And so Lord Leveson has delivered his esteemed judgement in a truly impressive 2000 page report. Typical lawyers, they always have to go overboard with the wording! For all that, it is a serious study with a lot of analysis behind it and so none of its recommendations should be dismissed lightly or quickly.
Leveson has pretty much publicly confirmed what anyone who has had any professional dealings with the media already knows. On the whole they lie. A lot! The reasons for this are many, but it boils down to deadlines, lack of standards and professionalism and outright political or commercial bias. This is on top of the mistakes that any pressured written work will have. This is not to tarnish all journalists with the same brush, but for anyone who takes pride in their work it is unacceptable to put a misleading statement into the public domain, I still remain horrified by how often the media reports opinions and complete fabrications as fact. I am a big fan of proper investigative journalism, which in many ways mirror some of the basic principles in being a good civil servant – find out what is going on and get it confirmed/checked from more than one source if possible. If this is not possible, make this clear and say it is the best judgement that can be made with the information available.
Leveson draws a crucial distinction between what is put on the internet and what has a ‘big name’ behind it. The mainstream media claim to have the high ground when it comes to news because unlike some random blogger they have the resources and people to add credibility to their articles or posts. We cannot just make free market claims that if people do not believe the veracity of the press they will go elsewhere. This might be true of blogs in the ‘wild west’ of the internet, but the mainstream press is not as diverse and the tricks used to manipulate people are subtle and well used. In short, the mainstream press have a tremendous capacity to ‘influence’ people for good or for bad and so they have a lot of power. What Leveson highlights all too starkly is that this power is too often abused with little in the way of restraint or punishment against its misuse. In short, it is a very unhealthy situation for a democracy to be in and something has to change. He make take nearly 2000 pages to say this, but I can only say that I fully agree with Leveson’s observations of the problems of the press.
Many comments and articles have been written about how the British media is controlled by a small number of wealthy individuals and it cannot be denied this is one problem, but I would argue it is certainly not the only one. One of the other big problems is the belief that the press protects liberty. While this is true in part, what this belief does is provide a good excuse for vested interests to clamour against reform. The mainstream press is not just ugly, it is clearly corrupt, self-promoting and in worse cases actually restricts liberty not safeguards it. The most obvious cases of the way liberty is restricted are those of hacking victims and those who are victims of vigilante justice promoted by the press. Less obvious is the way the press curtails critical reporting for ‘editorial reasons’ or the fact that complex issues are dumbed down and presented in a way to reduce independent/critical thought by the reader. Liberty and free speech will not be preserved by entrusting its protection to a group of journalists motivated by a variety of factors, but by making sure the population at large is well informed and able to articulate its feelings in a coherent way that politicians can listen to.
The danger of the press is not only that they have colluded in reducing informed free speech by the population, but they have cluttered the communication from the population to those at the top and so the politicians themselves cannot clearly hear the ‘will of the people’. This has been frequently referred to as “the Westminster Bubble” The press are just as guilty as the politicians for this state of affairs and they live in a state of denial about their culpability. Leveson has challenged this and the completely hypocritical response from the elements of the press saying that he will curtail their free speech reveals the state of denial or worse still their desperate desire to preserve this unsustainable relationship which is significantly undermining British democracy.
In conclusion, I believe Leveson is totally right, a self regulated body cannot work and so some statutory legislation/regulation is needed. The trick is to do it in a way that preserves the essential components of liberty and free speech that are so vital for a properly functional democracy. A self regulated press has been shown to fail (through countless other enquiries) to do this and so another approach is needed and it needs to have teeth and to be free from political control.
