I remember the first time someone tried to slip me a few quid for a kinder paragraph. It was years ago, some minor PR type in a bad suit, acting like it was the most normal thing in the world. You laugh it off, tell them where to go, and move on. Turns out the game has moved on too, and not in a good direction.
The Guardian has just published the results of a four-month undercover operation that caught CT Group, a lobbying outfit with a £40 million annual turnover and 150 staff scattered around the globe, in the act of offering hard cash for friendly coverage. The firm was co-founded by Lynton Crosby, the man who steered David Cameron and Boris Johnson through their respective triumphs and disasters. One of its senior figures, Gavin Stollar, head of the real estate division and fresh from collecting an OBE last year, features prominently in the recordings.
According to the investigation, CT Group staff told the undercover reporter they would pay him £100 for every story successfully placed in a national or trade newspaper that painted a client in the property guardianship sector in a flattering light. They went further, offering £500 if he would chair a roundtable event for Live-in Guardians, one of those outfits. The real kicker, as The Guardian revealed, came when they admitted they had previously paid a journalist on a retainer basis to write a piece for a national newspaper without the editor having the faintest idea where the commission had come from.
They even spelled out the beauty of the arrangement: paying the reporter would give them greater editorial control while keeping the whole thing hidden from newspaper editors. You have to admire the candour, if nothing else. It's the sort of blunt commercial logic that treats journalism as just another supplier to be squeezed for advantage.
All this sits rather awkwardly alongside CT Group's own publicly available code of conduct, which solemnly declares that ethical and professional behaviour sits at the heart of its business and that it never does anything it cannot justify publicly. The gap between the lofty words and the secretly recorded conversations is wide enough to drive a double-decker bus through.
When challenged, the firm issued a statement insisting the events had been deliberately mischaracterised. It claimed it had not engaged the undercover reporter to do anything, had not paid him anything, and never asks journalists to deviate from professional and ethical standards. It added that it is commonplace for journalists to chair events or provide media services and that it supports their right to do so. The statement has all the weary tone of a man caught with his hand in the till explaining that he was merely counting the coins for the owner.
