Media: When people stop lying to us, we'll report the truth

We didn't call it spin in those days, but we were used to evasive and at times misleading answers by public relations officers trying to create the best impression of their companies.

Then one day I found out I had been lied to.

I was a young reporter in Coventry where, in the Sixties, strikes were a six-a-day occurrence in the car factories. Perhaps I had been naive, but I was offended and would never trust this PRO's word again.

Now truth is an elusive commodity in a journalist's trade. People demand the opportunity to give their side of the story and then often abuse it with a lie.

They don't explain how they have been caught out or say sorry. They don't make the truth work for them. They lie. They think of the story that will reflect their interests best and they use it.

Prince Andrew said the Palace had been lying to us for 20 years. That exposed serial lying about the way news had been manipulated for a generation. Then we had the double-spin. Officials couldn't say the Prince had lied, so predictably they blamed journalists for misunderstanding him.

At all levels lying to journalists has become endemic. If it were a game between us and the people we interview, it wouldn't matter much. But we are only the conduit through which news is communicated to the public. It is being reconstructed, and it is the people who are being misled.

Those of us in the media know the problem isn't confined to politicians. In a sense they are not our main concern. When a minister lies to dodge the sword on which he should fall, he isn't believed by anyone and often he makes things worse for himself. The public are sceptical about anything politicians say.

Elsewhere in public and business life people are more trusted. When these people speak, their words are likely to be believed.

But how often do reporters know the other side of a damning story is a lie? And which, then, of two contradictory statements do the public accept?

To some extent we have ourselves to blame. We sometimes reach too easily for the quote that will legitimise our newsgathering. We don't always press hard enough for the truth or seek it from a more authoritative source.

The result is stories that tell two sides but fail to illuminate anyone. At the Press Complaints Commission we are seen to honour our obligation for balance but in reality we have given currency to lies, often with no means of indicating how unreliable such statements are.

Some of the worst culprits are in the public services. It was of no surprise to me that the first reaction to what I had said at the Guild of Editors conference came from a doctor complaining about the lies told by health authority bureaucrats.

Stonewalling by Whitehall officials becomes a lie when it misleads us into spiking a story that turns out to be true.

Who will ever believe a health safety message again after the succession of lies told to the public through us about BSE?

If the local council realises it will embarrass itself with the truth it will resort to obfuscation. A lie is around the next corner.

Football clubs so seldom tell the truth that it is almost a story when they do.

Yet who gets the blame from those who know statements to be false or when they are more generally exposed? We do, of course. If companies and public institutions wanted a cynical press they could scarcely have done a better job in creating one.

For too long we have been on the defensive. Perhaps weary of self-serving attacks from all sides, we retire too often to our own company, instead of celebrating with the public the excellent job that we do for them.

Listen sometimes to editors and journalists apologising, not properly for their mistakes, but for what they do, as if journalism has no intrinsic worth and relies only on the forbearance of others.

We should market ourselves better. We should stick up for ourselves more. We should adopt our own public relations offensive.

For all its occasional excesses, our journalism today is more vibrant, more relevant, more meaningful than ever it was when I got my first job 35 years ago.

Journalists work harder and demand more of themselves because they know the public are more demanding of us all.

More than ever they have to resist the machinations of the country's 48,000 public relations officers who try to steal the news agenda or convert it to their employers' own interests. It is a corruption of our job to do their bidding, no matter what abuse we take later. We mustn't tell it the way they want it told, or write the positive when the story is a negative, or court their approval. Our duty is to be unpopular.

It's funny, isn't it, that the skills we journalists have are more in demand than ever before, by the people who want to subvert them to their own ends - but who also belittle them when they are put to use in defending the public's right to know?

Geoff Elliott is the new president of the Guild of Editors and editor of 'The News', Portsmouth