Vince Cable and journalistic ethics

If what the Telegraph did to Vince Cable and his Lib Dem colleagues left you with a slightly uneasy feeling about how the reporters got their story - and the implications for the way the world sees journalism - there were a couple of thoughtful reflections on the Today programme this morning. 

Columnist Peter Preston (former editor of the Guardian) and Steven Glover (who writes for the Daily Mail and the Independent) answer John Humphry's question, as to whether as editor, they would have allowed it. 

"Just about", says Preston, on the basis that according to the Press Complaints Commission something can be justified if it "prevents the public being misled". So what Cable says in public arguably misleads because privately he thinks differently, "but it's a bit of a borderline case."

Glover agrees, saying he's "certainly got some qualms about it" in that the usual justification for 'entrapment' is that wrongdoing is being exposed, which was not the case here: "is the Telegraph now in a kind of state of war with politicians?" he asks. "I'm not sure that's quite the right position for a newspaper to be in."

He was also worried about "this whole operation" because of the Telegraph's decision not to run, at first, with Cable's views on Murdoch, which, he thought, was because the company's own commercial interests were involved. "If they were being pure as pure, and they like to present themselves as pure as pure, they should have actually run this story themselves yesterday morning."

Preston said the Telegraph should be given the benefit of the doubt on the Murdoch question because they might have been planning to run it subsequently. (Although in his blog on the subject, the BBC's Business Editor, Robert Peston, throws that idea into question, pointing out that the Telegraph had published what it presented as a "fully transcript" of the conversation with Cable, with the Murdoch passage removed.)

Later on the Today programme, the BBC's Political Editor, Nick Robinson offered what he prefaced as "an entirely personal view" on the journalistic ethics of the Telegraph operation: "it seems to me that secretly recording a conversation with a constituent does cross a sort of line for me, and that there is a danger that politicians, already frightened to