It doesn't stand up, Belle de Jour

The exposing of the identity of the police detective blogger, NightJack, has highlighted a serious problem with “citizen journalism”.

Detective Constable Richard Horton, who published an award-winning blog on his experiences as a Lancashire cop dealing with the rough end of the criminal justice nightstick, had won an injunction against The Times preventing it naming him after a reporter figured out his identity. The High Court has quashed that, Mr Justice Eady remarking that a blogger “has no reasonable expectation of privacy” (“’Ello ’ello ’ello. Blogging detective unmasked”, The Guardian, p3, 17/06/09).

Another uniformed blogger, Tom Reynolds who publishes Random Acts of Reality about his experiences as a London ambulance worker, says the ruling is similar to making journalists reveal their sources. His point is that, as journalists who are their own sources, bloggers need privacy to be honest and protect them from the consequences of what they say.

The presumably occasionally uniformed sex-working blogger, Belle de Jour, whose writing turned into books and a TV series starring Billy Piper, weighed in with the announcement that journalism was dead and that it now was killing off the bloggers who had replaced it.

“We need people to tell the truth, to speak truth to power. Once that role was served by journalists. No longer,” she said in The Guardian (“A Dangerous Precedent” p33, 18/06/09).

Citing the need for privacy of bloggers in repressive parts of the world, and the similar need for whistleblowers in our own society, Belle asserted that there’s a need for anonymity for bloggers, even if what they do goes public.

NightJack - I mean DC Horton - took a disciplinary hearing from the force rather than attempt to benefit financially from his writing, as Belle did. Accepting that his conduct had been unprofessional, his blog has been stopped and its archive has gone.

Belle de Jour, whose identity is presumably either known or not important to the journalists who dish out comment space in The Guardian, accused The Times of destroying the NightJack blog because it must have contained something “incendiary”.

Belle has this issue back to front. The police blogger tried to use the power of the court to silence a journalist. The Times wanted to publish the identity of a person who had won the Orwell blogging prize and had been reportedly approached by agents and publishers. There was immense interest in his identity because of his own blog.

Lancashire senior police officers might have considered allowing NightJack to continue, as ambulance bosses have encouraged Reynolds, but it might also have devalued his writing once the public knew of the force’s permission. The DC decided to stay with the force anyway. Presumably, he contested the revelation of his identity so that he both blog and remain a detective.

The professional reporter that uncovered his identity has no special powers or warrant card, as DC Horton has. Really, it was always going to be a matter of time before the detective was named because he had initially and unavoidably placed himself within a relatively small group of people among whom he could not have long hidden once a journalist started looking.

It is a pity that the blog has stopped because it was entertaining and well-written. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to slap reporters with court orders under the assumed name of freedom.

When you are fed some nonsense in a paper or on TV by a journalist, you know who they are and who they work for. You might complain, correct and respond in all manner of ways because the journalist reports to the public with a responsibility to the public (however badly) and news organisations must stand by their stories. The accountability of journalism to its public is very, very imperfect, but there is some.

Belle do Jour used The Guardian to promote her obituary of journalism. For her, freedom to blog rests on anonymity, of course, so she is not accountable for what she says. Until now, it never really mattered what she said, because it was just about her and her sad clients.

Bloggers in repressive countries comprise an underground press that writes and publishes under extremely difficult conditions. What they do to oppose their regimes has absolutely nothing to do with blue-light stories from the front line (or red-light revelations).

People, who risk imprisonment in, say, Iran for reporting their experiences on blogs are in no way assisted by the silencing of journalists by courts in this country.

The logic that bloggers need anonymity is faulty. Undercover work in our society can be unfair to the whistleblowers who collaborate with journalists; they have breached confidence with their employers, albeit in the public interest. To expect a blanket court ruling of privacy from journalists, so that one can carry on anonymously commenting, reveals how narrow the interests of a personal blogger can be.

Even a really terrible journalist has some standard by which copy will be judged, some concept of the readership that should be informed or represented.

Does honesty rely on no-one knowing who you are? In the small world of the western “citizen journalist”, maybe it does. The secrecy that protects some anonymous bloggers from reprisals protects all from having to take responsibility for the truth of what they say. Anonymous writing in newspapers used to come with a name and address supplied tag – indicating that the author was known but their details were withheld for some reason. That is protecting a source. Purely anonymous submissions were once binned. Now newspapers frequently publish anonymous material with the online tag in place of the name. Journalists should not give up on their own jobs by presenting the fall-out of the blogosphere as public opinion.

If you speak out in public, and you have something interesting and original to say, you will not be able to hide behind a blog tag.

The public wants to know who’s poking it; arousing curiosity about something invites curiosity about you and what your motives are.

Try giving a speech at Speakers’ Corner in a ski mask.

Public scrutiny is the essence of journalism and a court should never be used protect anyone from that, as NightJack demanded.

Belle de Jour, after your comment in print I would have said that you should not give up the day job. But I want you to give that up as well.