An academic has warned that the UK is at risk of evolving “into a propaganda regime” following interviews with dozens of journalists about the state of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws.
Jingrong Tong, a senior lecturer in Media and Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, said decreased compliance with FOI rules had resulted in “growing government secrecy”.
Tong interviewed 31 journalists from around the UK for the study, which was published in the academic journal Journalism Practice.
Although the journalists interviewed felt they had “good levels of reporting freedom”, particularly compared with countries where journalists are imprisoned or killed over their coverage, “all participants expressed frustrations over the increasing restrictions on their information access and the growing government secrecy surrounding it”.
Tong wrote that those surveyed, who had an average of 17.7 years in the industry, “portrayed a mixed picture of media freedom in the UK”.
In particular, Tong said “all participants who used FOI requests in their practices voiced concerns about UK public authorities’ handling of their FOI requests at both local and central level”.
Delays were common, interviewees said, and where they did arrive responses often contained information that was not useful.
One long-serving journalist, who began their career before the current FOI regime was enacted, said public bodies breaking the 20-day time limit was “par for the course now”.
Another person surveyed said they had asked for data they had FOI’d to be put in a spreadsheet – only to receive a spreadsheet containing a screengrab of the actual spreadsheet they wanted. They told Tong: “That can be nothing but deliberate.”
Some research participants pointed to a trend of government staff declining FOIs because the information sought was on their website – but then failing to say where on the website it could be found.
“This flood of information, under the guise of transparency, has actually made things more opaque,” one said.
Interviewees also noted significant disparities between how likely different local councils and police forces were to seriously engage with an FOI request. Some of the journalists suggested the FOI regime needed to be reformed to bring large outsourcing firms within its remit.
One interviewee told Tong they had taken to asking non-journalist friends and family to file FOI requests so press officers wouldn’t intervene in how they were handled.
They said that often, when they ring up a government department about something they’ve learned from an FOI, “the press office is fully informed and aware”. That PRs are clued into the FOI process, the journalist said, “raises the possibility that they may have a say in whether or not a piece of information should or should not be released”.
FOI requests are meant to be purpose and applicant blind, meaning staff should not evaluate who the respondent is or why they want the information when deciding whether to share it.
Tong told Press Gazette that the involvement of press officers in the system could ultimately mean “the manipulation of what information can or cannot be released to the public”.
Whether deliberate or more passive, Tong said, “the result would be the same: the selective, patchy publication of information.
“This can be a type of censorship which is not direct and obvious but hidden and subtle. This insidious way of controlling information can be harmful as it is deceptive and more difficult to detect, and when we assume we have transparency, we would let our guard down and may not realise that the information we receive is actually manipulated.”
‘Obstacles’ and ‘bad faith argument’ from public body PRs
There were also issues beyond FOI requests. Tong’s subjects, particularly those who had been journalists for more than two decades, said the centralisation of government communications under press offices has created “obstacles” that were “increasingly severe”.
One local journalist told Tong they had been “basically told off” by a council press officer for contacting a council staff member instead of going through them. Another said local council staff “had even been asked to sign a contract that required them not to talk to the press”.
A senior political correspondent at a national newspaper said they had found that when asking government departmental press officers about something “that is half-correct… because it’s not 100% correct, they just dismiss it, and say, ‘That’s wrong. I’m not going to answer it’”.
A regional newspaper editor said journalists’ relationships with the police had “completely broken down”. They said that when their parent was a journalist “you would go around to the local police station and ask police officers… what was going on in your city that day”, but journalists are now shepherded to press officers who are “incredibly protective of the information that they hold”.
Crime reporters and regional journalists have complained for several years that they are struggling to receive engagement from police forces, resulting in some cases, such as the riots following the Southport attacks or the disappearance of Nicola Bulley, in misinformation being able to spread unopposed.
One journalist said that when they were working on a story about the government moving Covid patients out of London to Newcastle to avoid overburdening the NHS in the capital, the Department for Health and Social Care “flatly denied it even though we knew, for a fact, that it had happened…
“When you’re working with that level of bad faith argument it’s very, very hard to report on stories.”
Tong said the trend toward secrecy appeared to be driven by several factors. A lack of resources at local councils in particular was brought up by several of her interviewees, while a desire for public bodies to avoid backlash, or a negative relationship between the media and public institutions, also seemed to play into the trend.
She wrote in her conclusion: “Without good access to information from public bodies, journalists cannot properly do their job to serve democracy. Increasingly restricted information access is not direct media control or censorship, but it is subtle and embedded in everyday journalistic practices.
“This would result in the alignment of official agendas and discourse of events with those of the media, suppressing critical voices and concealing the secrets of governments or powerful individuals.
“This situation has the alarming potential to evolve into a propaganda regime over time, requiring urgent attention.”
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