Introduction

I started my research on this book in October 2011. It was both a good and bad time to be starting such a project – good in that police/news media relations were front page news daily, but bad in that I initially found it – and understandably so – very difficult to interview journalists. No one would answer my emails. In the end, I resorted to desperate measures, and gatecrashed a private book launch, at which I managed to speak to a prominent journalist. He very kindly agreed not only to grant me an interview, but also to introduce me to some of his colleagues, many of whom, like him, had retired or were on the brink of retirement.

At first, I wasn’t sure how useful this might be, as my initial plan had been to interview journalists and press officers who were currently in post. After the first interview, I realised that it was absolutely vital for a study of this kind to be able to set the current crisis in context. The more interviews I conducted, the more I realised that the complexities of the current police/media/public relations had their roots in the 1980s and 1990s. In this chapter and in Chapter 3, I draw on interviews with former senior police officers, former MPS press officers and journalists whose careers spanned the 1980s to the present day.

A considerable body of literature explores the relationship between the police and the news media in the last quarter of the 20th century (Chibnall, 1977, 1979; Hall et al, 1978; Ericson et al, 1989, 1991; Ericson, 1995; Innes, 1999; Mawby, 1999). A key recurring theme is the issue of power in the relationship between the police and the media. In Law-and-Order News, Chibnall (1977) suggested that, while the police perspective might be challenged on occasion, the relationship between the police and the press is always asymmetrical – ‘the reporter who cannot get information is out of a job, whereas the policeman who retains it is not’ (Chibnall, 1977, p 155).