Did The Guardian Fool The Lot Of Us?

This is a follow-up to my previous post, so if you want some background then go and read that; I should probably credit all the commenters who provided my with some dang interesting links, but I think y'all know who you are. Anyway, now that the dust has settled on the whole Trafigura / Carter-Ruck / Guardian gagging affair, it's actually not too difficult to make an educated guess at what happened.

There are accounts from either side here and here. Interestingly, they don't really contradict each other to any great degree, so it's just a question of working out a course of events which satisfies both criteria. I don't want to particularly focus on who's right and who's wrong here, but suffice it to say; I don't take that long to choose my sympathies when the choices are "occasionally-annoying left-of-centre liberal newspaper" and "multinational corporation who let toxic shit be dumped in the Cote d'Ivoire*".

So: the Guardian got hold of the Minton Report, a pretty damning (but confidential) internal Trafigura document about the aforementioned dumping of toxic slime; and, as any newspaper would, rang Trafigura to ask about it. Trafigura didn't answer the questions, and instead applied for a High Court injunction to prevent the Guardian reporting on the contents of the document. They also asked that they be prevent from reporting on the injunction.

The High Court granted the injunction. Cue several weeks of boring legal fighting, and articles in the Guardian along the lines of "ooh aren't super-injunctions terrible, we could be under one right now and you wouldn't know, wink wink nudge nudge".

After 5 weeks, an MP (who just happens to be a former Observer employee, and it's not uncommon journalistic practice to get an MP to ask a question for you in these circumstances) asked a question about it in the House of Commons. The Guardian faxed the question to Carter-Ruck and asked if the existing injunction prevented them from reporting the question. Carter-Ruck said it was.

If there's any doubt about the chain of events, it's here. Carter-Ruck's press release states that they "would take further instructions on their request to vary the Order and respond to them as soon as possible today". In other words, they'd ask Trafigura if they were allowed to vary the Order or not. There's nothing in the Guardian's version of events that says this didn't happen - although they don't mention it happening either. The statement that Carter-Ruck "emphatically" said that the existing order prevented them from reporting on parliament isn't at all relevant, if Carter-Ruck said they would try and get the Order changed to allow the question to be reported.

The fact is that, even assuming that they did say this... well, there's a million different ways to say "we'll ask our client if we can change it". So, either:-

a: The Guardian used this exchange as an excuse to publish their rather hyperbolic "Guardian Gagged from reporting on Parliament" article

or b: Carter-Ruck subtly implied they could Fuck Right Off, and the Guardian published their piece in desperation.

Delete as you prefer.

The rest is pretty straightforward. The Guardian certainly allowed everybody to think that the High Court Injunction was specifically related to the parliamentary question; to the extent that Charlie Brooker's opinion piece in Monday's Guardian referred to there being two injunctions (a pretty serious error that was corrected the following day). The only real question is whether they did so out of opportunism or desperation.

Cue outrage, Twitter, blah blah you know the rest.

Conclusions?

No-one would dispute that the Guardian played a PR blinder here (see Sarah Ditum's blog post for a sharp analysis), whatever the circumstances. If you view this purely as a struggle between two rival factions, then hooray; the good guys won, and won convincingly. They've also highlighted the existence of "super-injunctions", and created debate about Britain's libel laws and press freedom - this excellent piece by George Monbiot** is a good example. Tea and cakes all round, then.

And yet it neglects a key point. The Guardian is often seen as some form of civilised liberal-left bulwark; as the only genuinely left-of-centre mainstream paper in the UK, that's probably understandable. The phrase "Guardian Reader" doesn't exist for nothing; to many it's a badge of political leaning, almost tantamount to being a political party. If you could vote for The Guardian, many of its readers would***.

However, the Guardian isn't a political magazine. It's not the New Statesman. And it's certainly not a bunch of reputation-management lawyers.

It's a newspaper.

And if this newspaper - just repeat that to yourself, remember what the word means - didn't actually lie to its readers, then it certainly encouraged a false impression to develop. The headline "Guardian gagged from reporting parliament" isn't false, exactly, but there are a dozen ways of formulating the headline that don't give the impression that their gagging order specifically related to parliament. They created that impression and then put it out there into Twitterworld; and because the Guardian - unlike every other mainstream newspaper - actually understands the tinternet and social media, it must have been aware that #guardiangagged was going to trend like a motherfucker.

In other words, they manipulated their readers, and did so by giving a false impression of a story. And that's two things that a newspaper should never, ever do.

The result? Nice and all as it is to see Trafigura get a good old kicking, I trust my favourite newspaper less than I did this time last week. The very fact that, in piecing together an account of the battle I've had to ask myself whether or not the Guardian's account can be trusted, is an indication that their victory has carried a cost.

*Not to be confused with Carte d'Or. Except if it's funny.
** Who's actually very good, when he's not boring my tits off about carbon footprints and TIDOE (The Imminent Death Of Everything).
*** And yes, I am one of them. I even buy the actual physical paper. Which must leave George Monbiot... conflicted. Think of the rainforests.
**** This doesn't relate to anything, except that I'm sorry about all the hyperlinks.