Paul Lashmar

Urinal or conduit? Institutional information flow between the UK intelligence services and the news media

Since the 1990s, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5) have developed formal links with most major UK news organisations in an effort to improve the agencies’ media presentation. This article discusses the impact and inherent problems of these relationships, including whether the news media can have official, formal but non-attributable links with these agencies without compromising their role as the fourth estate. Utilising epistemologies for crime reporting and news sources, this article proposes an initial framework to analyse these institutional relationships. It also takes as a case study the controversy over whether MI5 deliberately played down their prior knowledge of 7/7 suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan. The author was one of the journalists briefed by MI5 on Khan and has here taken the Khan controversy as a case study to investigate the Security Service’s information flow and whether the agency misled, and indeed intended to mislead, the media and the public.

How to humiliate and shame: A reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the authors reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society.

No More Sources?: The impact of Snowden’s revelations on journalists and their confidential sources

From June 2013, documents leaked by the National Security Agency (NSA) dissident Edward Snowden revealed that Western intelligence agencies are capable of bulk collection of electronic communications flowing through global telecommunication systems. Surveillance data shared by the “Five Eyes” eavesdropping agencies of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand include journalist’s communications. In the wake of the Snowden leak, Zygmunt Bauman and colleagues called for a systematic assessment of the scale, reach and character of contemporary surveillance practices. This paper explores a specific part of Bauman’s task by assessing the impact of the Snowden revelations on confidential source-based journalism. Interviews were conducted with a range of investigative journalists who have experience of covering national security in Five Eyes countries. All expressed serious concern over the intelligence agencies’ greatly enhanced capability to track journalists and to identify and neutralise their sources. The paper concludes that there is clear evidence of a paradigmatic shift in journalist–source relations as those interviewed regard Five Eyes mass surveillance as a most serious threat to the fourth estate model of journalism as practised in Western democratic countries.

7/7: A reflexive re-evaluation of journalistic practice:

The suicide bombings of 7 July 2005 remain the most serious terror attacks in the United Kingdom to date in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Much has been published on the war on terror but few journalists have reflected on their practice post 9/11 and none on their domestic coverage of the 7/7 attacks. This article is written by a journalist who covered the London bombings for a UK national newspaper and more recently is a practitioner-academic. Using academic texts focusing on the domestic reporting of the war on terror as stimuli for scholarly reflection, this article reviews the author’s own coverage using reflexive practice and content analysis. This article places 7/7 in the continuum of reporting subsequent to 11 September 2001 (9/11) and issues discussed. Some 63 authored articles were considered from the period. Scholarly texts have proposed a range of concepts to analyse coverage from including political ritual, trauma, national wound and hegemony. This article concludes by noting that while many academic texts see coverage of terrorism as an elite discourse, dominated by political economy drivers and responding to events in a homogeneous reactivity, in practice, news organisations can have complex responses and journalists, agency in their coverage of major terrorism events.

From Silence to Primary Definer: The Emergence of an Intelligence Lobby in the Public Sphere

Until the end of the Cold War the UK intelligence services were not officially acknowledged, and their personnel were banned from entering the public sphere. From 1989 the UK government began to put the intelligence services on a legal footing and to release the identity of the heads of the intelligence agencies. Since then, public engagement by the intelligence agencies has gathered pace. What this article hypothesises is that there is now, in the UK, an effective intelligence lobby of former insiders who engage in the public sphere – using on the record briefings – to counter criticism of the intelligence community and to promote a narrative and vision of what UK intelligence should do, how it is supported and how oversight is conducted. Content analysis and framing models of non-broadcast coverage of intelligence debates, focusing on the 36 months after the Snowden revelations, confirm an active and rolling lobby of current and former intelligence officials. The paper concludes that the extent of the lobby’s interventions in the public sphere is a matter for debate and possible concern.

Putting lives in danger? Tinker, tailor, journalist, spy: the use of journalistic cover

The Anglo-American intelligence agencies’ use of journalists as spies or propagandists and the practice of providing intelligence agents in the field with journalistic cover have been a source of controversy for many decades. This article examines the extent to which these covert practices have taken place and whether they have put journalists’ lives in danger. This article, drawing on various methodologies, examines a number of cases where the arrest, murder or kidnap of journalists was justified on the grounds that the journalist was a ‘spy’. This has been followed through with research, using a range of sources, that shows there have been many occasions when the distinction between spies and journalists has been opaque. The article concludes that widespread use of journalistic cover by spies has put lives in danger, but that the extent is unquantifiable.

User Experience UX of Heritage Journeys: Design Taxonomy for Quality Measurement

User experience UX design is unsurprisingly challenging, specifically the classification of experience within a customer journey. It is vital that personal sentiment is described using practical quality measures. An experience journey is too broad a term to be easily used. However it is easier to measure the influence of various elements of experience design on a users opinion across a wider journey. In this paper, a taxonomy of heritage experience design will be presented wherein improved quality measurement can be developed for user experience journey design. This paper draws on primary and secondary data to propose a taxonomy of user experience for quality measurement. The primary purpose of this framework is to guide experienced designers on choices to initiate high-quality user experience in a heritage context. Included are journey goals, organizational atmosphere, and technological, behavioral or economic biases. The taxonomy is also valuable to experience designers in specifying the scope of quality measurement and further to researchers in creating proposals for further study. Empirical data was collected from a historical organization Dorset County Museum in the UK using semi-structured interviews. It was then analyzed using grounded theory techniques. The importance of user experience was highlighted and prioritized with respect to the journey design process.