It was not because there was a senior PSNI member at the centre of something sordid. That has been standard fare for policing in the North. It is hard not to remember the claims by John Stalker that when the PSNI was officially called the RUC its chief constable tried intimidating him in a bid to dissuade him from probing too deeply into police killings in the North.
What stirred my interest in this story is that the cops were trying to bury it. Barry McCaffrey writing in The Detail reported that:
A senior member of the PSNI is at the centre of allegations of receiving payments from a private company. However the PSNI has been pressing for an indefinite blackout of the story. It asked The Detail not to publicly identify or approach the person at the centre of the allegations, claiming it would jeopardise an “ongoing covert investigation.
That is not The Detail's problem. It’s vocation is to gather news, not suppress it. The Detail stuck to its guns and made the story known. The media outlet, presumably out of a sense of civic responsibility, delayed its coverage for 3 to 4 days. When it became clear that the PSNI was basically procrastinating, The Detail spiked the blackout and ran the story.
The force sought to guff and bluff and tryied to sell flannel to The Detail. At root it was trying to suppress information about this case and went so far as to invent a cover story, informing The Detail that:
Our request to you was solely motivated by the need to ensure that a live and ongoing investigation is allowed to take its course. By exposing or publishing details this investigation may be jeopardised.
The Detail was not about to fall for that. A media that swallows such is most definitely not doing its job. The PSNI has since been both withholding information from the public and trying to ensure the public has access to some information that the PSNI deems conducive to its own political agenda.
The danger of not bringing this matter to public attention was that the very real possibility that the senior police figure at the centre of the allegations might have been covertly alerted by colleagues rather than covertly investigated. The Detail through its endeavours has ensured that will not happen or at least if it does it will not be done behind closed doors.
More censorship because another journalist simply wants to publish the truth.
ReplyDeleteJournalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
ReplyDelete― George Orwell