Media must keep up fight for right to use leaked information

Roy Greenslade
3 Dec 2008

Newspapers are at their lowest ebb at a time when their readers need them to be on the highest state of alert. The Damian Green affair reminds us that it is essential for this society to support a vibrant, independent press with sufficient muscle to hold power to account.

The police, as has always been the case, must be answerable for the enormous powers that they wield. Although the media has no official role in policing the police, newspapers and broadcasters do an incomparable job within a democracy by casting light on their transgressions.

Worries about Britain becoming a police state, as suggested in several leading articles last week, may seem hyperbolic. Yet the need for vigilance remains constant and, ever since 9/11, there have been growing concerns that the forces of law and order are threatening our civil liberties. But we must also be aware that the police do not need terrorism as a reason (or excuse) for encroaching on our freedoms.

There have been plenty of examples down the years of them having abused their powers. Rightly, there was unanimity among national newspaper editors about the implications of the Green affair. Along with a raft of commentators, editorials registered various degrees of amazement and anger at the treatment meted out to Green because - as an MP and a shadow minister - his arrest struck at the heart of parliamentary democracy.

Some commentators, notably Nick Cohen in The Observer, also pointed to the similarities between the Green case and that of Sally Murrer, a local newspaper journalist who was also subject to unwarranted police action. But I believe her arrest demands greater attention than it has been given.

At once mundane and ludicrous, beneath its black comedic aspects it reveals a truth about the problems facing journalists across Britain in dealings with the police. In so doing, it helps to put in perspective what happened to Green and why.

Murrer is an experienced reporter working part-time on the Milton Keynes Citizen, the free weekly paper that is distributed across the town where she was born 50 years ago. As might be expected, after 32 years as a journalist, she knows everybody that counts in her area, including many local policemen.

Her friendship with one officer, Mark Kearney, developed into a relationship. That eventually broke up but they remained good friends, not least because he had formed a close bond with her autistic son. So they went on meeting and, naturally enough, he told her about cases that might be of journalistic interest. We are not talking state secrets here. One story concerned a brawling local footballer, a second was about the death of an ex-drug offender and a third, which was never published, involved a Muslim prisoner released early from jail.

These were routine cases, and the confidential briefing by Kearney was - by the standards that applied to the reporting in my days on a local paper - entirely uncontroversial. Journalists have always received informal information from police officers. It is not only not a crime, it is a way of ensuring that stories of genuine public interest are published.

What neither Murrer nor Kearney realised was that his superiors came to know of their conversations because their calls and one of their cars were bugged, which is an extraordinarily disproportionate use of covert techniques. The matters discussed were completely inconsequential. The result was also disproportionate. Murrer was arrested by eight plain-clothes police, driven far from her home, locked up, interrogated, strip-searched and charged with three counts of the archaic offence of aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office (the same charges levelled at Green).

Her house was searched, as was the newspaper office. For 18 months, Murrer - who had been told she could go to jail for life - worried what would happen when the case reached court. She got the services of good lawyers, and I should disclose at this point that I gave a statement on her behalf and was prepared to be an expert witness in her defence.

It did not come to that because, as her lawyers successfully argued, the bugging tapes were inadmissible.

A judge at Kingston Crown Court ruled there was nothing in the information that touched on national security or serious crime. Therefore, the intrusive investigation by the Thames Valley police force was wholly unjustified. Kearney was also cleared.

As Murrer wrote in the Mail on Sunday: "It was only afterwards that it dawned on me what sinister implications this case could have for journalists all over Britain. Indeed, it would be highly unusual for a journalist not to have off-the-record contacts. Technically, thousands of my media colleagues could be arrested just like me."

That, in a nutshell, is the worrying aspect to the Murrer (and Green) cases. They are the tip of an iceberg because they led to arrests and secured a public profile. But across Britain, police have been clamping down on the amount of information given to journalists.

Despite appointing public relations officers, who did not exist in my long-ago reporting days, the amount of information given to local reporters has diminished down the years.

Whether they are misquoting the Data Protection Act or simply being bloody-minded, police are giving out less and less information that should be in the public domain.