Ed Wight's Column

Ed has been living in Poland for over ten years. As CEN correspondent he has written for the UK's leading tabloids including The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The News of the World, and for magazines such as Closer, Chat and Reveal. He is a member of the National Association of Press Agencies and the Chartered Institute of Journalists.

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Previous Columns

Abort this plan
2011-07-02

A tortured goodbye
2011-05-06

One year on
2011-04-15

Sending in the boys
2011-03-26

Kuba Wojewodzki - No shame
2011-03-19

Etude in F*@K minor
2011-02-25

What a joke!
2011-02-19

Hoolio 2012
2011-02-11

Injustice being served
2011-02-04

Cause and effect
2011-01-21

It ain't over yet
2011-01-14

Where is Ewelina?
2010-12-10

PiS off
2010-11-26

How YOU doing?
2010-11-20

From completely mong to classic ding dong
2010-11-12

Political bully boys
2010-11-05

Muscle flexing
2010-10-30

The blame game
2010-10-24

A long and deadly road
2010-10-16

A murder most...strange
2010-10-14

A tough choice to make
2010-10-05

Stuck between a rock and a hard place
2010-09-24

A ban on free speech? Whatever.
2010-09-10

Getting cross
2010-08-13

A cross to bear
2010-08-06

Courting the enemy
2010-08-01

Witch Hunt
2010-07-25

Kacz is back - and rowdy as ever
2010-07-17

So what now?
2010-07-10

Defending the News of the World and press freedom

Friday 8th July, 2011

Over the last four months I have worked on five different investigations for the News of the World newspaper - one in Kazakhstan, one in the Ukraine and three in Poland.

Every single one of those investigations was run with extreme professionalism and with the utmost integrity from the NotW news desk in London. I am proud of the work I did and proud of the people I worked with.

The announcement, therefore, that the paper is to close down over the phone hacking scandal is both shocking and a very, very serious blow to investigative journalism.

For, as abhorrent as the allegations over NotW phone hacking are, two points need claryfing.

First, most if not all of the toxic elements at the newspaper were got rid of a long time ago and a great team of talented, serious, professional, and honest journalists were brought in who had absolutely nothing to do with the events of six years ago and more.

The people I worked with were excellent and firing them solves nothing.

Closing down NotW is a massively detrimental blow to investigative journalism and to the job of the media - to hold public officials to account for what they do, and to reveal to the public any wrongdoing.

Without NotW we wouldn’t have known about the match-fixing antics of Pakistani cricketers nor about the corruption at the heart of FIFA, to name but two of the hundreds of excellent exposes carried out by NotW journalists.

And that brings us to the question of regulation. The Press Complaints Commission failed to hold NotW to account for its past wrongs, but introducing tougher regulatory measures threatens the very existence of a free media.

Yes, there needs to be regulation and oversight in order to prevent the possibility of corruption and wrongdoing pervading our media. But that should come from the industry itself, not government.

Because, the last thing we want is a state-controlled media.

The job of robust, aggressive and free journalism is to find information other people don’t want found.

In order to do that aggressive tactics are used.

Imposing state regulation will take away the ability of the press to expose politicians, criminals, cheats and liars for their wrongs.

A lot of them will be rubbing their hands in glee at the moment.