The Leveson report is in – Protecting liberty or curtailing free speech?

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.

Dealing with the enemy, the media

This is a post I have wanted to write for a while. When I was given training on how to handle the media many years ago, the message was very much that they were usually the enemy and so needed to be handled with caution and suspicion. Sadly, the reason for this is not because the media keep exposing things that government does not want exposed. Civil servants are just as eager as the person in the street for the media to properly expose all that is wrong in Government. No, the reason for treating the media as the enemy is because they are not the fourth estate as they claim to be, with the notable exception of the specialist press and those who still have a very strong investigative journalism element such as the Private Eye. At their worst, the mainstream media are corrupt, dishonest and very political. They now exist to do two things: sell newspapers and promote certain political/social messages or themes. Only by coincidence do these goals align with holding powerful people to account in the public interest and only occasionally can they be judged to be a neutral party, free from political/financial interest and eager to do the right thing. The Leveson enquiry is exposing this reality in a truly landmark way, shattering the myths and showing the ugly underbelly of British democracy. This has been nicely captured in an article in The Guardian by John Harris: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/10/leveson-elite-shames-new-politics

For any civil servant who has had experience of answering media enquiries, it becomes rapidly apparent that something is consistently wrong. Whenever I read a media article to which I have contributed information to, I can always spot a large number of basic and fundamental errors. Many of these errors are distortion of facts, deliberately done to make a political point, and many others are just as a result of poor research and limited knowledge of the subject matter. This happens so often that it can only be concluded that journalism is no longer about quality writing when it comes to the content of their material, the message itself is far more important. One critical result is that the reader ends up not well informed about that issue and merely reacts to any such articles emotionally rather than intellectually. For someone trained to believe that they should never put anything out in the public domain that is not as factually accurate as possible, even including some spin, this is a complete travesty. It also raises the obvious question asked by many civil servants, “If what they write about topics I know about is complete rubbish, why should I believe anything else written in the rest of the newspaper?” I am sorry to say, I consider very few journalists to be truly ‘professional’ at their craft. The newspaper that is easily the worst for all these issues is the Daily Mail, but then everyone already knows this. Despite that, they remain successful.

There is a darker side to this debate too. Think of any major news story in recent years. As an example I will choose the Soham murders in Cambridgeshire. The press descended upon that story like a swarm of locusts. So what did the local police and local council have to do? They had to put people into handling that media scrum. Now I know giving information to the press is important, but when you are in the middle of desperately looking for two missing girls, people in the office handling press enquiries are not people outside helping in the search. This is a familiar pattern for any major news story there is. Government departments are mocked for having so many press officers and yet no one questions why they are needed. The press is a rapacious beast, it does not care who it tramples over or how many people it takes to handle it. This is taxpayer’s money and one day it could be someone’s life. I can only speculate that this may have been the case for Madeleine McCann, there is a reason why the British police ask the press not to run any stories of a kidnapping victim in the early stages. I hasten to add that this is speculation, the truth of what happened has not come out, but I can only say that the press coverage has sickened me as much as the kidnapping itself. This case has only shown that there are few depth to which the mainstream media will not sink and from the bowels of government they are seen as a hindrance to doing one’s job.

On a more routine note, journalists are the biggest users of the Freedom of Information laws. Granted, this is about government being accountable and so a good thing, but the point I want to make here is that a significant amount of taxpayers’ money is devoted to handling these enquiries by journalists who are willing to ‘distort’ the facts and then try to make money off the resulting story. I wish to emphasise the fact that all too often they are using taxpayer funded resources to make the newspaper money rather than holding the government to account. Some people may consider this a good thing, to which all I can say is look at what the Leveson enquiry is exposing, do you want your tax money keeping these people in business? Again another caveat, I am not advocating the abolition of FOI, I only point out that there is not enough intelligent use of these laws to get at the truth rather than to manufacture a story.

In conclusion, I believe the media has too much power with too little responsibility. There is an obvious and critical need for an independent press in a democratic society. The sad reality is that the UK press is not independent, it is nearly wholly owned by a small number of very rich white men. I hope the Levenson enquiry results in significant changes to the fourth estate and how it operates. Apart from all the harm done by the lack of professionalism by journalism as a whole and the blatant political bias of various news organisations, a situation where the government is not able to tell the truth because it will be turned into lies and journalists report the government’s lies as truths is not one that is democratically healthy.