This weekend has seen a veritable media frenzy over the case of Alex Wickham, the journalist whose honey trap prompted the now ex-minister, and self-confessed fool, Brooks Newmark, into exchanging provocative photographs with him.
When other papers accused Wickham of crossing some sacred line of journalism, The Sunday Mirror responded with a regal wave of its hand. Wickham’s story, claimed the paper, was published entirely in the service of the public interest; in fact, it did Britain a favour by rooting out a man who was heavily involved in the advancement of young women in politics, yet prepared to take sexual bribes from them.
Unsurprisingly, this defence has also been echoed by the likes of Guido Fawkes who, true to form, ran a blog-post decrying the UK’s media standards as a type of censorship that left the wrongdoings of the powerful unexposed. “We will continue to use subterfuge and clandestine methods to go after wrong ’uns,” its post trumpeted proudly.
There is massive problem with this sort of argument, however, and here it is: Newmark was not actually a ‘wrong ‘un’’ until explicitly prompted off the straight and narrow by Wickham’s virtual wiles. To date, the Sunday Mirror‘s sting has not proven successful in uncovering old cases of misdemeanour on Newmark’s part; indeed, no other women have spoken up in the wake of this scandal to confirm that other politicians — let alone Newmark — preyed on them via social media. Wickham’s piece, then, did not lift the flap on some kind of ongoing and unseen hive of criminal activity, as pieces of investigative journalism ought to do. Instead, it created a contentious sensation precisely so that it could report on it.
This, put very simply, is why I think that The Sunday Mirror is going to lose its case at IPSO (the new press regulatory body): Wickham’s story told us nothing new or pertinent about politicians’ existing abuses of social media, only that such abuses were possible. This means that it cannot be justified as a defence of public interest, since it reflects not on reality as it stands, but only on what could be. And anyway, didn’t we already know that the politicians in office are human beings just like us, with the potential to make mistakes? Can you indict someone on the grounds of mere potential?
These questions aside, there are also several issues of methodology that belie the sting operation’s validity. For one thing, Wickham filched pictures off young women’s social media accounts without their knowledge or permission to help improve the authenticity of his Twitter avatar, a “Tory PR girl”: his coy profile picture was nicked from a 22 year-old Swedish model’s Instagram account, and his sunbathing selfies off a 26 year-old woman in Lincolnshire. There’s no need to expound on how being used as online lures has proven degrading and humiliating to the women involved, or about the kinds of avenues for legal action that it might open to them. Suffice to say that The Sunday Mirror may have more than just IPSO to worry about.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that Wickham distributed his virtual bait only amongst Tory MPs, strongly suggesting that he hoped to ensnare them in particular. This is the sort of rookie error that, unfortunately, makes The Sunday Mirror’s heroic claim to be defending the public interest even more dubious than it already is. The paper’s unabashed dislike of the Tories is widely known, which means that to a casual observer, the whole thing comes across more akin to a vindictive stab at a perceived political enemy than as a gallant, self-sacrificial public service.
There’s no disputing that Brooks Newmark did wrong by his family — and wrong by a public that trusted him — by responding so readily to Wickham’s online wiles. His fall has been inglorious to say the least, and will probably haunt his career for a good many years to come. Nevertheless, one can’t help but feel that the bigger scandal in the whole debacle has less to do with Newmark, and more to do with the journalist and newspaper which ran his scoop.
