British Newspaper Tests Teeth of a New Regulator

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/world/europe/british-newspaper-tests-teeth-of-a-new-regulator.html

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LONDON — There had been inquiries and arrests and trials and high drama; millions were paid out in compensation as the British press shuddered through years of unwonted scrutiny.

A major newspaper was closed down. Editors faced trial. A report cataloging malfeasance ran almost 2,000 pages. The scandal, set off by illicit phone-hacking — primarily but not exclusively at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire — brought the fortunes of an oft-maligned profession yet lower, recalling doggerel of the 1930s: “You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”

Now, more than three years since the scandal shook the political elite and the police as much as the press, the longer-term impact of efforts to overhaul the British press may come down to something far more prosaic — an intimate image, said by The Sunday Mirror to show paisley-patterned pajamas and a private part of their owner.

This latest twist came with an almost surreal alchemy of the banal and the bizarre after Brooks Newmark, a wealthy Conservative lawmaker and government minister, exchanged messages and photographs on social media sites with someone who claimed to be a “20-something Tory PR girl” called Sophie Wittams.

Ms. Wittams, however, turned out to be a male investigative reporter using the image of a glamorous, blond Swedish model (who says she was not part of the sting) to coax the politician into swapping increasingly raunchy, late-night images and indiscretions.

When the minister — in charge, among other things, of a campaign called Women2Win, designed to draw more women into Conservative politics — learned that The Sunday Mirror tabloid was about to publish the story, he quit, describing himself as “a complete fool.”

Not too long ago, that might have been the end of it — one more chapter in the annals of steamy scandal that haunt politicians from John Profumo and John Major to Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner.

But this time, there was another element. After all the convulsions of the hacking scandal, most of the mainstream British press had agreed to set up a new self-regulatory body, the Independent Press Standards Organization, or IPSO, designed to show that journalists and their editors had turned a new leaf.

So the Newmark case became “the first real test” of whether the new regulator “has any teeth,” said Mark Pritchard, another legislator who claimed he had been cyberstalked by the same reporter masquerading as someone completely different.

Lloyd Embley, the editor in chief of The Sunday Mirror and The Daily Mirror, defended his decision to publish, saying it had clearly been in the public interest to uncover the minister’s behavior. Indeed, IPSO’s own code of practice says that “misrepresentation or subterfuge” may be justified “only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.”

But critics of the newspaper said its behavior amounted to entrapment, the product of a “fishing expedition” rather than a well-planned investigation. On either count, the newspaper could be found to have infringed the code of the new regulator, which has promised to be far tougher than its predecessor, the Press Complaints Commission.

More to the point, the debacle raised the question of whether Britain’s tabloid press had simply returned to its default setting, predating a long and exhaustive inquiry by Lord Justice Brian Leveson. That sense of déjà vu has deepened with a tally of recent cases in which Mirror newspapers have acknowledged for the first time that their reporters were also involved in phone hacking.

The way the regulator handles Mr. Newmark’s case, thus, “will set the tone for the future of British tabloid journalism in the wake of the Leveson inquiry,” said Ian Burrell, media editor of The Independent.

A nocturnal selfie, it seemed, had become a cause célèbre.