At 6:04 p.m., ITV News on television featured Lucy Manning’s Bullygate package as its top story and the studio anchor went live to outside Number 10, where Manning revealed a statement from the National Bullying Helpline chief, Christine Pratt. The statement read: “The calls we have received suggest there is a culture of bullying within Downing Street. Whether Gordon Brown is the perpetrator or not, we cannot say. We know that someone who works at No. 10 has been off sick because of the effect of this on their health” (ITV News, 2010c).
The BBC and ITV were therefore confident enough about the veracity of the National Bullying Helpline’s claims to run with this as their main story for the evening news. However, Channel 4 took a different approach. Recall that their presenter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, had become aware during his engagement with Twitter users that the National Bullying Helpline had the prominent Conservative MP, Ann Widdecombe, as one of its patrons. Channel 4 News ran with Bullygate as its top story and featured an interview with Rawnsley, but at no point was the Helpline mentioned, even though the Channel 4 team was aware of the information (Channel 4 News, 2010c). Clearly, Channel 4 News had access to the details because it and ITV both get their news from parent company ITN, albeit from separate divisions. An editorial decision was therefore taken at Channel 4 News to hold off on the Helpline development due to uncertainty about the source. Although it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that the journalists’ interactions on Twitter were the cause of this decision, we can infer that it was an important factor.
Once the Helpline news had appeared on the BBC News Channel’s foot-of-screen ticker and ITV’s 6:00 p.m. television bulletin, it was immediately picked up by the newspapers. At 6:29 p.m., the Telegraph became the first paper to report the Helpline story on its website (Sunday Telegraph, 2010b). It was not until 7:02 p.m. that the BBC presented a full package including, for the first time, a video interview with National Bullying Helpline chief Christine Pratt and extended live-to-anchor commentary from the BBC’s deputy political editor, James Landale (BBC News, 2010b). Landale’s report also included a second denial of Brown’s bullying, this time from the Cabinet Office, who stated that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, did not speak with the prime minister about his behavior. As soon as James Landale’s report had ended, his senior colleague, Nick Robinson, posted an update to his BBC blog arguing that Lord Mandelson’s defense of the prime minister earlier in the day had “backfired,” but once again the blog post made no mention of the National Bullying Helpline (Robinson, 2010b). The frame was shifting, and this was a period of uncertainty. Two minutes later, the Telegraph added further material to its story originally published at 6:29 p.m., fleshing out the claims about the Helpline (Sunday Telegraph, 2010a). This was followed by a number of new articles published in quick succession, as the newspapers scrambled to integrate the new information. Over the next four hours, the Star (7:19 p.m.), the Mirror (7:30 p.m.), the Mail (8:31 p.m. and 10:46 p.m.), the Sun (9:19 p.m.), the Financial Times (10:27 p.m.), and the Times (11:18 p.m.) all added the news about Christine Pratt and the Helpline. And yet not one of these online newspaper articles raised the issue of the contested origins and status of the organization (Barker, 2010; Coates, 2010a; Daily Star, 2010b; Sun, 2010; Sunday Mirror, 2010; Walters, 2010b).
But it was doubts about the National Bullying Helpline’s status that led Vijay Singh Riyait, not a journalist but an IT engineer and Labour-supporting activist with his own blog (www.sikhgeek.com), to send a Twitter message to Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy at 9:16 p.m. Riyait pointed to an anonymous blog that had been set up some six months earlier to act as a channel for those with grievances against the National Bullying Helpline. Labeled “The Bullying Helpline: the last thing you need if you’re being bullied,” the blog raised questions about the organization’s working practices, in particular its relationship with a company, HR & Diversity Management, owned by Christine Pratt and her husband (Anonymous, 2010). The link to this hitherto obscure blog was first posted to Twitter earlier that evening by Jo Anne Brown, the head of Dignity Works, a management consultancy and rival to the National Bullying Helpline, specializing in workplace “bullying and harassment” (Brown, 2010). The link had been recirculated in the emerging Twitter storm, which now centered upon the Helpline’s alleged Conservative Party links, its charitable status, working practices, and the publicity-seeking behavior of its chief. Vijay Singh Riyait, the IT engineer and amateur blogger, had picked up Jo Anne Brown’s link and decided to forward it to Channel 4 News via Guru-Murthy.
Within the space of a few hours, then, the National Bullying Helpline’s motives had been called into question. A new set of actors from the charity and management consultancy sector were now plugging into the news-making assemblage. These individuals were seeking to use Bullygate as a means of publicizing their own work and to criticize a rival for its alleged breach of ethics on client confidentiality. Twitter enabled these actors to intervene and shape the flow of news because their expressed skepticism served to heighten awareness of the Helpline’s organizational status among journalists and bloggers monitoring their Twitter feeds.
This increasing skepticism soon began to be reflected in the “mainstream.” The first hint was a cautious blog post from the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson at 9:35 p.m. on Sunday evening. Robinson reported the doubts about the Helpline, and mentioned that there was a supportive statement from Conservative leader David Cameron on the Helpline’s website. He also reported that Downing Street had issued a response to the Helpline’s allegations, stating that they had never been contacted by the organization. It was also revealed that the Labour MP Anne Snelgrove had helped publicize the Helpline when it was established but had severed her links when she became aware of complaints that the organization was allegedly referring calls to the private consultancy business run by Christine Pratt’s husband. Robinson went on: “Colleagues checked the status of the charity and questioned Ms. Pratt’s claims. We can’t, of course, verify the truth of her allegations—merely report them and Downing Street’s response to them” (Robinson, 2010c).
Shortly after Robinson’s blog post, BullyingUK, another anti-bullying charity, intervened. It issued a strongly worded press release on its website criticizing the National Bullying Helpline for breaching confidentiality and it sent a message to Nick Robinson’s Twitter account to alert him to the release (BullyingUK, 2010a, 2010b). Meanwhile, the volume of comments had been building on Robinson’s blog from readers pointing out the potential problems with the credibility of Christine Pratt as a source.
At this point, however, no professional journalist was willing to publicly question Pratt’s testimony. As the evening drew to a close and the next day’s newspapers were in the process of being finalized, the Helpline’s claims seemed set to dominate the headlines as the political information cycle moved into Monday morning. The frame was finely balanced.
“WHO ARE THE NATIONAL BULLYING HELPLINE?”
Late on Sunday evening, at 11:28 p.m., however, there was yet another decisive shift. A left-of-center amateur blogger, Adam Bienkov, posted an article to his well-known political blog, Tory Troll. The post was entitled “Who are the National Bullying Helpline?” Bienkov wrote that the whole story “immediately smelt funny” and he criticized the BBC for failing to check its facts. He had spent the evening researching publicly available online sources such as the Charity Commission’s website and the internet’s Whois database, which lists the owners of web domain names. These sources showed that a number of senior Conservatives were associated with the Helpline, that it had a number of informal links with the Conservative-controlled Swindon local council, and that it was late in filing its accounts and had “registered just £852 in expenditure since they were established” (Bienkov, 2010). Bienkov then posted a link to the post on Twitter. A few minutes later, Labour MP Kerry McCarthy retweeted Adam Bienkov’s blog post to her six thousand followers, and this was in turn retweeted many hundreds of times lat
e into the night (McCarthy, 2010a). Bienkov’s blog post assembled in readable form what had, until then, been a dispersed and fragmented set of messages and counter-messages on Twitter.
During the early hours of Monday, February 22, the newspapers’ digital editions were uploaded as the political information cycle moved into a decisive final phase. Uncertainty over the National Bullying Helpline angle continued, and was revealed in the lack of consensus in the mainstream newspaper press. The Independent and the Guardian still made no mention of Christine Pratt’s allegations, though they did publish pieces on the Rawnsley book (Anderson, 2010; Ashley, 2010; Guardian, 2010). It was not until 7:00 a.m., when the Guardian published a commentary piece by Jonathan Freedland, that the paper mentioned the Helpline, and even then it was in neutral terms (Freedland, 2010). By now, however, the focus had shifted once again to the broadcast studios. To defend her claims, Pratt appeared on the two major early morning national television shows, GMTV and BBC Breakfast. More significantly, she also appeared alongside Labour MP Anne Snelgrove on BBC Radio Four’s highly influential Today program. As part of the interview, Today’s presenter John Humphrys read out extracts from e-mail messages from disgruntled clients of the Helpline and suggested that Pratt’s husband’s company had been “angling for business” with people who had called what was supposed to be a charitable organization. These e-mails had been passed to Humphrys by Anne Snelgrove (BBC Radio 4, 2010c). It was clear that the frame was now shifting toward outright skepticism about the National Bullying Helpline.
Christine Pratt’s television and radio appearances then fed into new stories for the newspapers. The Daily Star and the Daily Telegraph simply reported Pratt’s appearances (Daily Star, 2010a; Irvine, 2010). In the background, however, things were shifting. At 9:29 a.m., the BBC’s political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg posted on Twitter that one of the patrons of the Helpline, Professor Cary Cooper, had resigned from the Helpline’s board (Kuenssberg, 2010c). Cooper is a prestigious scholar in the field of management and workplace studies and is well-known for his media appearances. This was a major blow to the entire Bullygate frame.
Perhaps sensing that the power of the story was beginning to recede, the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, now attempted to seize the initiative. At 10:45 a.m., while speaking at a pre-election conference in east London, Cameron suggested during questions that there ought to be an official inquiry into the bullying allegations inside Downing Street. He recommended that the former Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Sir Philip Mawer, conduct the inquiry. Immediately, Tim Montgomerie, editor of the Conservative Home website and an attendee at the Cameron conference, broke this information on Twitter. Half an hour later, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tweeted the news that Cameron had called for an official inquiry (Kuenssberg, 2010a; Montgomerie, 2010b). Understandably, Cameron’s intervention had a huge impact on the news agenda. Within forty minutes the Times published an article stating that the paper had been in contact with Pratt the night before, when she had told their reporter that “they [staff in 10 Downing Street] had been in contact by e-mail, by phone and that they [the Helpline] could see the computers used to download their literature” (Coates, 2010c).
The unfolding story was now being mediated almost in real time. Two minutes later, at 11:36 a.m., Laura Kuenssberg tweeted that Labour minister Lord Mandelson had accused the Conservatives of “directing” Christine Pratt. At 11:47 a.m., Times journalist Jenny Booth reported that Cameron, and now the opposition Liberal Democrats’ leader, Nick Clegg, had both called for an official inquiry. Five minutes later, Laura Kuenssberg, who had clearly been in contact with the Conservatives to ask them to confirm or deny Lord Mandelson’s allegations, tweeted that the Conservatives “totally reject idea they had anything to do with charity allegations” (J. Booth, 2010; Kuenssberg, 2010b, 2010e).
Once again, the focus shifted back to broadcasting. BBC Radio Four’s influential lunchtime news show The World at One led on Lord Mandelson’s remarks from mid-morning and reports that the Conservatives had strongly denied the allegation that they had links to Christine Pratt. The show’s presenter, Martha Kearney, interviewed Peter Watt, a former general secretary of the Labour Party, who spoke of Brown’s occasional bad temper. Kearney also interviewed Professor Cary Cooper, who stated that he had resigned from the National Bullying Helpline on the grounds of its breaches of client confidentiality. Liz Carnell, the head of the rival organization BullyingUK, was also interviewed, and reported that she had asked the U.K. Charity Commission to carry out an investigation into the alleged breaches of confidentiality at Pratt’s organization (BBC Radio 4, 2010d).
At 2:04 p.m., Christine Pratt appeared on Sky News, in what was to prove her last live television interview of the Bullygate affair, only around twenty-two hours after her initial intervention. At 3:25 p.m., Downing Street released a third statement of denial and at 4:24 p.m. Laura Kuenssberg tweeted that civil service head Sir Gus O’Donnell had again confirmed that he had never raised any concerns with Brown. At 4:37 p.m., Andrew Rawnsley responded directly to this denial on Twitter: “Sir Gus O’Donnell spoke to the Prime Minister about his behavior. My source for that could not be better,” he said. Then, Gordon Brown used an interview with the Economist magazine to further deny the allegations (BBC News, 2010c; Economist, 2010; Kuenssberg, 2010d; Rawnsley, 2010c; Sky News, 2010b).
Meanwhile, the National Bullying Helpline was falling apart. Its three remaining patrons announced their resignation from its board: television presenter Sarah Cawood, Conservative councilor Mary O’Connor, and, more importantly, Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP whose association with the organization had led to the suspicions regarding its alleged alignment with the Conservatives and which had first sparked the investigations by Twitter users and blogger Adam Bienkov. By early Monday evening, the newspaper websites began reporting the patrons’ resignations rather than Pratt’s confirmation of the events alleged in Rawnsley’s book (Daily Mirror, 2010b).
By the time of Britain’s most-watched television news show, the BBC Ten O’Clock News, later that Monday night, the Bullygate story was effectively finished. The BBC led on the story. While it repeated Cameron’s and Clegg’s calls for an official inquiry, it reported that the U.K. Charity Commission was now investigating the National Bullying Helpline. It sent a reporter, John Kay, to the Helpline’s headquarters in Swindon, in order to show that its offices were next-door-but-one to those of the local Conservative Party. Though the BBC did not draw its own conclusions, it reported that this was likely to add to the speculation that Christine Pratt may have been politically motivated. BBC political editor Nick Robinson pointedly stated that the BBC had “broken the story” about the Helpline, when in fact this was not strictly the case. In his final piece to camera, Robinson said: “It is now official. There was no bullying in that building behind me [Number 10], there will be no inquiry, the cabinet secretary gave no warning, at least by the latest statement that he has issued” (BBC News, 2010c). Robinson went on to say that the story raised broader concerns about the prime minister’s character, but the fact that he began his report with the official denials is an indication of how far the initial story had evolved over the course of three days.
Finally, on February 25, the U.K. Charity Commission issued a press release stating that it was conducting a formal investigation of 160 complaints about the working practices of the National Bullying Helpline. The helpline suspended its operations (U.K. Charity Commission, 2010).
I now turn to the events of a few weeks later that provide this chapter’s second case study: the mediation of Britain’s first live televised prime ministerial debate in 2010.
Britain’s First Live Televised Prime Ministerial Debate
INTEGRATING AND PREEMPTING
Stage one of the prime ministerial debate’s political information cycle began long before the debate itself and was based on the integration and preemption of potential real-time responses through specific decisions ab
out the format and timing of the event. The terms of engagement for the debates emerged during the early part of 2010, after more than seventy individual rules had been hammered out in numerous meetings involving party strategists, journalists, and television producers. These rules were left largely unmentioned during the first debate but were prominently displayed on the integrated ITV debate website (ITV, et al., 2010). The agreed format required that questions were not presented to candidates in advance of the debate, that audience members would not applaud, shout, or heckle, that program producers would not use cutaway shots explicitly focusing on the audience’s reactions to statements, and that the debate moderator would not introduce material outside of the scope of the audience’s questions. There was even some ambiguity around whether the audience would be allowed to laugh at jokes; they did, though with a reserve that betrayed uncertainty.
It is clear that British broadcasters paid close attention to the format and tone of previous American presidential candidate debates. The studio format was eerily familiar. The three candidates stood side-by-side behind lecterns and faced the presenter and a small, handpicked, studio audience at ITV’s Granada television studios in Manchester. The candidates gave tightly scripted one-minute opening and closing statements, then responded to a range of questions from the audience. This was followed by periods of varying length, during which the leaders directly engaged with each other. The first half of each debate was assigned a specific policy theme: home affairs, international affairs, and the economy. These rules became the subject of media coverage, when, the day before the first debate, Conservative leader David Cameron stated in a BBC television interview that he was concerned that the format might prove sterile and that the public might be “short-changed” by the experience. This move was quickly condemned by the other parties on the grounds that the Cameron team had already agreed to the rules, but this episode reveals how much the design of the format was politicized (Stacey & Pickard, 2010). The rules also became the subject of seven hundred complaints to the British broadcasting regulator, OFCOM (Sweney, 2010).
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