Ross Barkley celebrates Everton’s second goal against Burnley on Saturday
In my six years of adjudicating on complaints against the press,1 I am struggling to think of a case as bad as Kelvin MacKenzie’s assault on footballer Ross Barkley last Friday.
This has nothing to do with the ability of journalists to be offensive or controversial. Both are the price of our relatively free press. But from a regulatory point of view, MacKenzie’s article scrapped well below the bottom of the barrel.
I’m not going to reprise his rant – why recirculate and give fresh impetus to such bile? But the piece was inaccurate, and so misleading. It failed to differentiate opinion from fact. And it used a “protected characteristic” in way that was pejorative and gratuitous. All these things cross the red lines of the self-regulatory Editors’ Code.
But there are two things in addition that take us to a new level. First, the timing. The article was published on the eve of the anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, when 96 supporters from Liverpool lost their lives at the afore-mentioned stadum. Either MacKenzie was aware of the date and ploughed on regardless. Or he wasn’t which given his own personal involvement in mis-reporting the event in question is a profound act of self-serving amnesia. Irrespective of the explanation, it is spectacularly insensitive.
And second, how did the article get from MacKenzie’s keyboard into the Sun? Who proofed it? Who subbed it? Who found the images and who laid out the page? Again, two possible explanations: Either MacKenzie, as a former editor and long-established figure, was given “carte blanche” to do as he pleased. Or the editorial control was utterly lacking. Either way, the failure of effective editorial oversight is truly shocking. That is surely a question of standards that must be addressed.
The failure of editorial oversight is not just about the specific article, it is about the Sun’s standing and sales. Other commentators have already speculated that commercially this episode could prove counter-productive in an almost existential sense. I am not so sure, but I do know that writing-off a whole region of the UK is a curious way to try to increase influence and revenue.
What was going on in the editor’s office of the Sun last Thursday night? Was it some inexperienced southerner who has no idea of what this means on Merseyside and the North West generally? Was it someone who had the experience and knowledge but thought the notoriety would be somehow worth it?
I was at Goodison Park on Saturday and I have to say how wrong you can be. You could feel the resilience and unity of the capacity crowd over Hillsborough and Barkley. (And just by the way, referee Clattenberg was also wrong to book Barkley for his post-goal celebrations. After the week he had been through, greater humanity should have been shown.)
However, there are two positives than we can take from this sorry mess. The first is that People Power can and does work. The public and business boycott of the Sun on Merseyside, now more widespread than ever, hits the company harder than can be quantified. And second, that the ‘paper themselves suspended McKenzie shows that the reconfiguration of how press complaints are investigated –so that they have a primary hard-wired responsibility to own and act on complaints – is having some effect.
But what we surely need is a proactive culture rather than a reactive remedy. This was serious error of both judgement and procedure by the Sun. With freedom comes responsibility. They need to stop up the bottle and leave the last-chance saloon, dispense with Kelvin MacKenzie – and to programme their IT systems to delete any copy containing the words “Football” and “Merseyside”
1 I was a Press Complaints Commissioner 2008-2014
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