STATE OF UNDEMOCRACY: The NUJ Does Not Speak for Journalism

There is something breathtakingly ironic about the journalists’ union appearing to tell journalists which ideas are acceptable to challenge, which opinions are respectable enough to be heard, and which political orthodoxies should apparently be protected from uncomfortable scrutiny.

The National Union of Journalists exists, supposedly, to defend journalists. It should defend their jobs, their sources, their independence and, above all, their freedom to investigate, question and report without fear or favour. It should be the organisation standing at the barricades whenever anybody tries to narrow the boundaries of legitimate inquiry.

It should NOT be standing there helping to draw those boundaries.

Yet read the statement issued by NUJ General Secretary Laura Davison following the death of Cambridge academic Jason Arday and there is something deeply troubling about its tone.

Davison spoke of racism, ableism and what she called “pernicious rhetoric against diversity, equity and inclusion”, before declaring that the NUJ “vigorously opposes the rehabilitation of discredited ideas on race in academia”.

Let me be absolutely clear, because this distinction matters. Racism should be challenged wherever it appears. Racial abuse is abhorrent. Threatening, intimidating or harassing journalists is completely unacceptable, whether those journalists are black, white, Asian or anything else. Nobody should be subjected to abuse simply for doing their job.

But diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, is not a protected characteristic. It is not a race. It is not a sex. It is not a disability. It is a collection of ideas, policies and institutional practices about how organisations should address discrimination, representation and inequality. And ideas are allowed to be challenged.

In fact, challenging ideas is one of the fundamental purposes of journalism.

There are many competing philosophies about how best to combat racism and discrimination. Some people advocate DEI programmes. Others argue for equality of opportunity, colour-blind treatment, universalism, socioeconomic interventions, merit-based systems, or different combinations of those principles. Some believe particular DEI programmes help minorities, others believe some of those programmes can themselves become discriminatory.

Those arguments are precisely what a free society is supposed to have.

A healthy democracy allows them to collide. A healthy university allows them to collide. A healthy newspaper investigates them, interrogates the evidence, questions everybody involved and allows readers to make up their own minds.

What concerns me about the NUJ statement is the apparent willingness to place criticism of DEI alongside racism and ableism under the description of “pernicious rhetoric”.

Who decided that?

Laura Davison does not speak for every journalist in Britain. She certainly does not speak for the personal opinions of every member of the NUJ. I know NUJ members who profoundly disagree with this sort of ideological pronouncement, and who believe journalism should be a place where controversial ideas are examined rather than categorised as unacceptable before the investigation has even begun.

I know because I used to be a member of the NUJ myself.

I left.

And, unlike many of those who pontificate about the future of journalism, my family has spent decades actually producing newspapers. We know what it takes to keep them alive because we have lived it, week after week, year after year. We have employed and paid journalists, photographers, designers, printers and distributors, while meeting the countless other costs involved in making sure newspapers continue to land in communities every single week.

Newspapers are quite literally in my blood. My parents are credited in the British Museum with launching Britain’s first free daily newspaper, and over the decades they have launched more than 74 newspaper titles. This is not an industry we observe from the sidelines or discuss in theory. It is an industry my family has spent a lifetime building, investing in and fighting to preserve.

So excuse me if I find the NUJ’s position breathtakingly hypocritical. There is a world of difference between standing at a union conference talking about “saving journalism” and actually having to save a regional newspaper.

Try paying the printing bill when newsprint prices rise. Try keeping reporters employed while advertising revenue disappears during Covid or to the enormous technology companies. Try producing newspapers every week while Facebook, Google, social media, changing consumer habits, rising costs and economic downturns tear apart the business model that supported regional journalism for generations.

My family does not theorise about regional journalism. We live it.

And I have seen the NUJ from the other side.

In 2020, during one of the most difficult periods our industry and our country had faced at the start of Covid, NUJ members at our newspaper group went on strike. Twice. The union portrayed the dispute as a battle to save local journalism and protect jobs. It then publicly criticised me for taking on all the editorial work to ensure that our newspapers continued to appear.

Think about the absurdity of that for a moment.

When journalists walk out of a huge national broadcaster, programmes can sometimes be cancelled. When journalists walk out of a small independent newspaper company, the newspapers still have to be produced. Advertisers have paid for their advertisements. Readers expect their newspaper. Communities still have court cases, council meetings, planning applications, deaths, births, businesses, schools and local controversies that deserve coverage. Plus there was important pandemic information to report at the time.

The deadlines do not care that the NUJ has called a strike.

So I worked.

I found myself effectively doing the work of an entire editorial department. Eighteen people had walked out, but our newspapers still had to appear, our readers still expected them and our advertisers had paid for them. Failure simply was not an option.

This was before AI too… before the extraordinary tools available to newsrooms today. I had to write every word of those newspapers myself.

Thankfully, I was not completely alone. Beside me was our brilliant production director, Ian Hanley, and Alison Harris (nee Parkinson), a dear family friend and experienced journalist who could sub the pages and help us get them ready for press. My parents and brother, plus the sales force were also cheering from the sidelines. It felt like a movie.

For two weeks it felt like we didn’t sleep. But Between the three of us in the newly formed editorial team, we simply refused to let the papers die. I wrote, we edited, subbed, designed and laid out pages, filled the inevitable gaps, battled through deadline after deadline and somehow kept the entire operation moving.

And we did it.

The presses rolled on time. The newspapers came out on time. Our readers received their papers, our advertisers received what they had paid for and, despite eighteen people walking out and everything that had been thrown at us, we did not miss an edition.

And do you know what? They were bloody good newspapers, too.

Then came the attacks.

Chris Morley, the NUJ’s then Northern and Midlands senior organiser, publicly accused the company of “unprofessional meddling in the editorial process”. The NUJ attacked our efforts when we momentarily tried to find temporary journalists to keep the newspapers operating during the strike, calling on journalists not to work for us.

Some of the claims made about me personally at the time were also completely untrue and deeply damaging. Morley publicly stated I wasn’t a journalist. By that point, I had spent 14 years working as a journalist in the United States, before returning to Britain and continuing to work in the newspaper industry here. I had also been a member of the NUJ myself, a fact that must have been rather difficult for him to swallow when I responded by cutting up my NUJ membership card, taking a photograph of it and sending it to him.

I think the message was fairly clear.

But think about that. Eighteen journalists had walked out. We were desperately trying to keep 14 newspapers alive during a global pandemic, and the journalists’ union was publicly urging other journalists not to help us produce them to “Save Local News”.

That experience taught me something I have never forgotten.

There comes a point when a union can become so obsessed with defeating the employer that it loses sight of whether the employer survives.

And if the employer disappears, so do the jobs.

That is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of so much modern trade unionism. You can strike, obstruct, demand, condemn and resist, but eventually somebody has to generate the money that pays the wages. Eventually the organisation has to function. Eventually the product has to be produced.

For newspapers, that reality is becoming more urgent by the year because our industry is facing another enormous revolution, artificial intelligence.

I will certainly use it to check this piece before I publish.

There are of course serious questions about AI… and journalists should be asking them. Copyright matters. Accuracy matters. Fabricated quotations matter. Deepfakes matter. Intellectual property matters. Human accountability matters. Nobody sensible is arguing that newspapers should simply hand their newsrooms over to machines and abandon journalistic standards. Regional newspapers are the number one trusted news source for a reason. We are very, very accurate.

But there is an enormous difference between demanding responsible use of new technology and treating technological change primarily as an enemy of workers.

Technology is not going away because a trade union dislikes its implications. Regional newspapers either adapt or die. That is the brutal truth.

Used properly, technology can help a small newsroom transcribe a three-hour council meeting in minutes, analyse hundreds of pages of public documents, search datasets, process photographs, produce video, manage archives and perform administrative work that once consumed enormous amounts of journalists’ time.

That does not have to destroy journalism. It can free journalists to do more journalism.

It can give reporters more time to get out of the office, meet people, develop sources, attend meetings, investigate councils, challenge politicians, expose wrongdoing and uncover the stories that algorithms cannot discover because they require human relationships, instinct and trust.

If unions simply dig their heels in against productivity-enhancing technology, history tells us what happens next. They do not stop the technological revolution, they simply make the businesses they are supposedly protecting less competitive.

And eventually there are no jobs left to protect.

The great danger facing regional journalism is not that newspapers will change. It is that they will disappear.

We are already watching communities across Britain lose newspapers, offices and reporters. Councils are subjected to less scrutiny, courts receive less coverage, local campaigns struggle for attention and people increasingly receive their understanding of their own communities through Facebook groups, TikTok videos and anonymous social media accounts. Often infiltrated by a lot of fake news or one sided commentary.

That should terrify anybody who genuinely cares about democracy.

Yet instead of asking how journalism can survive this extraordinary technological and economic upheaval, too much energy is spent defending old structures and policing ideological boundaries.

Which brings us back to Jason Arday.

His death is a tragedy for his family and for those who loved him. It should not become a political weapon for either side of an argument, nor should it ever be used to excuse racist abuse, threats or harassment. But neither should tragedy become an excuse for narrowing legitimate public debate.

Journalists must be allowed to investigate academics. They must be allowed to investigate universities. They must be allowed to investigate DEI programmes. They must be allowed to investigate people who oppose DEI programmes. They must be allowed to investigate controversial claims about race, sex, class, immigration, religion, disability, politics and every other difficult subject imaginable.

Sometimes the conclusions will make the Left uncomfortable. Sometimes they will make the Right uncomfortable.

That is journalism.

Journalism is not supposed to provide emotional reassurance to whichever political tribe happens to agree with us. It is not supposed to enforce an approved worldview. Its purpose is to establish facts, expose wrongdoing, test claims, challenge power and give readers enough information to reach their own conclusions.

The moment journalists begin asking whether an investigation might undermine an ideology they have been told is virtuous, journalism is already in trouble.

The moment a journalists’ union begins attaching morally loaded labels to criticism of particular political or institutional philosophies, we should be asking serious questions.

Who watches the watchdogs?

The NUJ becomes rightly furious when governments threaten press freedom. It campaigns against intimidation of journalists. It demands access to information. It argues for the protection of sources.

On those principles, I agree with it.

But freedom of the press cannot mean freedom only for journalists whose opinions conform to the prevailing orthodoxy of their union.

A journalists’ union ought to be almost fanatical about freedom of inquiry. When confronted with a controversial claim, its instinct should never be, “How do we prevent this idea gaining legitimacy?”

It should be, “How do journalists establish whether it is true?” That is the whole point.

There is also another uncomfortable reality the NUJ needs to confront. Britain’s regional newspaper industry is fighting for its life.

The people operating independent newspapers are not all sitting in wood-panelled boardrooms counting enormous profits while plotting how to impoverish journalists. Many are desperately trying to work out how newspapers can remain commercially viable in a world in which the advertising market that sustained them for generations has been transformed beyond recognition.

Every lost edition matters. Every unnecessary cost matters. Every working practice matters. Every technological advantage matters. Every advertiser matters. Every reader matters.

There is no divine law saying Britain must continue to have regional newspapers. They can die. And if we make them commercially impossible to operate, they will.

Then there will be nothing left to strike against. No proprietor. No newsroom. No local office. No printing press. No newspaper. No journalists.

The NUJ can congratulate itself for “saving journalism” while resisting the very changes that might allow journalism to survive, but eventually reality wins. And there is something else that needs saying.

Trade unions are not inherently democratic simply because they use the language of solidarity. A union leadership can become every bit as doctrinaire, insulated and intolerant of dissent as any corporation, government department or political organisation.

When a union claiming to represent journalists begins pronouncing on which political ideas are acceptable, when it appears to treat disagreement with fashionable institutional orthodoxies as morally suspect, it risks becoming part of precisely the establishment journalism is supposed to scrutinise.

That is why it is important to highlight the absurdity of Laura Davison’s statement.

Not because journalists should ignore racism. They absolutely should not. Not because Jason Arday’s death should not prompt reflection. Of course it should. It matters because journalism depends upon a principle far greater than any particular ideology, the right to ask the question.

The uncomfortable question. The unpopular question. The question somebody powerful desperately wishes you would stop asking.

That principle belongs to everybody.

Laura Davison does not speak for journalism. The NUJ does not own journalism. DEI does not own the fight against racism.

No trade union, political party, university, government, corporation or pressure group has the right to determine which ideas Britain’s journalists are permitted to investigate, question or challenge.

Nor can an organisation credibly claim to be saving regional journalism if, in its determination to preserve yesterday’s structures, it helps make tomorrow’s newspapers impossible to produce.

Britain desperately needs local journalism. We need reporters sitting in council meetings when nobody else is watching. We need journalists in courtrooms. We need newspapers prepared to embarrass councils, MPs, police forces, businesses, universities and, yes, trade unions.

We need independent journalism precisely because institutions do not like being questioned. The NUJ should remember that.

Because journalism does not need another organisation telling journalists what they should think.

It needs organisations prepared to defend their right to think, investigate, question and discover for themselves.

That is press freedom.

Anything less risks becoming a state of undemocracy.

By Claire Bullivant