Undiplomatic Cable

The Daily Telegraph has gone too far with it's latest piece of sparkling undercover journalism, and the editor and reporters concerned should think deeply about where their paper is heading.


If you're not familiar with the story then allow me, dear reader, to fill you in. As it were. So, over several days the Telegraph sent a pair of female reporters to a string of Lib Dem constituency surgeries, posing as single mothers facing difficulties with benefits. Hours of conversations were recorded, and the resulting sting has stung the arses of leading MPs - Deputy Leader of the House David Heath, Business Secretary Vince Cable, and Transport Minister Norman Baker, to name three. The quotes which the reporters eventually managed to glean, presumably after sieving through swathes of uninteresting bullshit, have cost Cable some of his already limited responsibilities; the others were forced into either apologies or denials.


Very good, congratulations Telegraph. This is almost as big as the expenses shitstorm you created, after being handed all the evidence.


I think this is different, though. For two reasons. The first lies in the paper's reaction to the recent Wikileaks disclosure of American War documents and ambassadorial cables. In these articles the paper has wheeled out a pair of its more bizarre looking journalists to call Wikileaks 'delinquent' and undemocratic, as well as snidily referring to Julian Assange as a 'glamorous hero', but only until people get sick of him. Of course, there is a difference between what Wikileaks does and the greasy tactics the Telegraph employed in stinging Vince Cable. The latter is certainly more dishonest. But to carp madly on about Wikileaks being undemocratic, providing mainly conjecture and gossamer-thin, we-knew-all-this-shit-already reasons for the criticism is a nonsense.


Then, in the 11th paragraph, the crux of my beef:


"Private conversations, even when they are not at the level of the diplomatic communiqué, are generally considered to be no-go areas for journalists, because it is recognised that professional life of any kind would be virtually unsustainable without the possibility of confidential communication."


Too bloody right!


The second objection I have concerns the nature of their sting. These undercover reporters were posing as constituents at an MP's surgery, a place where beleaguered Lib Dem MPs would be seeking to regain some popularity from their voters after all the messiness of the Coalition agreements. The headlines they generated - breathtaking incites such as George Osbourne not being in touch with problems of the common man - did nothing but cover up and distract people from the absolute shit-tonne of bad press that should be heading the way of the Conservatives.


Undercover reporting, according to Bob Steele of Poynter Online "can support substantive, compelling journalism that serves citizens and society", but this is not the case with the Telegraph's sting on Vince Cable. The information they recovered, which amounts to little more than bitching, serves no public interest. If the reporters suspected Cable would let slip that the coalition planned to renege on their promise not to raise university tuition fees, or that under new proposals the entire stock of Britain's forest land could be sold to foreign multinationals in a massive landgrab, then there would have been some point to it. 


But this was nothing, it was an insignificant drop in the ocean of contempt already felt for our MPs, and will probably stop them being at all candid in even the safest of circumstances, and that can only be a bad thing.