My tabloid work wasn't journalism - just entertainment within pre-defined narratives

Public figures may rightly have complained to the Leveson Inquiry about weeks of looking from inside their homes to see reporters camped along the driveway, but, as any coalface hack would care to add, it's even less fun huddled on the outside looking in. Even in the relative comfort of the newsroom, many are disillusioned with being forced to fit the squareness of fact into the round hole assigned by their editors.

Sitting before Lord Justice Leveson myself, I was struck by how, as much as giving evidence about my former employers at The Daily Star, I was also testifying against myself. The picture I was painting of my red top exploits, be it the ideologically driven distortions or tittle-tattle inventions, betrayed my behaviour as something other than journalistic. What is less clear is what that other is.

Look up 'journalist' in the dictionary and you will be told it's 'a person who writes for newspapers or magazines'. The definition of 'journalism' is no more illuminating: 'the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines'.

To escape this frustrating semantic loop, I turned to a definition offered by professor Brian Cathcart. He describes journalism as an activity that is "demonstrably valuable to society. It tells us what is new, important and interesting in public life, it holds authority to account, it promotes informed debate, it entertains and enlightens."

It struck me as an excellent, if sobering, definition. Very little of my work in tabloids fell within these parameters. Sometimes what I wrote was 'new', but more often than not it was cannibalised from other news sources. Even that appearing new was caged within pre-defined narratives and well-worn stereotypes.

On occasion my writing 'held authority to account', but it was often simply as a byproduct of one powerful institution flexing its muscles against another for self-interested ideological or commercial reasons.

Far from 'promoting informed debate' and 'enlightening' the reader, my writing tended to deliberately obfuscate the issues and skew the terms of reference, creating binary arguments and offering reductive solutions - leaving any semblance of balance until the very last, safe in the knowledge few ever make it that far.

Whether it dealt with what is 'important and interesting in public life' is more difficult, because of the subjectivity of the terms, but let it be said that, on the awe-inspiring day last spring when millions took to the streets of Egypt to demand freedom, The Daily Star front page read: "Jordan... the movie." This was not a reference to the Middle East.

So, if it wasn't journalism I was doing, what was it?

Jonathan Caplan QC, lead counsel for Associated Newspapers, inadvertently lifted the lid during his opening statement to the Leveson Inquiry. "Our aim," he said, "is to entertain - to engage the reader."

To entertain. Despite the fullness of Brian Cathcart's definition of journalism, my experience in tabloids is that entertainment usurps all other facets. Everything I wrote was designed to appeal to the emotional over the rational, the knee-jerk over the considered - assumptions reinforced rather than challenged and all presented in an easily digestible style that celebrated its own triviality.

Back to my dictionary, I came across another word, defined as "an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment". The word? Story-telling.

Journalism proper, driven by a truth-seeking impulse grounded in the real, is vastly more exhausting both financially and temporally than the type of story-telling that dominates the news market. The conditions of the modern newsroom mean that journalists are forced by circumstance to behave as story-tellers, abiding by the pre-defined narratives as part of an entertainment-seeking impulse.

As we enter a period of profound change in the print media - tabloid versus broadsheet, politician versus press, self-regulation versus state regulation - for me the real battle is between journalism and story-telling; or; more specifically; story-telling masquerading as journalism.

With story-telling, the consumer is encouraged to suspend belief, while with journalism they are encouraged to do the opposite - to trust. With this in mind we must give more scrutiny to what journalism actually is, and what we want it to be.

This is not about deriding celebrity gossip or tabloid fun, because it certainly has its place within the media ecosystem. To me this is about recognising the true nature of the activity being pursued.

I take no pleasure in removing my career from the sphere of the journalistic and assigning it to the realm of story-telling. But until a distinction between the two is recognised I fear the truth-seeking impulse of journalism proper will always be tainted by the excesses of its entertainment-driven cousin, and in doing so public trust will remain in the gutter.

If the public don't believe the journalism they read then a vital facet of that transaction is lost. All journalists become story-tellers by default, the implications of which are devastating.

Richard Peppiatt is a former reporter for The Daily Star, turned writer and media commentator.

This article is a shortened and edited version of a chapter in The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair, just published by Arima.