On November 8, 2013, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) that it was sending an “unprecedented top-level press-freedom mission to the United Kingdom” as a “direct response to recent actions widely seen as contrary to press freedom guarantees: government interference in the regulation of the independent press, through the Royal Charter and associated legislation, but will also include discussion of the criticism of The Guardian for its coverage of the revelations from former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.”

Misunderstanding the Royal Charter

The ever so slight problem here, however, is that there has been absolutely no government interference in the press via the Royal Charter, whilst the government’s attacks on The Guardian, which are indeed a most serious assault on press freedom, have been loudly amplified and endorsed by newspapers such as The Sun, The Mail and The Telegraph. (Significantly, in its report of the “mission,” The Telegraph managed not to mention The Guardian aspect at all). Will the delegation be questioning these papers about their censorious actions, one wonders? And, while they’re about it, will they ask them why they campaign daily for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and abolish the Human Rights Act, Article 10 of which introduced for the first time to Britain a statutory right to freedom of expression?

The fact that part of the WAN-IFRA mission is based on a complete misunderstanding of what the Royal Charter entails is the result of a sustained campaign of distortion, disinformation and downright lies which has been conducted by most of the British national press (the exceptions being The Guardian, The Independent and Financial Times), not only in its own pages but on a global scale, ever since the was announced.

As one of Britain’s greatest-ever journalists, Sir Harold Evans, put it in his in January 2013, the misrepresentation of Leveson’s proposal for the statutory underpinning of press self-regulation has been “staggering,” and to portray it as state control is an “amazingly gross distortion.” Radio 4 Today program in October, he further complained that “the exaggerations of some of the papers comparing Britain to Zimbabwe is so ridiculous, so self-interested as to destroy confidence in the very freedom of speech they claim to protect.”

Equally scathing about the press reaction to Leveson has been Nick Davies, the journalist whose work for The Guardian uncovered the phone hacking scandal in the first place (and which for years was assiduously ignored by every other national newspaper). Davies has of behaving like “spoilt children” and “throwing their toys out of the pram,” adding that “the hysterical squealing from some parts of Fleet Street that any reform is a threat to press freedom is childish and bullying.” And on the very day that I wrote this piece, the former Sun editor, David Yelland, to the bulk of the British press, arguing that “one year on from , the country finds itself in a crazy place where facts don't seem to matter and generalisations are repeated so often that untruths almost seem truths,” and that “what we witnessed, post-Leveson, was pure hysteria. The press simply does not understand that it became the very thing it is there to attack: a vested interest. It did not listen but instead censored the public debate about itself. And it tried to bully anyone who had the temerity to challenge the party line.”

300 Years of Press Freedom

Because so much arrant nonsense has been written and spoken about the Charter introducing “state regulation” of the press and “ending 300 years of press freedom,” it’s extremely important to understand exactly what it does do. The Charter, which was a constitutional device brought into play in the first place only in an attempt to appease the press, was agreed by the Coalition and Labour parties on March 18, 2013, and, after massive obstruction on the part of the newspaper owners, was granted by the Privy Council on October 30, 2013.

Very briefly, it asks the press to devise its own system of self-regulation. This must contain three crucial ingredients: a board which is independent of both the press and politicians; a speedy and efficient complaints process with an arbitral arm; and a code of conduct, which will be administered by equal numbers of editors, journalists and lay members (unlike the present Code, which is administered solely by editors).

The Charter also establishes a recognition panel, which will not only ensure that the new self-regulatory body contains the above ingredients, but, every two to three years, will check that they are still present and functioning effectively. Appointments to the panel would be governed by a transparent mechanism which, again, would be designed to guarantee its independence from both the press and politicians. However, if newspapers refuse to recognize the panel, or if they establish a form of self-regulation that is not accepted by it, then they will be liable to exemplary damages in the event of civil court cases arising from stories which they have published recklessly.

The new arrangements will be entrenched in statute, simply so that they cannot be changed by ministers – either in order to water down regulation at the behest of the press, or to toughen it in order to please politicians and critics of the press. The relevant legislation doesn’t even mention the press specifically, but simply states that any Royal Charter that comes into being after March 2013 can be amended only if there is a two-thirds majority vote in both Houses of Parliament. This clause is absolutely essential, because bodies established by the Royal Charter are normally closely overseen by the Privy Council, which is in fact a committee of ministers. Thus, without the clause, ministers would be free to meddle with the new self-regulatory system, which would indeed give credence to those who claim that the new measures introduce a degree of “state control” over the press.

“State Regulation”

Now, even in simplified form, this may seem rather abstruse, but by no stretch of the imagination, however fevered, is this “state regulation” – it is merely an attempt to ensure that any new system of press self-regulation is effective and meaningful. Indeed, statutory underpinning of the new system is felt to be necessary only because the present system of “self-regulation,” as practiced by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), has been so dominated by the press interests which fund it, that it has proved to be utterly compromised and futile – except, of course, from the point of view of press owners and editors.  

Furthermore, the insistence on the new self-regulatory body’s independence from politicians is all the more vital given that the press industry has always ensured that the PCC is chaired by active working politicians, namely Lord McGregor (Social Democrat), Lord Wakeham (Conservative), Baroness Buscombe (Conservative), and Lord Hunt (Conservative).

Furthermore, the body which funds the PCC, the Press Standards Board of Finance (PressBof), is chaired by yet another Conservative peer, Lord Black, who is also executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, and a former director of the PCC. That all but one of the chairs of the PCC have been Tories is, of course, absolutely no accident, since this mirrors the overwhelmingly dominant position of Tory newspapers in Britain’s national press.

However, the crucial point here is that the very last thing which the owners of most of Britain’s national newspapers desire, in spite of all their protestations to the contrary, is a regulatory system which is independent of politicians – or, rather, of the “right” kind of politicians. What they want is exactly what they’ve got, namely a set-up in which the dominant press interests are represented in Parliament by powerful and influential voices that help to ensure that legislation favorable to the press is passed and – crucially important at the present juncture – that pesky calls for reform are strongly resisted.

Thus, the press owners have rejected the Royal Charter, in so doing sticking up two fingers to the Queen, Parliament, and the will of the people (as represented both by Parliament and the numerous public opinion polls which show the British public to be overwhelmingly in favor of the arrangements proposed by Leveson). Instead, they intend to rebrand the wretched PCC as the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which, as the Media Standards Trust has , threatens to be even more compromised than its feeble predecessor.

And just as during the passage of the Charter the press did its absolute utmost to try to ensure the deletion of the ban on working peers with party political affiliations holding senior positions in either the new self-regulator or the recognition panel, so, utterly predictably, party political peers and MEPs will be allowed onto the board of IPSO, the appointment panel, and the Complaints Committee.

So much for keeping politicians out of the press, then. But, of course, all this is entirely ignored in the papers’ raucous campaign against “state regulation.” This has prompted an increasing number of overseas bodies to issue dire warnings against what they have been led to believe is happening in the UK. Whether these have come from the Committee to Protect Journalists, or the that wrote to the Queen on October 23, 2013, the message has always been the same. In the words of the latter grouping: “The world still follows Britain in so many areas. If the UK moves to control the press through the force of law then it will have a terrifying knock-on effect throughout the Commonwealth and much of the developing world where Britain has a key leadership role … The actions of Britain’s Parliament will be used as an excuse by those who want to muzzle the press in their own country and stifle the free flow of information – and there are many governments who would love to do so.”

However, the truth of the matter, as we have seen, is that Britain’s Parliament has done absolutely none of the things of which it is accused here. Indeed, the really tragic irony of woefully ill-informed interventions such as this is that by giving the impression that this is what is happening in Britain, it is actually they who play into the hands of those who want to muzzle the press in authoritarian countries. Furthermore, the letter to the Queen is all the more absurd since its purpose was to ask her, an unelected, hereditary monarch, to block a measure that has been backed by every single party in the democratically elected House of Commons. For people who apparently care so passionately about democratic values, this is an utterly ludicrous position to adopt.

However, matters reached their absolute nadir when The Guardian, on November 11, 2013, revealed that Sri Lankan editors had written to David Cameron “urging him to put a stop to the royal charter on newspaper regulation, claiming it will serve as a blueprint for those who want to control the press around the world,” quoting them to the effect that “since countries like Sri Lanka regained their independence, and the advent of the Commonwealth, Britain acted as a beacon of freedom to the oppressed across the world. The actions of your government now send out a different blueprint to those seeking to control the press.”

Now, these courageous people really do know what it’s like to be subject not simply to state control but to state violence, and the fact that they felt compelled to waste their valuable time tilting at windmills, or, worse still, were prodded into doing so by British press interests, is the most resounding condemnation imaginable of all involved in this global pantomime of deceit, this charade of commercial self-interest masquerading as concern for democratic values. Any organization in Britain responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of itself, but, given that this is the bulk of the British press that we’re talking about here, one can rest assured that “shame” is a word that doesn’t feature in their vocabulary – unless, of course, it’s applied to others, and particularly to those groups which it loves to demonize, which includes those campaigning for a genuinely free press.        

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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‘Democracies require an unlovable press. They need journalists who get in the face of power’. So says Michael Schudson, one of America’s foremost media scholars, in a recent collection of essays, and most journalists would wholeheartedly agree. Such sentiments were much in evidence in the pre-emptive nuclear strike mounted by the press in the run-up to the publication in November 2012 of Lord Justice Leveson’s report into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press.

The Freedom to Dig Dirt

For example, in an editorial on 28 October, the Telegraph argued that “a free press – opinionated, raucous, even, at times, distasteful – is essential for the functioning of democracy”. In the next day’s edition, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, opined that: “One of the reasons London is a great place to live and invest in is that we have the stability which goes with the rule of law and a ruling class that is (very largely) prevented from indulging in venality and corruption by the activities of a brutal, exuberant and uninhibited media”. The same line was followed by Trevor Kavanagh, associate editor of the Sun, on 31 October: “Britain is squeaky clean by comparison [with France, Spain, Portugal and Italy]. Both the political class and civil service are largely above criticism. But as politicians on all sides admit, this is at least partly thanks to the British Press. Ours might be a rough old trade, sometimes scurrilous and always noisy. But without the freedom to dig dirt, embarrass the great and the good and tell unpalatable truth – and yes, occasionally get it wrong – British democracy risks grievous damage”.

Meanwhile an editorial in the Mail on Sunday, 25 November followed a slightly different tack, arguing that: “Commercial success depends on popularity. Popular newspapers have to recognise and satisfy the tastes of the public, or they will die. This does not mean encouraging or feeding the worst in people, but it does tend to involve printing material that might not go down too well in an Oxford Senior Common Room, or in the Chambers of Her Majesty’s judges. That is just how things must be. Those countries which lack a robust, even raucous, but successful popular press also lack a crucial restraint on power”. The whole approach was neatly summed up by Jurgen Kronig, head of the Foreign Press Association in London, quoted in the Independent, 26 November, as stating that: “Britain has in my view the freest, probably the best press in the world. At the same time it can be the most irresponsible press. Two sides of one and the same coin”.

In other words, the price to be paid for journalism that adheres to the values of the Fourth Estate is the kind of journalism which led to the Leveson Inquiry in the first place. However, this is a largely meretricious argument.

Three Objections

Firstly, those papers which carry the largest amounts of scurrilous and error-ridden journalism also carry the least hard news, thus badly denting the “subsidy” argument (although, in fairness, the Sun partly subsidises The Times).Ìę Furthermore, what hard news there is in popular papers is frequently so polluted by bias, partisanship and editorialising as not to count as news at all, witness the Mail and Express in particular.

Second, the idea that the press discourages Britain’s elites from engaging in venality and corruption is simply delusionary, self-serving nonsense. This is not for a moment to deny that the press, even the Mail, sometimes produces fine investigative journalism, which is entirely in line with the values of the Fourth Estate, but such journalism is the exception rather than the rule. Were this not the case, stories such as the following would have dominated the news agenda for years, as opposed either to being conspicuous by their absence or appearing belatedly only when bounced onto it by non-journalistic activity such as public inquiries. The events which led to the banking crisis. The role of the City in acting as the equivalent of a vast offshore tax haven anchored in East London, accounting for around half of the world’s secrecy jurisdictions. The and cover-ups. The scandal, not properly picked up by the national press until the Francis Report forced it onto the agenda (and this in spite of five years of excellent reporting by the local Express and Star). The trade deficit: we are now importing, annually, well over ÂŁ100bn more manufactured goods than we export. Flogging vast quantities of the family silver: between 2000 and 2010, ÂŁ615bn worth of portfolio assets passed into foreign hands. Thus, whilst Europhobic newspapers habitually condemn “rule by Brussels”, the UK electricity generating and supply industry has been effectively re-nationalised – by the French, since most of it is now in the grateful hands of the state owned ElectricitĂ© de France (which is what lurks behind the conveniently anonymous acronym EDF). And so on.

Nor is it simply the case that these (and many similar) stories were routinely ignored by most of the press. The very values which fuelled the banking scandal in the first place were reproduced on a daily basis by most newspapers – and not simply in their financial pages and in the mass of advertisements for financial services and “products”.Ìę The alleged virtues of privatisation and “de-regulation” are entirely taken for granted across most of the British press. And newspapers played an absolutely key role in both the Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough cover-ups – most shockingly in the case of the Sun and Hillsborough. One might also note that the papers’ role in covering up the police riot at Orgreave during the miners’ strike in June 1984 still remains to be acknowledged.

Third, and leading on directly from the above, the press which the Mail on Sunday celebrates as being “a crucial restraint on power” is itself one of the greatest powers in the land. ÌęIndeed, the main reason why the Leveson Inquiry’s third module was devoted to the relationship between the press and politicians was because of the widespread perception that newspapers had gained the upper hand over our elected representatives (albeit with the latters’ complicity).

“Unaccountable New Elites”

In his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, Oscar Wilde wrote: “At the present moment it [journalism] is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism”. ÌęOne simply shudders to think what he would make of the power of the national press today. ÌęÌęSignificantly, Anthony Sampson’s chapter on the media in his 2004 book “Who Runs This Place?” is entitled Ìę“Unelected Legislators”, and in it he notes that MPs are now “in the gallery of the virtual debating chamber, looking down in awe on the journalists. The fourth estate had become the first estate”. He concluded, quite rightly, that “Parliament without a press is now unimaginable, but a press without an effective Parliament is an invitation to demagogy and rule by unaccountable new elites”.

The power and the political role of the press are, however, almost never acknowledged by journalists themselves. A rare exception is the Guardian’sDavid Walker who has noted that “the power held by journalists and the media organisations for which they work is unperceived or assumed away”. In the stories which newspapers daily tell their readers, the institution of the press itself is usually quite simply invisible, and journalists themselves very rarely turn the spotlight on their relationship with each other, with politicians and with proprietors. ÌęThe motto of the British press is: dog doesn’t eat dog. It could be argued that the Guardian’s revelation of the phone-hacking scandal suggests otherwise; however, this is simply another case of events forcing a story onto the press agenda as, until the revelation of the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone, most papers had studiously ignored the Guardian’s investigations. ÌęFurthermore, the paper, and its reporter Nick Davies, who broke the story, are anathematised as “disloyal” by large swathes of the British press.

These considerations should lead us to examine the nature of the freedom which the press defends and demands so stoutly. Is it the freedom to do exactly what it, or rather its owners, want? Is it freedom from the kind of public scrutiny and accountability which it demands from every other institution in society? Is it the freedom to exercise power without responsibility? Is it the freedom to make money, however debased and degraded the product on offer? If so, these are in no conceivable sense the values of the Fourth Estate, and newspapers should no longer be allowed to get away with the con trick of claiming that membership of such an institution should absolve them from any kind of regulation, let alone positive forms of regulation which are designed to ensure that newspapers are considerably more honest, truthful, diverse and accountable than they are at present. In other words, we need to think rather less about the property rights of press proprietors, still less about the “freedom” of the market, and much more about the communicative rights of the public.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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