Trust, ethics and the Scottish Licensed Trade News

Never trust a journalist.

We’ve all heard it – it is a maxim that rankles with many and some expend great energy convincing people it is unfair. There are two main ways of doing that – lying through your teeth or trying to adhere to the highest standards of “journalistic ethics”, whatever they are.

Sadly, not every journalist cares. Take, for example, the reporter from the Scottish Licensed Trade News, one of Scotland’s most influential trade papers. Now some say that journalism and PR are a bad mix – one tries to get to the heart of the story and expose the truth; the other tries to deflect from the story with any amount of diversionary fluff.

That is simplistic and unfair, of course: the reality is a tale of shades of grey.

But when a journo in a trade title has a background in PR, perhaps you better watch out. At least, that is the moral of the story of one young man who had an off-guarded moment with a woman who phoned him at work. She was chatty, a bit unusual and asked if he would mind if she asked him a few questions. He was affable, trusting, tired, indulgent of people and naïve.

So after easing in with questions about a particular football match day and how things were in the area – the atmosphere, any trouble, whether people enjoyed the day, if it was fun to work, etc., he was “softened up” by the time it came to ask two more sinister questions.

“Was business quite good?”
“Yeah, we had a good day.”
“Can I ask how much you made, for example?”

In black and white, it is obvious that the only correct answer to that is click-brrrrrrrr. But, we’ve all been there in one sense or another – taken in, deceived, conned.

Any of us who have made similar mistakes would hope that the damage would be minimal. We would certainly hope that we weren’t talking to a journalist that hadn’t identified herself as such. If she was, we might hope that she would just use the information so carelessly given and dishonestly gleaned as simple background, rather than publishing every detail including precise figures. And, if ever there was a time for a journalist to protect her sources, rather than naming the individual in the trade paper, that would seem to be it.

However, these sentiments are apparently far from the mind of the kid-on hacks at SLTN. And the outcome? One young man who had spent five years with the company, working his way up to the position of assistant bar manager lost his job.

SLTN, part of the Peebles Media group, has had a reputation in recent years for being willing to smudge the line between editorial and advertorial depending on the importance of the client. Allegations that senior figures at the group have offered key advertisers the option of writing their own copy, which would be printed without identification as adverts, have persisted almost since the former editor Pat Duffy moved on from his role of direct responsibility for the title. It is understood that Duffy would not countenance such activity.

On one level or another, that type of things happens in many better-known titles. But when staff are obtaining information by deception at the cost of people’s jobs, it brings shame on the title and makes that proposition of trust ever harder to justify.