Yellow press

British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the outrage caused by the latest phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World tabloid by announcing the creation of an inquiry.

Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who is to lead the investigation, is to have the power to summon “newspaper reporters, management, proprietors, policemen and politicians to give evidence under oath and in public,” Cameron told the House of Commons on Wednesday.

This wasn't the first time that the News of the World has been embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal. In 2007 Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who worked for the tabloid was sentenced to six months in jail for tapping into the phones of royal aides.

What's made this scandal different, though, is that while the previous incidents involved hacking into the phones of celebrities or politicians, this time it was the phones of relatives of fallen British soldiers and of victims of the 2005 London bombings which were targeted.

This has many in Britain wondering what would drive an organization allegedly to resort to ordering criminal actions to help it sell papers. Some media analysts say it reveals a lot about how competitive the British tabloid market has become, particularly since the arrival of the Internet and smart phones.

The Internet challenge

"What's happening at the moment is that under technological pressures you actually have a race to get to even grosser and grosser levels of intrusion and gossip," Martin Conboy, a professor of journalism history at the University of Sheffield told Deutsche Welle.

"The inclusion of private investigators to actually go to the trouble of compiling whole dossiers on anybody you might want to have any sort of insider dirt on, just indicates how far that newspaper and that culture is driven to stay ahead of the game, when we have a world of Twitter and blogs and mobile phone leaks."

The brashness with which the News of the World went about its business is hard to imagine in Germany, where the market is dominated by a single national mass daily, Bild. While Bild is known for its sometimes provocative headlines and pictures of topless women on the front page, it's generally agreed that it doesn't go nearly as far as the British tabloids.

Less competition

Professor Conboy, who spent five years lecturing at the University of Potsdam, sees this as a reflection of a different media market, with less competition.

"Germany doesn't have a Sunday newspaper tradition in the same sort of way. You don't have that massive once-only discrete publication on a Sunday," he said. "How, in a 24-hour seven-day-a-week news cycle can a Sunday newspaper in particular maintain its audience. In terms of the News of the World, it was through this sort of coverage, this sort of intrusion."

Tom Vesey, chief executive of the media consultancy Carma International, agrees that the competitive tabloid market in Britain may be a factor, but he doesn't see it as the main one. In studies conducted by his firm on media outlets in some 97 countries over the past decade, Vesey has observed something about the British market, which, he argues, encourages the British media to go to greater extremes than their counterparts in Germany or other parts of Europe.

Cultural differences

"This feeds into what is unfortunately a relatively bestial mentality in the British. If you look at other aspects of society like binge drinking, you find that the British public is a public that responds to events with both aggression and excess, so the media simply feed this back into society," Vesey told Deutsche Welle.

The fact that the British tabloids are businesses that are out to maximize profit, means that it is clearly in their interest to give the readers what they want. This is also the case in the rest of Europe; so that, according to German media analyst Jo Groebel, the comparatively toned-down fare that Bild offers is in keeping with a difference in mentality.

“In Germany too drastic reporting, too much diving into people's private sphere, would not be welcomed by an audience, it would say, 'Leave people alone - that's not fair and that's unethical,'" Groebel told Deutsche Welle. “Clearly they would probably read and discuss it, but it's not the same kind of culture of reporting, having practically no borders or hesitation to dive into the lives of private people.”

Another factor, Groebel argues, is that in Germany self-regulation through the German Press Council has been more successful than in Britain.

Britain also has a self-regulatory organization in the form of the Press Complaints Commission. However, in light of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, Prime Minister Cameron has declared it a failure - and promised a new regulatory system.

Speaking to reporters at his official Downing Street residence last Friday, Cameron said that it would be up to the inquiry to decide what that system would be, but that it should be "truly independent - independent from the press, so that the public will know that newspapers will never again be solely responsible for policing themselves."

Author: Chuck Penfold
Editor: Michael Lawton