THE TRUTH ABOUT A MEDIA OMERTA OVER RECENT SEXUAL ALLEGATIONS? IT’S COMPLICATED

The British media can hardly be trusted to report on sexual misconduct in the workplace if it stands accused of going out of its way to conceal incidents that happen on its doorstep.

Last week two of the UK’s most prominent media companies, ITV and Guardian News & Media (GNM), found themselves accused of concealing internal sex scandals. Both had previously been lauded for their journalism in exposing sexual abuse.

ITV, the outlet that did most to expose the evil of Jimmy Savile at the BBC, has been denounced for staging a “cover-up” of an affair between star This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield and a teenage employee more than 30 years his junior. ITV denies this.

The Guardian, which won an award for its exposé of the predatory behaviour of the former BBC radio presenter Tim Westwood, and revealed serial sexual harassment claims against the film director Noel Clarke, is alleged to have buried similar #MeToo-style accusations against its star columnist Nick Cohen.

Publishing an investigation into Cohen based on testimony from seven women, the New York Times insinuated that there is an omertà in the British media, whereby industry misbehaviour is kept out of the public eye. “The British news media is smaller and cosier than its American counterpart, with journalists often coming from the same elite schools,” noted its investigative reporter Jane Bradley, a Brit.

In support of this thesis, she revealed that the Financial Times had spoken with several alleged victims of Cohen but its editor, Roula Khalaf “killed” the story, apparently because she judged Cohen to be of insufficient relevance to business readers.

The FT has won kudos for its #MeToo investigations, with reporter Madison Marriage winning multiple awards, notably for exposing sexual harassment of women at the all-male Presidents Club fundraising dinner at the Dorchester Hotel. Marriage investigated Cohen for the FT and was, presumably, frustrated that the story did not run.

But I don’t entirely buy the NYT’s depiction of the British media as a private club that enforces a code of silence in respect of its members. True, stories about the private affairs of editors or proprietors are generally – perhaps corruptly – treated as off limits by the national press. But this is otherwise a dog-eat-dog industry where any opportunity is taken to diminish a rival.

ITV has taken a media mauling over Schofield, with the Daily Mail and rival broadcasters reporting the scandal in granular detail and with top billing. The BBC even produced the story for its global audience – surely an over-estimation of the presenter’s profile.

The Cohen allegations were reported last year in the industry title, Press Gazette, and his chief accuser, Lucy Siegle, wrote in the New European about Cohen having groped her at the photocopier when she was a young editorial assistant in 2001.

But these are small publishers and Khalaf was surely misguided if she thought Marriage’s deeper investigation into Cohen did not merit an FT story. The paper long ago expanded beyond business journalism, as the broad-based and successful FT Weekend shows. Moreover, the Cohen and Schofield tales are essentially about corporate reputation and management failure.

ITV’s handling of the Schofield affair threatens the position of its CEO Carolyn McCall. The married presenter met the boy when he was 15 and began the relationship after helping him to get a job on This Morning after he turned 18. Schofield described the affair as “unwise, but not illegal”. ITV’s cursory investigation into the matter uncovered only “hearsay and rumour”. The broadcaster is accused of tolerating the relationship, with one producer saying “everyone knew”.

Siegle claims that when she made a complaint about Cohen to Guardian management in 2018 “they were at turns dismissive, talked over me, angry and yet also confusingly vague”. For two decades, Cohen was a superb columnist on The Observer (The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper). After a GNM investigation into complaints against him, he left in January but on “health grounds”, with a financial settlement and praise from his employer for his “brilliant and “incisive” journalism. He has described the accusations as “vile and untrue”. But, in an email to the NYT, he referred to his past alcoholism: “I look back on my addicted life with great shame.”

Neither of these stories are matters of life and death but they reflect an important issue.

Media, like music and sport, is an industry where fame creates potential for workplace exploitation. But sexual misconduct is not confined to these sectors. We need journalists to be probing similar abuses in other fields – higher education, the armed forces, the health service – but to do so they need trust and credibility.

And that will be undermined if the public suspects that the bosses of big media companies are allowing predatory behaviour inside their own buildings, just to protect their brands.

2023-06-03T06:16:37Z dg43tfdfdgfd