The Life, Death and Resurrection of The Snout
They were a dying breed, but I remember seeing them lurking about at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. I remember too seeing them staking out Lord Lucan’s London home after the murder of his children’s nanny. They wore dirty macks and sported grubby hats. They were snouts, hired by the tabloid papers to do the tedious pavement beating and keyhole snooping that gave the them their edge. But so far as I can recall, they didn’t actually break into the houses they were watching.
The snouts cost money and over time, as margins shrank, the tabloid red-tops got rid of them. Their demise timed neatly with the arrival of the ever vulnerable mobile phone. A new kind of snout began to emerge. We never saw him – I doubt many women were involved – but he established himself as a ‘private investigator ‘- he advertised in Yellow Pages and set up an office in a backroom somewhere. He kept abreast of the emerging telephony.
The availability of these guys chimed with the beginnings of the demise of newspapers. Exclusives were becoming ever more essential. It’s a world that others beyond the Murdoch empire populated and used. But the News of the World was a market leader. The police knew it happened and sometimes, as we have learned, they would sell the much needed number for the ‘investigator’ to penetrate.
It was understandably hard for the self regulating papers to take a line or even a view on all this. Many of those who sat in judgement on each other were at it. The police were making convenient money out of it. Hence nothing was done.
Fast forward to today. I have recently been involved in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme involving ‘secret filming’ by people who secured employment in establishments where we sought to expose illegal activity. The whole issue of surreptitious filming is very tightly regulated both by Ofcom and by our own internal procedures. But were anyone at Channel Four News ever to request or even mention the prospect of tapping/hacking/penetrating someone’s phone or computer, they would be sent packing. The very idea offends against any sense of journalistic ethics. Not so in those organs with no tradition of ‘public service’.
Unleash the raw commercial thirst for profit on a massive scale, and limitless available cash, and you get what we have got.
In all this, it is doubtful that any number of inquiries will ever stop it. The genie of espionage is a concommitent of the development of cyberspace. It is well out of the bottle. Bottle? Oh for the good old days when the ocacsional snout could be found too drunk to snout. Not so now. The internet phone hacking snout is out there for all time.
Only two issues remain. Firstly, do we want to regulate the press properly? Probably not – that end of the trade is in enough trouble. Secondly do we want to give the ‘raw commercial thirst for profit’ an even greater place in the UK media landscape? That’s a question for us all.