[COLOR=rgb(26, 188, 156)]It is a global phenomenon called hint or innuendo journalism…I also hate it cause in most cases it is driven by malice and negates Journalism’s canon that “Facts are Sacred”…
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[SIZE=7]Are we nudging into ‘hint’ journalism?[/SIZE]
By Tom Leonard
12:01AM GMT 07 Nov 2003
Perhaps after such recent newspaper scoops as unnamed footballers from unnamed clubs accused of rape, unnamed England footballers taking cocaine and unnamed television presenter accused of rape, this week’s blockbuster - unnamed royal servant gags newspaper over undisclosed story - was just one more anticlimax for readers.
The Mail On Sunday’s splash (“Royal servant gags MoS in court drama”) last weekend was, after all, up against a similarly infuriatingly incomplete contender on the front of The Sunday Times, alleging MI5 had bungled the bugging of an unnamed embassy.
Yesterday, the mist cleared slightly in the latest battle between journalists attempting to name names and lawyers trying to stop them. The Guardian won the right to identify Michael Fawcett, once one of the Prince of Wales’s top aides, as the man who obtained a libel injunction stopping the MoS publishing an article about him.
After several days arguing its case in the High Court, The Guardian finally convinced Mr Justice Tugendhat to lift the injunction which had been placed against the paper on Monday after it threatened to name Mr Fawcett.
The injunction was lifted because the broadsheet had argued it had no intention of repeating the allegations against Mr Fawcett.
And as if there wasn’t already enough confusion in court, The Daily Telegraph was also there, ready to make an application to find out what was in the two injunctions.
In a significant departure from current legal practice, lawyers had told the paper that the MoS injunction was not being circulated. Equally unusually, the injunction had concerned libel - normally, the libelled have to wait until the story has been published.
The Mail on Sunday is expected to continue to argue its case in the courts so it can run the story this weekend. The paper has reported it has a 3,000 word account from a former royal servant whose story is supported by a sworn affidavit.
Will the MoS’s story ever make it into print? Only a few years ago that would have been the crucial question for all concerned. Not any more. Details of the allegations were running yesterday on a well-known gossip website (unconnected with the MoS) and have also been published on a Swiss website (a fact that has been similarly well publicised).
Mark Stephens, a media lawyer at Finers Stephens Innocent, said he learnt the details simply sitting in a pub in Islington on Sunday night - the people on a neighbouring table were discussing it and he eavesdropped, as did the occupants of two other tables.
For many ordinary readers, the growth of what he calls “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” journalism must be deeply annoying. With increasing frequency newspapers are publishing stories in which the crucial details are missing. Fleet Street was gripped for weeks by allegations that a woman was raped by Premier League footballers in a London hotel suite, as it was by Ulrika Jonsson’s claim to have been raped by a television presenter.
Last month, the media whispering was about Iain Duncan Smith and allegations - finally revealed after several weeks of damaging hints - of irregular payments to his wife, Betsy. And last week, The Sun “exposed” four England footballer players as “cocaine fiends”. Once again, readers’ appetites were whetted only for the paper to admit it couldn’t name the men for legal reasons.
The formula is becoming wearyingly familiar, particularly to tabloid readers - in each case, the newspaper makes clear to readers that it is in possession of very juicy information which, damn those judges, it is unable to impart.
Why is this happening more and more? Some say it is not the law that has really changed in this area but the tabloid appetite for salacious stories. Fleet Street has always been in the business of naming names wherever possible. But commercial pressures, it is argued, are forcing the press to push so much harder in what it can print. And when it is stopped by the law, that block is so much more obvious.
But Mark Stephens believes both legal and technological changes are responsible for the popularity of “hint journalism”. In the past, it was impossible to get an injunction to prevent a libellous story if a newspaper was in a position to justify it, he says. Nowadays, applicants are by-passing that problem by instead claiming their right to privacy is under threat - and so more pre-publication injunctions are being granted.
“It’s caused a change in the way society interacts with news. People are no longer content simply to sit on the sofa waiting for the news to be brought to them,” he says. “They take the nudge, nudge, wink, wink story and begin to surf the net. They’re becoming their own investigative journalists.”
He provides evidence - for two months at the height of the Ulrika rape story, she and John Leslie were the most frequently inputted names in the Google internet search engine. The same happened when a famous footballer was implicated in a scurrilous story on a gossip website, (even though the story was quickly removed and never appeared in the press). Mr Stephens says the turning point in this development came when Newsweek decided not to publish the story about Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, only for Matt Drudge to put it on the internet.
Since then, the “water cooler” conversations between friends and colleagues have moved increasingly into international cyberspace and foreign websites where British libel laws do not apply.
Meanwhile, the subject of a damaging story is in a “no-win” situation, he says. If they remain silent, many of those who know the allegations will think they are guilty. If they take out an injunction, many will think they are simply trying to gag the truth.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, believes the growth in hint journalism is down more to technological advances than to the law. And he says there are limits to how much readers will put up with it. He believes it would be a mistake, for instance, if the MoS were to splash again this week with another story saying it had been injuncted.
“They should take their medicine and shut up or find a second source for the story,” he says.
“You can’t deny people are titillated by this sort of story but you get a sense of the media elite tantalising readers. That does cause more irritation than enlightenment. There may come a point where readers say, ‘Just publish it or shut up’.”
-The Telegraph