Mark Watts: telling hard truths

[Richard Simcox]

Mark,

In your email circular and other places you link to various sites where you claim I have failed to declare my political allegiances.

But in none of those places were the candidates for the job of editor of the Journalist asked to declare their political beliefs. None of the other candidates talked about their politics either.

If I had been asked I would have answered. There was nothing secret.

The first article written anywhere on the web about a declared candidate in the election was on 3 September and made it clear I was supported by NUJ Left:

http://jonslattery.blogspot.com/2009/09/rich-simcox-in-for-journalist.html

And this article is on a public website:

http://www.nujleft.org/2009/10/vote-richard-simcox-for-journalist-editor/

But I am grateful for the support of a wider group of NUJ members and activists:

http://richsimcox.co.uk/supporters/

And as I have said already on this forum - if elected I will be proud to be accountable to the whole NUJ membership and will ensure I am properly scrutinised by leaving my campaign website live, so my record can be judged against my promises.

http://richsimcox.co.uk/

I hope as many people as possible will vote. Ballot papers must reach the scrutineers in London by first post on Monday 16 November.

Best wishes

Rich

[Mark Watts]

First of all, thanks to everyone who helped make this subject the most viewed thread on this “election” forum – even beating the poll, according to the forum’s stats.

I am running as a candidate in the election for the editor of the NUJ’s magazine, the Journalist, with what I believe is a really good, clear progr- oh, yes, you have probably heard that.

So, to the “endearing” Chris Wheal, aka the voice of reason. Purveyor of fine drivel. Or do I call you JAlfred? But, don’t worry, I am not calling you schizophrenic because we all saw how that sort of thing landed Greenslade in trouble http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/nov/05/nationalunionofjournalists.

Before I address your issues, I know you well enough to know that you must have read McNae’s. John, who was still waiting for his copy to arrive last time I heard, has something of an excuse for his little slips. (By the way, John, perhaps instead of sending me a Christmas card this year, you might send me a copy of Cassell’s.)

You had a spell at Morgan Grampian, the magazine publisher. And, as you know, I think that some rather good journalists, whom we both know, came out of there.

But, Chris, what on earth happened to you in the past few weeks?

The suggestion that I am the “lookalike” of “Herr Flick”: well, you might be able to mount a case that that is funny, although I am less than certain that Private Eye would run it as a “lookalike”. By all means give it a go, it might.

But as for your attempt to suggest that I am somehow linked to the BNP. Well, that is an example of something false and defamatory. (John, this is not recommended.) I am pretty sure that this does not count as being funny.

You had the dubious honour, at the time of writing, of being the only person to have two comments moderated out of the pretty wild Guardian discussions on Roy Greenslade’s piece (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/nov/03/nationalunionofjournalists?showallcomments=true#comment-51). I had complained that they contained other statements that were false and defamatory of me (I asked them only to delete those sentences, rather than the whole comments, but the legal department decided to have them remove entirely).

But back to the BNP. Chris, you know me well enough to know that whatever I may be, and I am quite sure that some good four-letter words come to mind, I am not, and would never be, linked to the BNP in any way shape or form. (There was a good clue to that in my e-mail circular, but you did not need that to arrive at the conclusion.)

So, that makes your attempt to suggest otherwise an example of malice. Now, for the John Jones’s of the world, I am using “malice” not in the lay, but the legal sense. That is to say, someone making a false statement not necessarily out of spite or ill-will but where s/he knows it to be false, or makes it recklessly, ie not caring whether it is true or false.

John, this is also not recommended. It is not a funny thing to do. Especially for a journalist.

On a lighter note, I bet you did not know that Judith Townend, senior reporter on journalism.co.uk, has something in common with Lord Laird. They both asked me, in circumstances that I could never have predicted, a very similar question.

Judith asked me at one stage during the election campaign, and I paraphrase her very roughly: are you somehow linked to the BNP?

My reply, and again I paraphrase very roughly, was: er, no.

Anyway, I was in the House of Lords dining room the other day because of a story I am working on for The Observer. And who should come in but Lord Laird (http://www.foiacentre.com/news-NUJ-Journalist-editor-lords.html), the NUJ member, crossbench peer and former Ulster Unionist Stormont MP. He’s really a friend of a friend, but he spotted us and joined our table. I promise you that I am not making this up.

How’s that NUJ election campaign going, he asked.

Very well, I said. Although, I added a little nervously, they’re, um, calling us “right-wing nutters”. (Chris, you really should not dismiss people just because they are in a political party with which you do not, in general, agree. And that is a reference to Lord Laird, an Ulster Unionist because, as you know, I am not a member of any political party or group.)

Are they now, asked Lord Laird.

And, I added, they’re trying to say that I am linked to the BNP.

Are they? And after a brief pause, he asked a little hesitantly: Are you linked to the BNP?

My exact reply was: “Er, no.”

You asked in another place, presumably as a joke, whether I thought that Paul Mason, Newsnight economics editor, was unfit to work for the BBC because he had tweeted that he was sad to hear of the death of Chris Harman, a leading light in the Socialist Workers Party.

There’s an irony there because I worked on several stories, particular related to the “arms to Iraq” affair, with the late Paul Foot, who was then at the Eye. In fact, given that the ace journalist Fiona O’Cleirigh managed to raise the Channel 4 News presenter, Jon Snow, I wondered whether she might manage to contact “Footie” to see whether he would endorse my bid for the Journalist editorship.

“Footie” was, as you know, a leading SWP member. (There you go, Judith, you have your story. Revealed: Watts link to top SWP man.) On every story on which we worked together, we saw it the same way, as I recall. He was a fantastic trouble-maker, and a fantastic journalist. I guess that we would never have agreed entirely on politics, but I can only remember us disagreeing about one thing some years after “arms to Iraq”. At a lunch, I was singing the praises of my then editor at Sunday Business, Jeff Randall.

Footie looked at me reproachfully, and said, he’s not that great, you know. Well, nobody’s perfect, and Jeff had often featured in the Eye previously for allegedly being too close to some financial PRs and leading business figures. But, actually, Footie was wrong about Jeff (another person who, it is safe to assume, does not share my politics, and certainly not Footie’s): he was an excellent reporter with excellent contacts, and he was an excellent editor.

You raised the issue, in some place or other, about whether my revelations really revealed anything. You had already mentioned “NUJ Left” on your blog, you said. Well, “NUJ Left” was mentioned on the FOIA Centre website before that, but that is not the issue. My revelations have relied on a combination of credible publicly available information, whistleblowers and leaked documents. It was a classic investigation.

In addition, I am sorry to say, neither the FOIA Centre nor your blog is read by the mass of NUJ members. My e-mail circular went to some 19,000 of them. The disclosures in it were plainly news to the vast majority of those who received it.

The key point – the story – was that the political group, “NUJ Left”, had fielded a candidate in this election without a proper declaration being made to the voters: in the mass of election material sent with the ballot papers, the e-mail circular sent to members via the NUJ, or even on the candidate’s campaign website. No one had published that before, so far as I am aware.

Your moans are reminiscent of the story about MPs’ expenses. I was one of the first journalists to file a FOIA request, on behalf of one newspaper, for some details about MPs’ expenses. There were a few journalists on similar paths at the same time, working for different newspapers. We had some early results, but most newspapers decided against committing the resources to press the issue after political correspondents advised that it was not much of a story because everyone knew that MPs were milking expenses.

However, two staff journalists and Heather Brooke, the FOIA campaigner, did press on with the issue and secured a major victory for openness. Everyone knows the rest. And I still hear political correspondents moaning that we already knew about it, there was nothing new, etc. Of course, everyone in the Westminster village did know some of it, but just look at the reaction of the public now that it has been let in on it.

Politicians in power often mistake – perhaps deliberately – attacks on their parties as attacks on, for example, the country they govern. I have noticed that many in “NUJ Left” talk about my attack on that political group as an attack on the union. The two are not the same: despite the hijacking of the abbreviation “NUJ” and indeed the term, “left”.

An illustrative example of how you conflate them was shown when you wrote on MediaGuardian: “I have publicly stated that I thought the way the NUJ decided to back Simcox, before nominations had even closed, was wrong.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/nov/03/nationalunionofjournalists?showAllComments=true#CommentKey:84544e9e-e2f2-4d83-bd7a-303c33df6b48

Well, we still have until November 16 for receipt of postal ballots, so you should have said, “NUJ Left”, rather than “NUJ”.

My revelations have had a huge impact among “ordinary” NUJ members. Only on Monday, I was in the pub after the London freelance branch meeting when one member I met said that he was amazed by what I had revealed, and he wished he had voted for me first but, unfortunately, he had already sent his ballot paper (and he is not the first to tell me that).

Another member bounded up to me in the pub on Monday and said: so, are you the author of that e-mail?

Yes.

And is all of it true?

Yes, absolutely.

We all really needed to know about that, she said, and she would be sending her completed ballot the next day.

There have been some occasions during the election campaign when I have had my tongue firmly in my cheek. (I am afraid, though, that the award for the best gag in the election has to go to Jon Slattery and his own Trotsky exposure http://jonslattery.blogspot.com/2009/11/picture-exclusive-nuj-left-unmasked.html.)

Nonetheless I stand by everything I have said in this election campaign. That includes this from my election address: “I believe that, like me, most NUJ members are less interested in the machinations of union politics than the enormous issues facing us, such as the devastation wreaked on our trade by savage cuts to resources by media groups, or the state’s attempts to stifle journalism, or the future direction of different parts of our industry. These are tumultuous times for journalism, and I want the Journalist to help journalists steer through them.”

I added in the Journalist questionnaire: “It should keep NUJ members abreast of important news about their union.”

Plus, contrary to recent evidence, I can write NIBs.

And, Richard, you really should stop saying things with which I wholly agree. You say that if elected you will leave your campaign website live so that your record can be judged against your promises. But I will go one better, I will leave the election material on the FOIA Centre website live whether I am elected or not (so far as I can make that undertaking, John, assuming for example that the company remains solvent, etc).

Now, Richard was only the latest example of NUJ election candidates failing properly to declare – not their politics – but that they were a particular political group’s candidate. And, Richard, your attempt to defend the indefensible on this is just silly. You are a political activist, could you not see that, politically let alone anything else, the best move would have been to admit that it was a mistake. But I will leave a friend of yours to reiterate the point for me in a moment.

I already asked Tom Davies on this thread whether he had properly declared that he was an “NUJ Left” candidate in the recent NEC elections. We have not heard from him since. Well, he was one of four “NUJ Left” candidates who stood in September for four NEC seats representing London members: Tom Davies, Alan Gibson, Pierre Vicary and Barry White.

Davies, Vicary and White all failed to declare the fact that they were “NUJ Left” candidates in their election addresses and campaign e-mail circulars.

But what of Gibson? He wrote this in his election address: “I have taken on convenorship of the NUJ Left... I am a strong believer in candidates for union election proclaiming their political affiliations and am a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party.” Oh, Alan, you McCarthyite!

The results? Three of them won seats in the election. Guess which one failed. Yup, Alan Gibson.

So, if you have not already done so, please vote in this election. I am recommending: Mark Watts 1, Steve Usher 2, NUJ Left (Richard Simcox) 8. Lance the boil. savethenuj@yahoo.com.

And finally, to the “endearing” Chris. You should demand an apology for that one from Greenslade. He’s quite good at apologies.

[whealie]

I hav eno idea about The Guardian.

I do know that if you ask for a statement to be removed from the Guardian website the moderators have no choice but to remove it. You could sue for libel and they'd be forced to settle because that would be cheaper than defending it and winning.

You know that, so I assume you used the threat to censor opposition to you. A proud upholding of the NUJ code of conduct.

You have named three NUJ members as having won elections because they did not openly declare their membership of the NUJ Left. I'm not sure one of those is actually a member or supporter at all. I'd double check that if I were you. Another inaccuracy would not surprise me.

There are loads of journalists who hold political or other views, who do not feel the need to declare them openly all the time. They have every right to that privacy. There are BBC reporters who were or are members of the SWP, for example. This in no way affects their ability to report objectively.

Simcox has declared his views openly.

You organised a witch hunt. It was despicable. When you do  that, do not be surprised if the BNP become your supporters.

I have now voted. I'm not getting involved in this any more.

[Mark Watts]

‘I do know that if you ask for a statement to be removed from the Guardian website the moderators have no choice but to remove it. You could sue for libel and they'd be forced to settle because that would be cheaper than defending it and winning.

‘You know that, so I assume you used the threat to censor opposition to you. A proud upholding of the NUJ code of conduct.’

That’s not what The Guardian told me, Chris. The point is that your comments contained false and defamatory statements about me. The NUJ Code of Conduct, while expecting journalists to uphold the right of freedom of expression, does not require anyone to tolerate the publication of wild, false and defamatory statements about them.

Mind you, it does say that a journalist should “strive to ensure that information disseminated is honestly conveyed, accurate and fair.” You have certainly failed to meet that principle in some of your postings on the subject.

I did not ask The Guardian to remove any comments because they were critical of me. You can see plenty of wild nonsense about me on the discussion threads. And you are mistaken in assuming that I threatened to sue for libel: I did not. Your moderated comments to The Guardian were ridiculous, but, as I said, I expressly asked only for the false and defamatory passages in them to be removed. They decided to remove the comments altogether.

I note they also 'moderated' a posting that was abusive of Fiona O’Cleirigh, and that was removed even though neither Fiona nor I requested that. We would have preferred it to remain: it was rather telling about that with which we are dealing.

‘You have named three NUJ members as having won elections because they did not openly declare their membership of the NUJ Left. I'm not sure one of those is actually a member or supporter at all. I'd double check that if I were you. Another inaccuracy would not surprise me.’

First, let’s get right what I actually said, which was that four “NUJ Left” candidates stood in September for four NEC seats representing London members: Tom Davies, Alan Gibson, Pierre Vicary and Barry White. Three who did not declare that fact were elected, and one (Alan Gibson) who did declare was not elected.

You will be amazed how many times I checked it, Chris. And it is a little silly to say that you are not sure that I am right about one of the three because you could have checked it out for yourself. It was very easy. All you had to do was a Google search. Try it now. You will find this leaflet, http://www.nujleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Election-leaflet.pdf, and this, http://www.nujleft.org/2009/08/vote-nuj-left-in-the-nec-elections, and indeed, most reliably of all, this, http://www.journalism.co.uk/journalists/forum/index.php/topic,2004.30.html. Or did “NUJ Left” falsely claim one of them as its own?

Now, if you, as you say, are “one of the many misfits within this grouping”, ie “NUJ Left”, but did not know that one of these candidates was an “NUJ Left” candidate, what chance do you think the “ordinary”, ie non-politicised voters had? How many of them would have done some background research on the candidates, rather just rely on the mass of election material distributed to them?

As you know, I have written thousands of words on the subject of “NUJ Left” during this election campaign. No one, including you, has so far pointed to a single inaccuracy. Your posting was 223 words, and it contained that howler.

‘There are loads of journalists who hold political or other views, who do not feel the need to declare them openly all the time. They have every right to that privacy. There are BBC reporters who were or are members of the SWP, for example. This in no way affects their ability to report objectively.

‘Simcox has declared his views openly.

‘You organised a witch hunt. It was despicable.’

You are mis-representing my position. I have not said, because I do not believe, that journalists should have to declare their political views all the time. I do not say that members of political groups cannot be journalists. I cited the example of my past working relationship with Paul Foot.

I do believe, however, that journalists should declare relevant interests – be they commercial, personal or political – when they have, or could be perceived to have, a significant bearing on the subject matter about which they are writing. For example, if I write a feature about a row between Microsoft and Google, and if I have a current or past consultancy with one, or even with Yahoo, I should declare it.

As I wrote above, although you seem to want to ignore it: ‘Richard was only the latest example of NUJ election candidates failing properly to declare – not their politics – but that they were a particular political group’s candidate.’

And, as I wrote in my e-mail circular, although you seem to want to ignore it: ‘In general, I believe that no one should be under any obligation to declare her or his political allegiance. However, if you stand for office as, for example, a councillor, MP or MEP, you’re expected to declare any political allegiances. Imagine the uproar if a candidate standing as an independent in such an election were discovered to be part of some party.

‘Why should it be different for a trade union that is supposed to be democratically governed?

‘This should certainly apply to a candidate’s allegiance with any kind of political grouping that organises itself in the union. I know only of “NUJ Left” that currently fits that description. But it should also apply even to political groups that do not organise themselves within the union. There’s no legal requirement for this, but it’s necessary in fairness to the electorate and in the interests of our union's democracy.’

I do not know Alan Gibson. And it may be that we would disagree on many things. But I agree with him on what he said in his election address when standing unsuccessfully for an NEC seat last September: “I have taken on convenorship of the NUJ Left... I am a strong believer in candidates for union election proclaiming their political affiliations and am a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party.”

Simcox failed to do that in the election material distributed to voters. That is what all this comes down to: “NUJ Left” made an enormous mistake. And its members and supporters are making another by refusing to admit to it.

I have not organised a witch-hunt: I exposed that mistake. I did it by employing standard investigative journalistic techniques. That was not McCarthyite: this is as ridiculous a charge as it was when various MPs levelled it at the Telegraph for exposing the expenses scandal. I know you do not like it, but I hit the bulls-eye.

‘Do not be surprised if the BNP become your supporters.’

First, there is no evidence so far as I am aware that BNP has become one of my supporters. You have referred elsewhere to a BNP-supporting website that quoted my e-mail circular. That website also quoted Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News presenter, http://www.foiacentre.com/news-NUJ-Journalist-editor-endorsements03.html in the same article. The notion that this shows BNP support for me is as ridiculous as claiming that it shows BNP support for Jon.

Second, I would be very surprised if the BNP became my supporter. Not least because of what I actually wrote in my e-mail circular, and which should serve as a warning to all of us in the NUJ:

‘Imagine if a candidate had stood in this election, or stands in any future NUJ election, who omits to make clear in material sent to the electorate any political affiliation. Let’s imagine she or he presents a good case. Let’s say, for sake of argument, that she or he wins. Then you find out that the person you’ve just elected into an NUJ position is a member of the BNP. What, you’re going to hope that I’m one of the candidates, that I find out just in time and find the necessary proof, and bring it all to your attention? I’m not comparing “NUJ Left” with the BNP. I’m saying the NUJ membership has the right to know if a candidate is a member of “NUJ Left”, the BNP, or any other political group – especially for a job such as the Journalist editorship.’