Dismay at Mail’s so-called Ross-Brand news ‘scoop’

Senior Fleet Street journalists have spoken to The First Post about their dismay at the Mail on Sunday winning a second 'scoop of the year' award for its 'exclusive' report last October about the obscene phone calls Jonathan Ross (above left) and Russell Brand (right) made to Andrew Sachs on BBC Radio 2. The London Press Club has become the second organisation to honour journalist Miles Goslett after he was feted in the British Press Awards last month.
 
Donald Trelford, a former editor of the Observer, who is Press Club president, said the judges "decided that the winner should the one that caused the biggest and longest-lasting fuss" and commended the Mail on Sunday for "maintaining its record for exclusives".
 
But newspaper insiders say that Goslett deserves no credit for happening to listen to the radio at an opportune moment. For fear of being accused of sour grapes, journalists are disinclined to write in their own papers of their anger. But speaking anonymously to The First Post, one senior Fleet Street editor said: "Since when does sitting at home on a Saturday listening to the banter on Radio 2 constitute a scoop? This is ridiculous and Donald Trelford should be ashamed of himself."

Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, told The First Post: "I reckon a good scoop has to involve two things - one, the story is exclusive, and, two, the story was difficult to get hold of. The Ross/Brand story fails on both counts. But it was recent, so it's in the judges' memories. And it made newspapers look good (as the moral arbiters of bad journalism on the airwaves) so it's good stuff for the awards ceremony. And the sad truth is that there aren't that many real scoops for judges to choose from nowadays."

There may not be many, but there are some. Among press stories Goslett's report was deemed to have trumped was the Sunday Times’s undercover investigation that discovered two members of the House of Lords allegedly prepared to take payola to amend legislation (it was reported yesterday that Lord Taylor of Blackburn and Lord Truscott now face suspension from the House): Decca Aitkenhead's August interview with Alistair Darling for the Guardian in which the Chancellor admitted that Britain faced the worst economic crisis in 60 years, and the Sunday Times’s story about Business Secretary Peter Mandelson's meeting with shadow chancellor George Osborne aboard a yacht owned by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
 
How did Goslett's story compare with these scoops? According to an experienced investigative reporter, Goslett and the Mail on Sunday should never even have been considered in the scoop of the year category. "The Mail did not uncover anything, or discover anything. It made a mountain out of a molehill, taking a relatively minor cock-up on live radio and, in typical Mail style, egging on the British public to create a row that never existed before their intervention."

He has a point. The incident occurred on Radio 2 between 9pm and 11pm on the evening of Saturday, October 18. But it was not reported for a full eight days by the Mail on Sunday - during which time the BBC received exactly two complaints from listeners. And those complaints concerned Ross's swearing rather than the content of what he and Brand actually said. (For those who need reminding, the two presenters left lewd messages on actor Andrew Sachs’s answer-machine saying Brand had slept with his 23-year-old granddaughter, Georgina Baillie.)
 
The journalist continued: "Only after the Mail did its pernicious knife-twisting thing did Middle England join the crusade and complain about a programme it hadn’t even listened to." At which point, the number of complaints went into the thousands.

The Mail on Sunday's award, which it boasted about in yesterday's edition under the headline "The honours just keep on coming...", is thrown into sharp focus by the Pulitzer Prizes for American journalism announced a week ago by Columbia University, New York. They included:

• Investigative journalism award: David Barstow of the New York Times for his meticulous investigation into how retired generals were using their appearances on TV and radio chat shows to drum up support for the military policies in Iraq - when some of them had undisclosed ties to companies that would benefit from going to war;

• Public service journalism award: The Las Vegas Sun, and especially reporter Alexandra Berzon, for its exposure of the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas strip, because of the lax enforcement of regulations;

• Breaking news award: The staff of the New York Times for the sex scandal involving New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and call-girl Ashley Alexandra Dupre, which led to his resignation.

British journalism had its own sex scandal, of course - the News of the World's story of motor-racing boss Max Mosley and his taste for sadomasochism. But Mosley successfully sued the NoW for wrongly claiming an orgy he had enjoyed had Nazi overtones. And defeat in the High Court is never going to improve your chances of scoop of the year. ·