Peppiatt left was originally due to the anti-Muslim undertones the majority of the Star’s content, but the racism didn’t just stop at Muslims. “Black on black killing were called BOB-slaying behind closed doors. If a young, attractive, white woman with blonde hair gets murdered, that’ll get more coverage than a young black male. When they do write about them, it’s more of a caricature. That’s tabloid journalism, creating the caricature.”

In his resignation letter he openly stated the reasons for his departure and this may have indeed upset people at the top. “I started getting death threats saying ‘you’re a marked man til the day you die’ or that ‘Richard Desmond will get you’. This isn’t confirmed to be anyone that works for the paper but Peppiatt did say it was a person linked to the tabloid world.

For everything Richard Peppiatt did as a journalist for the Daily Star; from proposing to Susan Boyle, just for the photograph, to writing hurtful content about the death of Matt Lucas’ former husband, and even being ambushed by anti-terror police when he pretended to be a Muslim woman dressed in a full veil, this is certainly no way to treat a former employee.

“Some days we would have three people writing the entire newspaper”, an average reader would never know this. Included in that day’s content would be un-edited press releases, articles written under pseudo-names (look up the name Laura Neil and you’ll see some of Peppiat’s work), reworded news from the Daily mail and fake headlines “Simon Cowell is dead”.

“When I first got there, I thought, it’s a break on to Fleet Street, because everybody wants to work for the Guardian but not everybody can”.

As the Leveson Inquiry rumbles on even Guardian journalists will have to reveal some ‘underhand’ tactics they used to get some of their stories. As David Leigh put it at his evidence hearing “I don’t hack phones normally. I have never done anything like that since. I’d never done anything like that before. On that particularly small occasion, this minor incident did seem to be perfectly ethical.” This level of ethicality seemingly never translated to Peppiatt’s view when inside the Daily Star.

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As Lord Leveson seeks a phone hacking resolution, Kevin Marsh already has the answer

The current discussion of phone hacking takes many forms. Everyone is talking about it but no one is doing anything. With respect to Lord Leveson and his phone hacking inquiry, nobody has (yet) come up with a serious solution. The Hacked Offcampaign have one ready to be put in place.

Kevin Marsh spoke at John Mair’s Coventry Conversation about this and he came out of his corner swinging. The sizeable public outrage at the News of the World has left some paper’s cowering in the shadows, worried for their lives but the former Editor at the BBC College of Journalism turned the spotlights on them.

“You will hear tabloid editors take leave of the world of human decency – as Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre did at the Leveson inquiry – trying to defend what they do. Claiming it’s in the public interest. Asserting their freedom of expression. Standing on their right to expose corruption and hold power to account.”

Marsh describes this act as “hypocrisy of the most sniveling sort”.

The average journalist at a local or regional newspaper works incredibly hard to doubly source each story they write. The BBC will not budge until they have two confirmed sources. It may be the biggest story of the year, it may be entirely in the public interest, but they will wait for that second source.

This isn’t how it looked to Kevin Marsh when the Mail was reporting the tragic case of Joanna Yates. “Innocent ‘til proven guilty. Except that the picture the Mail and other tabloids gave us was of a weirdo – subtext “he did it”. After all, he had funny hair. And he once dyed it blue. Must have done it.”

In a post-fight exclusive interview Kevin Marsh accused the Mail of not writing real news “I don’t think anybody would argue that newspapers shouldn’t be perfectly free to report news, to have great opinion pages, to run fantastic editorials, to run fantastic campaigns, but that’s not the same as chasing a 61 year-old woman down the street. That’s not a lot to do with having a view or campaigning, it’s just sheer thuggery”.

Marsh’s anger and impatience is understandable. He has previously been at the heart of a similar, but much smaller saga with the Hutton Inquiry. He was the Editor in 2003 when Andrew Gilligan went off script whilst revealing the story of the ‘sexed-up’ dossier. Since then the Mail and other newspapers have directed many jabs and blows at the former BBC employee but no one has yet handed a knock-out blow and now the momentum of the fight is shifting toward the victim.

Kevin Marsh is still standing

The comeback started with a group called Hacked off. This campaign for a good public inquiry into phone hacking quickly caught the eye of many people in powerful positions. Three days later the Leveson Inquiry was announced.

“I can’t say that was because of us, but it certainly made us look good.”

Back in the ring, the audience at Coventry University are stunned into silence by this descriptive and brutal account from Kevin Marsh, as he prepares to explain the solution to the phone hacking problem.

“If you ask the question – is self-regulation the way ahead? Or is it statutory regulation? – you’re asking the wrong question. It’s this: what do we want our press to do for us? And what do we want it to stop doing in order to become again a civilised player in a civilised society?”

At this point the speaker is merely toying with the audience as they are on the edge of their seat in the final seconds of this round.

“First we need a new legal framework for the media. Second, we need rapid, low-cost resolution of disputes with newspapers. Newspapers would have to decide whether they were in, or out of this system.”

This suggestion is not to be taken lightly, Marsh and Hacked Off do not intend to simply re-do the PCC.

“Inside, there’d also be a much stricter Editors’ Code, enforced with real sanctions and administered by a totally independent, statutorily established regulator with the powers and people to investigate. Outside would be very, very cold hostile place to be. You would have no public interest defence; costs and damages would be unlimited if you lost an action; juries and judges would be invited to take into account your decision not to sign up to the stricter code; and the balance of proof would be against you”

Kevin Marsh isn’t the man behind this idea. He doesn’t deny that there are better brains at work on this than him. He is the media insider who is working with the lawyers to create a Manifesto.

One thing the journalism industry knows is we are only halfway through the fight. It will continue to be a long drawn out sluggish affair, but when Lord Leveson has completed his findings there is already a manifesto and a framework to work from.

The fight isn’t over, but it seems Kevin Marsh and the Hacked Off team have won this round, and this could swing the momentum toward who will win the whole contest.

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