The truth? National newspaper editors found the Post Office scandal boring

Papers didn't ignore the plight of the wrongly accused sub-postmasters but it took a TV drama to make them shout about it. Specialist journalists kept the story alive.

Previously: Paper Stings
The New York Times op-ed speculating about Taylor Swift's sexuality shows how media ethics can be a blank space.

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The rash of front-page denunciations (The Mirror: ‘Why still no justice?’, The Sunday Times: ‘Post Office fury intensifies’, The Daily Mail: ‘Shameless: National revulsion over Post Office scandal mounts…’) might have led the casual reader to believe that the national newspapers had been all over the hounding of innocent sub-postmasters since the scandal first came to light 15 years ago. In fact, as Liz Gerard writes for The New European, the story had only been the subject of just one national newspaper splash since Computer Weekly started reporting on it in 2008.

That Daily Mail front page — ‘33 die without justice’ — appeared in February 2022, bylined to Tom Witherow, who was reporting from the first day of the public inquiry which began that month. Witherow, who has since moved to The Times, was bylined alongside legal expert Catherine Baksi and legal editor Jonathan Ames on that paper’s lead story last Saturday (‘Horizon scandal: Police investigate Post Office ‘potential fraud’).

Witherow has written extensively about the case for the Mail and the Times, but that interest came once the postmasters had won two huge legal battles (a £58m class action brought by 550 of them in December 2019 and the quashing of 39 convictions in April 2021). Before that, there was virtual silence from The Times — a whisper, to be scrupulously fair — made up of a scattering of small stories deep in the paper, some of them tiny nib (‘news in brief’) pieces.

In her piece, Gerard pointedly extracts one of those nibs, which was headlined Post Office legal bill:

The Post Office has spent an estimated £5m in a legal battle with sub-postmasters. More than 500 people say computer glitches mean they were wrongly accused of false accounting and theft. The case will be heard in the High Court on Wednesday. The Post Office denies that the system was at fault. It may have to pay up to £1bn if it loses.

The Post Office — and ultimately the taxpayer — facing a £1bn bill — as a result of a campaign of false accusations against more than 500 innocent people was shoved in a corner, considered unworthy of more than 63 words.

This dismissive attitude from her own newspaper did not, of course, play any part in the arguments put forward by the permanently outraged but conveniently blinkered Melanie Phillips in The Times’ opinion section this week. Under the headline Where’s the outcry over postmaster scandal? she squeezed out the crocodile tears with the skill of a jaded golden-age Hollywood starlet:

… despite periodic reports about this scandal in Computer Weekly, Private Eye and on the BBC, these failed to spark public outrage or concern. Even after evidence of Post Office obstruction and gross dysfunctionality was revealed in 2015 at the Business, Innovation and Skills select committee hearing where [Post Office chief executive, Paula] Vennells’s feet were held to the fire, there was still no wider glimmer of interest. 

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was because the victims were just ordinary people from modest backgrounds. There was no fashionable cause behind them. No celebrities or public figures were involved. Post Offices hardly engage emotions like scandals over blood transfusions or dead babies in hospitals. 

Phillips writes admiringly, as serves her position this week, about the relentless focus shown by Nick Wallis, a freelance journalist who’s reported on the scandal for years, reporting for Private Eye, presenting, producing and consulting on three BBC Panorama episodes, presenting a BBC Radio 4 series (The Great Post Office Trial) and writing a book on the case (The Great Post Office Scandal) as well as acting a series consultant on the ITV drama Mr Bates vs. The Post Office. It’s the latter that has sparked renewed newspaper interest and finally led to rapid (and panicked) political action.

Usually, despite appearing frequently on Radio 4’s excreable Moral Maze, Phillips is very keen to attack the BBC. The Times even more so; its Media Editor title could quite easily be renamed the Anti-BBC Correspondent given the frequency and intensity of attacks on the BBC published on its pages. Rupert Murdoch has nothing but disdain for the BBC so The Times is institutionally predisposed to feel the same. It’s easier to pretend that everyone was looking the other way while the postmasters fought for justice than it is to accept that The Times was uninterested.

While Wallis, Private Eye, and journalists at Computer Weekly — notably Rebecca Thomson and Karl Flinders — remained doggedly committed to the case, the words “post office” and “computer system” were enough to induce situational narcolepsy in national newspaper editors.

The Daily Mail started to take the scandal more seriously only after a lucky break on Wallis’ part in late 2018. As he explained in an interview with InPublishing last year, Wallis managed to get hold of the personal email address for the paper’s then-editor Geordie Greig. He got in touch and Greig replied that the local sub-postmaster in the village where he had a weekend cottage — such a very Geordie Greig touch — had been pressuring him to look at the story. Greig assigned the Mail’s chief reporter Sam Greenhill to look into it and the paper began one of its patented and enormously self-aggrandising campaigns on the issue.

While the Mail had reported on some aspects of the story from 2008 onwards, the coverage was confined to pieces buried deep in its pages. But once its ‘campaign’ kicked off, it was able to claim out-sized credit for the sub-postmasters’ successes in 2019 and 2021 (‘Our £58m Post Office victory’, ‘Victory for the Mail as first postmaster cleared’). Had Wallis not got Greig’s email address and the second-home adjacent sub-postmaster not been forthcoming, the Mail may well have been as chronically disengaged as the rest of Fleet Street.

The papers howled for Vennells to be stripped of her CBE — she has now agreed to return it and will, no doubt, be stripped of it by the Honours Forfeiture Committee in due course — but said nothing when she was awarded it in the 2019 New Year’s Honours, a year before the sub-postmasters won their £58m class action. A damehood for the model/actress/singer Twiggy, a knighthood for cricketer Alastair Cook, and another for the author Philip Pullman dominated coverage.

It wasn’t until this week that most national newspapers and broadcasters reported on the fact that Fujitsu, the firm behind the faulty Horizon IT system that led to the unjust prosecutions and hounding of hundreds of people, has won more than 150 government contracts since the Post Office stopped prosecuting staff and continues to be one of the government’s ‘Strategic Suppliers’. Computer Weekly and Private Eye noticed, of course, and to give (tiny) credit where it’s due — as Liz Gerard points out — the Sunday Express reported on the extension of the Horizon contract last year.

There are two prominent strains of bullshit splattering around the place since Mr Bates vs. The Post Office put the Post Office scandal at the top of the bulletins.

The first is the familiar cry that journalists failed to report the story and that it was ‘ITV evening drama wot won it’. But as the writers and producers of the series have been scrupulous in pointing out, it would not exist without the work of Nick Wallis, Private Eye, and the journalists from Computer Weekly. The nationals also didn’t ignore the story but they barely concealed their yawns; treating the case as one of corporate failure and big numbers rather than a human story of innocent individuals crushed beneath the corruption and indifference of a vast bureaucracy.

The second sort of bullshit is the type being spouted by the national newspapers as they rush around attempting to insert themselves into the story as late-in-the-day heroes or wave their hands, pointing everywhere but to themselves when it comes to the question of why a vast and calculated injustice wasn’t bigger news far earlier.

The national newspapers are dominated by the soap opera stories composed by the political, royal, and entertainment correspondents. Specialists struggle to get their news lines taken seriously or, in a lot of cases, simply don’t have roles any more. It’s why, following the almost total death of the industrial correspondent, strikes are so poorly reported on. It’s also why scandals in the NHS emerged in Health Service Journal and Nursing Times long before The Sunday Times; why crumbling schools were a surprise to Fleet Street hacks even after Jessica Hill at Schools Week had been reporting on the issue for months before they were forced to stay shut in September 2023; and why Inside Housing had been sounding the alarm on dangerous cladding and high-rise buildings for years before Grenfell.

A fast food diet of confected culture wars rows, Westminster who’s up/who’s down? horsetrading, bollocks about the Royal Family and trend stories ripped from TikTok is unfulfilling. But it’s cheaper, easier to produce and explain, and far less risky than the hard graft of breaking stories, explaining why they matter to readers, and sticking with them for the long term. There’s an appetite out there for that kind of journalism — the resilience of Private Eye’s circulation and the growth of Byline Times are two examples — but national newspaper editors and their proprietors prefer to pretend that their readers are as bored and disconnected as them.

The circle-the-wagons tendency among journalists at ‘big’ papers and broadcasters has also been evident in their analysis of why the Horizon scandal didn’t attract this level of attention before. A conversation between the hosts of LBC’s The News Agents — all three ex-BBC reporters — last week was a case in point:

Lewis Goodall: At the moment, the brutal truth is there’s not much else in terms of news. And if this story had happened, if the [ITV] drama had aired on, I don’t know, October 6 2023, just before the October 7 attacks, would we be in the place we’re now in? The answer is: Probably not. And that is, in a way, a bit disturbing, right? But it just shows this kind of contingency of news and politics sometimes. 

Jon Sopel: Look, I spent a third of my career as a foreign correspondent and what you learned was that there is a lighthouse beam and that beam is continually going around the world. And sometimes it is on you. 

When I was in the US and Donald Trump was president, it was pretty much on you the whole time. There were other times when the beam goes somewhere else — Israel, the Middle East — and there’s no point in ringing up the editor and saying, ‘Put me on the news tonight’ because the story would have to be so colossal. 

And this [Post Office scandal story] landed just at a time after Christmas/New Year when people are still at home watching TV, maybe not at work, and have more downtime… Great moment in the schedules. There is no big competing new story that is taking it off the air — I’m sure people will say to me, ‘Come on, Gaza has been huge’ — it was a domestic story and it got attention. And that is the way we work…

Emily Maitlis: I also think… many [previous disasters] were focused around events. Hillsborough was an event, it was appalling, it is actually sawn into my memory as a Sheffield girl… Grenfell the same, I can still see the building, see the flames at the top, we covered it on Newsnight, we were standing there. I think the ITV drama became that event in the absence of one thing that was memorable… that was the problem with the Post Office scandal, the stories and the testimonies were emerging to build a picture in a jigsaw way but it didn’t focus around one day, one moment, one catastrophic emergency…

We talk in the industry about ‘a peg’… ‘What’s the peg for that?’ is the question that we’re all asking, which is: What does this hang on? What is the new piece of information that allows you to kick off your day’s discussion or your news or your bulletin or your programme with that today? The truth is that the journalists did do their job, the paper editors did do their jobs, they did run the stories, they did put it prominently in their papers, but until you have new news, you’re not going to lead with it.  

There’s a complacency there that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in an office where things could be improved but won’t be because people shrug and say, “This is how we’ve always done it.”

That same complacency is in Sopel’s “and that is the way we work” and Maitlis’ (self-) reassurance that journalists and editors did their jobs. Most of them didn’t. Paying brief and half-hearted attention to a major scandal for years is not “doing your job” it is the failure to do so wrapped in the tissue paper of an excuse.

Correction, 13 Jan 2024, 8.13pm: I originally wrote that Vennells was awarded her CBE in the same month that the sub-postmasters won their class action victory. It was, of course, the year before. Thanks to Liz Gerard for pointing out my calendar calamity.

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