Graef to be acting chair of Media Standards Trust

Roger Graef, the award winning filmmaker, writer, broadcaster and criminologist, has been appointed as the new acting chair of the Media Standards Trust.

It follows the decision by Sir David Bell to suspended his chairmanship of the Trust following his appointment to the Leveson Inquiry on media behaviour and ethics.

Graef said: "I look forward to building on the great work of David and the Trust's Board and team. The Trust has achieved a remarkable amount in the last five years, culminating in some of the achievements of the last 5 weeks."

Graef has made films for both Granada and the BBC as a freelance, he founded his independent production company, Films of Record, in 1979, and has won many awards for films on difficult social issues and criminal justice.

He was given the BAFTA Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in 2004. In 2006 he was awarded an OBE for services to television. He is the author of, Talking Blues - The Police in their own words, Living Dangerously- Young Offenders in their own words and Why Restorative Justice?.

Graef appears regularly on Radio 4, and writes for the Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Guardian, the Independent, the Sunday Times, and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. He was The Times media columnist from 1992-94.

He lectures frequently on media ethics. He was Visiting Professor of Media and Communications at Oxford University, and is now Visiting Professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the LSE and Visiting Professor at the Media School at Bournemouth University.

Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, said: "The Media Standards Trust has benefited hugely from Sir David Bell's wisdom and experience. Roger Graef's understanding of the media, the police and current affairs is unparalleled and his insights will be critical in informing the Trust's work over the period of the inquiry."

Churnalism debate defeat for proposal to mark news stories based on press releases as advertorials

A motion calling for news stories based on press releases to be marked as "advertorials" was defeated in a debate on churnalism, organised by the Media Standards Trust in London last night.

Opposing the motion, David Higgerson, head of multimedia at Trinity Mirror regionals, argued that the churnalism debate "demonised" press releases and did not take into account whether journalists had checked out the facts contained in them.

He said that within journalism "advertorial" was already used to describe articles and supplements that were guaranteed a place in a newspaper and were paid-for by a client.

Filmmaker Chris Atkins, who has hoaxed the press with fake press releases to highlight churnalism, spoke for the motion.

He claimed that by marking articles based on press release material as advertorial would help "rebuild" trust in journalists and encourage people to "go to news sources that weren't churning as much as others".

James Randerson, the Guardian's environment and science editor, also supported the motion. He argued that it was "about being honest with the reader". Randerson argued that journalists who failed to link to or credit sources were guilty of a paternalistic attitude to their readers which was out of kilter with the times.

"Linking to things is now so easy," he said and warned that if journalists didn't: "Lots of people out there are keen to see journalists trip up and they will be found out."

Visiting professor in PR at the University of Westminster Trevor Morris argued that without PR and press releases there would be less media and advertising revenue to support journalism.

He claimed the vast majority of press releases, around 90%, got no coverage. "PR is not that powerful. If you like the message you call it a campaign. If you hate it, you call it propaganda."

There was a consensus that the idea of marking stories based on press releases as advertorial was a "blunt tool" that did not take on the more complex relations between journalists and PRs.

But there was also agreement among the speakers that journalists need to be more transparent about where their stories come from and to link to original sources.

Overshadowing the debate were the latest phone hacking revelations and the damage they have done to the public image of journalists and how much they are trusted. The Media Standards Trust has been calling for a public inquiry into phone hacking.