View all newsletters
Sign up for our free email newsletters

Fighting for quality news media in the digital age.

  1. Comment
February 26, 2016updated 01 Mar 2016 11:14pm

Met signals the end of Elveden witch hunt with a glib infographic and a refusal to answer questions

By Dominic Ponsford

The Met Police appears to think that it can justify its five-year witch hunt against journalists and their sources with a glib infographic.

It sees Operation Elveden as a success because it resulted in 34 convictions, mainly of public officials paid money by journalists for stories.

Fair enough, up to a point.

But what about the 32 journalists, who in many cases, needlessly had their lives destroyed?

Out of 34 journalists arrested and or charged under Elveden only two convictions stand. One, Dan Evans, admitted the offence. The other, Anthony France of The Sun, was spared jail by the judge and is currently appealing his conviction.

The other 32 were in some cases arrested in dawn raids, in front of terrified families, spent years on police bail and then weeks behind a bullet-proof dock in the Old Bailey for nothing. Many careers have been ruined. Two tried to kill themselves. 

News Corp has to answer for the fact that it set Elveden in train by giving confidential emails to police. At the time of the closure of News of the World in 2011 it felt it had to co-operate totally and be completely transparent after covering up the scale of phone-hacking at that paper. It is also clearly saw this as a way to avoid a corporate prosecution.

Content from our partners
MHP Group's 30 To Watch awards for young journalists open for entries
How PA Media is helping newspapers make the digital transition
Publishing on the open web is broken, how generative AI could help fix it

But the Met also needs to explain the proportionality of devoting the sort of resources that might be used on half a dozen murder hunts to prosecute journalists writing in stories.

In nearly all cases those stories were in the public interest, or at the very least they did no demonstrable harm. That is why the prosecutions of journalists all collapsed.

The police officers and public officials taking money fall into a slightly different category. Although it must be said that in many cases the money may have been secondary to their role as genuine whistleblowers.

I would love to know how Operation Elveden became so big and why the Met found it impossible to put the investigation into reverse once it became apparent the prosecutions of journalists weren't going to stick. Sadly the Met has said it will be giving no interviews. So much for transparency and accountability.

Finally, back to that infographic. Apparently there were more than 400 victims of crime affected by Operation Elveden.

I covered the Elveden trials pretty closely, and I am not aware of any "victims" who were shown in court to have been done actual harm by the stories which appeared. I am guessing those victims will include people like James Bulger killer Jon Venables, who was the subject of stories about him getting special treatment in jail. And I suspect people like that do no fall into most peoples' definition of a victim.

Assistant commissioner Patricia Gallan said today: “In order to secure evidence and build cases detectives reviewed over 200,000 emails, 28,000 documents and in excess of 12,000 exhibits. They also established that confidential information was leaked over 400 times, and over 400 victims were informed that personal data relating to them had been sold.

“Some of these people were already victims of crime. The mother of a British Soldier who was killed in Iraq told officers that she was ‘totally sick to her stomach and devastated’ that someone could make money out of the death of her daughter. Another, the mother of a teenage girl who died in tragic circumstances, was devastated to learn that a police officer had sold information about the death of her child." 

My heart goes out to these two poor parents, but details of the fact that their loved ones had died in tragic circumstances would have come out anyway. These are matters of legitimate public interest.

Of course it is right that the Met investigates allegations of public officials corruptly taking money to disclose private information. And while I have sympathy for individual journalists who were arrested, I think it is clear that The Sun was guilty at a corporate level of creating a culture where public officials and police officers were routinely paid for stories without proper consideration being given to the public interest and the appropriateness of doing so.

But the Met also needs to face up to the mistakes that it has made over Elveden, rather than seeking to close the book and its eyes with a flurry of positive spin.

Topics in this article :

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog

Select and enter your email address Weekly insight into the big strategic issues affecting the future of the news industry. Essential reading for media leaders every Thursday. Your morning brew of news about the world of news from Press Gazette and elsewhere in the media. Sent at around 10am UK time. Our weekly does of strategic insight about the future of news media aimed at US readers. A fortnightly update from the front-line of news and advertising. Aimed at marketers and those involved in the advertising industry.
  • Business owner/co-owner
  • CEO
  • COO
  • CFO
  • CTO
  • Chairperson
  • Non-Exec Director
  • Other C-Suite
  • Managing Director
  • President/Partner
  • Senior Executive/SVP or Corporate VP or equivalent
  • Director or equivalent
  • Group or Senior Manager
  • Head of Department/Function
  • Manager
  • Non-manager
  • Retired
  • Other
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
Thank you

Thanks for subscribing.

Websites in our network