Health warning: rumours in cyberspace may seriously damage your credibility

Roy Greenslade
15 Apr 2009

ONE OF the major problems in running stories about smear campaigns is obvious. Publishing the content of a smear, even in attenuated form, may help do the rumour-monger's job for him. So to repeat more than the gist of any allegation is potentially very damaging, as the Sunday Times and the News of the World have discovered to their acute embarrassment.

I am sure the editors of those two papers did not wish to diminish the reputation of Frances Osborne, wife of shadow chancellor George Osborne, because their stories about the Damian McBride affair did make clear the allegations were bogus.

Their sin was to give far too much detail, engendering the possibility of readers believing there is no smoke without fire. It prompted Mrs Osborne to go to the Press Complaints Commission, and I am fairly sure the editors will end up apologising and removing the offending material from their websites.

To an extent, though, the damage is done. It's virtually impossible to erase material from cyberspace. To quote Mark Twain, writing long before the arrival of the internet, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has its trousers on.

The stuff is out there, aggregated, passed on scores of times, mulled over and archived. Mrs Osborne may well need to act further to have any respite from the ill-founded claims.

Moreover, the whole sordid business raises at least two other important questions, about the relationship between unaccountable bloggers and accountable mainstream media, and about the difficulty of regulating digital media. Journalists are well aware that freedom of the press (and freedom of expression) carries with it responsibility. Even advocates of "total freedom" would find it difficult to defend a person who shouts "fire" in a packed football stadium.

The McBride scandal illustrates once again that the internet is the medium of choice for people who wish to get up to no good, especially when it comes to spreading false stories.

There is no easy mechanism to prevent this. There is no national regulator, such as Ofcom or the PCC, to tackle the problem. Nor is there any chance of an international regulator being set up, given the myriad different laws about what can and can't be published in various countries.

If it is a matter of illegality, such as libel, then people can act through the courts, especially in Britain. But why, for example, should a Ukrainian citizen use the British courts to pursue a Ukrainian publisher whose work, though carried online, has been accessed within Britain by as few as a dozen people? That's libel tourism at its worst. And what happens when a British site carries scurrilous material? Going to law is often made more difficult by the fact that the server may be located outside British jurisdiction. Even if it is in Britain, a libel - or, more fashionably, privacy - can prove costly and the outcome is a lottery, especially if the defendant is a small-time operator without funds.

We are talking, of course, about bloggers. McBride's supposed ambition, together with Labour website overlord Derek Draper, was to set up a specific site in order to place damaging stories in the public domain.

This action would not necessarily have given them credence - though, left unchallenged, it is highly likely mainstream media outlets would have referred to them, however obliquely.

McBride and Draper knew that. They were prepared to plant their tawdry innuendos on an obscure website in the expectation they would be taken up. But we journalists do have to think hard about the ethics of touching such stuff, and though non-journalists may be amazed by what I'm about to say, in the vast majority of cases we do not go near it.

The net is replete with all manner of unprovable nonsense about individuals that journalists do not repeat in mainstream outlets. Similarly, most people do not repeat it either.

I have read the most outrageous and far-fetched online material about celebrities. It never sees the light of day on trusted news sites because it would damage their single most important asset - credibility. Mainstream journalists test what they might pick up online against their own professional news values and their knowledge (not least, legal knowledge).

Take the case of political blogger Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines). He often carries gossip that newspaper journalists do not touch. Then again, occasionally he puts up a story that is followed up avidly by Westminster correspondents - material which has sometimes been so significant that it has set the political agenda.

In deciding what to carry and what to ignore, mainstream journalists are therefore employing their usual news judgment. That's just as it should be.