A Fierce Public Warning

Peter Hitchens writes:

The BBC, which spends millions on giant salaries for star presenters most of us haven’t heard of, couldn’t be bothered, last week, to send a reporter to watch the sentencing of a terrifying killer in court.

So it missed a major story. The man, 50-year-old Simon Carter, had committed a ghastly, heartbreaking crime of a kind that would not long ago have been headline news across the country.

He had crazily and without reason or purpose beaten his 72-year-old mother to death, so ferociously that he had broken his own hand.

Bad enough already, you might think, even though, in these sad times, alas, crazy murders are all too common.

But there was an urgent and important new aspect to this killing. Carter was out of his mind thanks to the sort of marijuana habit that far too many people nowadays have.

It was a big enough story to warrant being there in person to watch the outcome if you are reporting it. But that’s not all.

So appalled by what he had heard, the judge, Steven Everett, was moved to issue a fierce public warning against those who seek to legalise this drug.

He appears to be one of the few judges who have been prepared to speak out on that issue. He warned that cannabis was a ‘terrible’ substance, which ‘caused and exacerbated’ mental health issues. And he said campaigns to decriminalise it – led by politicians including Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the Green Party’s Zack Polanski – were ‘wholly misconceived’.

He was incisive and specific, saying the case was evidence that those who talk about cannabis being a positive drug in the community are gravely mistaken.

He told the man who had beaten his mother to death: ‘You are not the first and won’t be the last with mental health issues to appear before me and say, “I smoke cannabis.”’ But if it had not been for the Daily Mail, which had an actual reporter from a reliable and experienced news agency in the courtroom, most people would not know.

Instead of arranging proper coverage of this event, the giant BBC supposedly dedicated to public service, relied rather pathetically on a police press release for its account.

Where do I begin? How can fair and accurate court reporting rely on the account provided by one side? In any case, it is not the job of the police to report court cases. They have other things to do.

Indeed, a police source told me they were not in court for the sentencing, which is why their release did not mention the judge’s comments.

I can’t begin to think how much trouble I’d have been in, in my court-reporting days on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, if I had done such a thing. You jolly well stayed to the end. The source also revealed that marijuana (possession of which remains a serious crime) didn’t feature in their investigations of this dope-infused crime.

Make what you like of that. Maybe if they cared more about it, there’d be fewer crimes of this kind.

Anyway, as a result, the BBC missed the story, which in my view very much deserved national exposure.

When I first saw the BBC account of the sentencing, and compared it with the Daily Mail’s far superior version, I thought the reason must be that the Corporation’s top deck were not that keen on reporting criticism of a drug that may possibly be used by some of its staff.

I was astounded to find that the true reason was, if anything, worse.

Many media just don’t cover the courts properly any more. An experienced freelance reporter explained to me that the BBC probably didn’t see the full story – as they have taken to cancelling contracts with on-the-spot agencies.

All serious newspapers and broadcasters used to make good use of such agencies, or even send their own people if the case was a big one – say, a son beating his mother to death.

A BBC source droned that they make decisions in line with editorial priorities and available resources at the time. News teams, the source added, follow clear editorial guidelines to ensure accuracy and this includes fact-checking with the relevant authorities. Or then again, not.

Apparently, on this occasion, they ‘fact-checked’ the police version with the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS told me the BBC ‘just asked what mental health illness the defendant was determined by psychiatrists to have, and we confirmed schizophrenia’. As if this made things better, the BBC source said that their behaviour was something that many, if not all, media outlets do. Happily, not all.

I had long heard rumours about how the reporting of much of what goes on in this country is collapsing, as the provincial newspapers where I learnt my trade 50 and more years ago shrink or decay. But I had never seen it so starkly illustrated as in this court case, which badly needed to cause a national controversy, and now won’t.

It is amazing to recall that the small evening paper in Swindon where I started work in 1973 had a full-time librarian and a treasury of cuttings going back at least 70 years, in which the history of the town was stored.

Every one of us was carefully trained in law and shorthand, and our first attempts at court reporting were always supervised by an experienced senior reporter.

The same went for all the other things we wrote about. I was actually an indentured apprentice, like a character out of Dickens, and could not be released from this bond until I had served my time, satisfied my superiors at many tasks, and passed various tests and examinations.

The national company that owned my paper and several others would pay for us to spend occasional weekends in a Victorian country house in the Chilterns, where we were lectured by experts and old hands, and spent the final day putting together an imaginary newspaper, under heavy time pressure. I don’t think it was that exceptional.

As a result, the whole country in those days was covered by a safety net of reporters who, though not perfect, kept a constant eye on things that badly need to be exposed to the clear light of day, if they are to stay healthy.

I suspect this is vanishing fast, because the advertisers and readers, who once kept local papers going, have deserted them, and all we have instead are websites.

Oh, and the BBC, which still has billions in licence fee receipts and can afford to do what the old newspapers often can’t.

So why doesn’t it?