There are few compliments rarer in journalism than this: the security services think you’re interesting.
So perhaps Vincent Kearney should, in the most backhanded sense imaginable, feel flattered. While working for the BBC in Belfast, MI5 wasn’t ignoring him. They were, shall we say, subscribing closely — dipping into phone records in 2006 and 2009 like particularly nosy readers who’d misplaced their library card.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s only when the spooks stop paying attention that a journalist should really panic. Being ignored by power is far worse than being monitored by it. Indifference is the ultimate professional insult.
Of course, let’s not romanticise it. MI5 has already conceded it illegally accessed his communications data. The PSNI has form too, with tribunals finding unlawful spying on reporters to identify sources. This wasn’t a harmless fan club. It was covert surveillance dressed up as “defensive operations” — which sounds less like accountability and more like a euphemism generator working overtime.
Kearney himself says he was treated as a suspect rather than a journalist. That’s not witty; that’s worrying. The right to protect sources isn’t a decorative extra — it’s the engine of investigative reporting. When agencies start mapping a reporter’s professional contacts, they aren’t just collecting metadata; they’re chilling conversations, spooking whistleblowers, and quietly sawing at the branch democracy sits on.
And yet, in dark Northern Irish humour fashion, there’s an absurdity to it all. Picture the scene: somewhere in Holywood, Co Down officials at Palace Barracks poring over phone logs, convinced the real threat to national stability was a current affairs correspondent with a notepad.
If the state’s energy is spent tracking journalists exposing uncomfortable truths, perhaps the problem isn’t the journalists.
So yes, in the gallows-humour sense, being spied on means you matter. But a free society shouldn’t measure journalistic worth by the intensity of secret surveillance. The real badge of honour would be this: that reporters can investigate power without power secretly investigating them back.
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