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Chequebook journalism and the hostages

Hasan Suroor

How can the British media lay the entire blame on the Defence Ministry for putting the sailors up for auction?

— PHOTO: AP

Faye Turney and Arthur Batchelor arrive at the Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran on April 5, 2007.

VICTORIAN BRITAIN was notorious for what chroniclers of that era have described as its habit of lapsing into "periodic fits of morality" with two-faced puritans attacking others for behaviour they themselves quietly practised. Post-modern(ist) Britain is refreshingly less hypocritical but if you want to know whether double standards in judging others have completely disappeared then the answer is "no" — especially when there is money to be made.

British society can still, periodically, lapse into fits of hypocritical moral outrage as we have seen over the past week in the way sections of the media have reacted to the cash-for-stories scandal involving former Navy hostages. Or more precisely to the Ministry of Defence's decision to allow them to flog their tales of captivity to newspapers and television networks.

Undoubtedly, the MoD's decision was cynically opportunistic, designed as it clearly was, to use the ex-hostages as tools of government propaganda against Iran. But for the British media, which have raised chequebook journalism to embarrassingly new levels, to wax indignant and lay the entire blame for putting the sailors up for auction on the MoD is self-serving nonsense.

As details of the scandal emerge, it is becoming clear that the auction was, in fact, started by the media. When the 15 sailors, who had been detained by Iran for allegedly violating its territorial waters, returned home on April 4 they were greeted by editors and TV executives waving fat cheques in their faces. A furious bidding war raged over the next two days as newspapers and TV channels vied with each other to swing exclusive deals.

Even before the sailors were freed, their families were under pressure with bearers of chequebooks reportedly gaining entry to their homes by "delivering huge bunches of flowers with envelopes attached, offering fabulous sums."

For obvious reasons, the newspapers were mostly interested in scooping the story of Faye Turney, the only woman member of the crew, and Arthur Batchelor, the youngest of the hostages. As Max Clifford, the celebrities' favourite publicist, said: "The girl was always going to be the one with the highest price — she was one woman among 14 men." A similar logic worked in favour of Mr. Batchelor: he was the only "kid" in the group.

The bidding war continued even after several of the crew members had spoken at length about their detention at an official press conference held within hours after they returned from Tehran. Clearly, their narrative was not judged sexy enough to produce the sort of headline-grabbing copy these newspapers were looking for.

The Navy, which was apparently flooded with bids from media outlets, saw in this an opportunity to push its own agenda. Here was a situation where newspapers were willing to pay huge sums to hostages for retailing their Iran-bashing tales in what almost amounted to proxy media warfare against Tehran without the Government having to soil its own hands.

So, abandoning all scruples, the Navy quietly waived the rules that bar serving members of the armed forces from doing media deals. The pretence, all along, was that these were independent voices keen to share their nightmare with their countrymen and the government had nothing to do with it.

PR disaster

But the move turned into a PR disaster when shocked politicians, defence officers, and families of service personnel accused the government of using the hostages' ordeal for its own ends. Amid a wave of damaging headlines, Defence Secretary Des Browne admitted that it had been a mistake to let hostages sell their stories, and imposed a ban on further media deals.

There is no doubt that the Navy/MoD got it wrong, but can the media escape their own responsibility in causing the scandal? One need not hold a brief for the Navy to accept its claim that there was a huge "media pressure" on it to give the hostages permission to speak even though it can be argued that it was under no obligation to cave in to the pressure; it did so simply because it served its own purpose. But let's look a little more closely at the media's behaviour.

Some of the newspapers that are now leading the campaign against the government and demanding Mr. Browne's head on a platter were the first to dangle obscene sums before the hostages to tempt them into talking. The executive of one tabloid, which got the story, has been reported as saying: "The very same people shouting loudest this week were making some of the biggest offers. I know, I've seen the emails."

Commenting on the "heart-stopping hypocrisy" of the media over the issue, The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee pointed out that The Daily Mail, which has been thundering against the MoD and calling for Mr. Browne's resignation, was among the first crop of newspapers to make a bid.

It emailed an offer of a "very substantial sum" but when it failed it suddenly developed a moral conscience and set about accusing the buyers and sellers of stories of insulting "national honour." It was "repugnant," the paper said, to see "Fay Turney cashing in... it sticks in the craw of all right-thinking people''. And The Mail was not alone in resorting to what Ms. Toynbee described as "flabbergasting shamelessness" and using "figleaf sermons to cover their real business, done with corrupting chequebook." Can hypocrisy get "better" than this?

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