The surest sign that a national institution is in trouble is when a team of overseas inspectors flies in, like Thunderbirds from Business Class or a pinstriped International Rescue, to pronounce upon it.
If public health is at risk, the World Health Organization (WHO) is on the health ministry’s doorstep before you can say WHO. If a nation’s finances are failing, suits from the International Monetary Fund will crawl over the Treasury’s books while the home team looks on, steaming silently. It is an ignominious business.
So when, in March, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) completed just such an external investigation into a perceived threat to press freedom, it was not just the damning verdict that caused international shock. It was the identity of the guilty culprit. It wasn’t China, Eritrea, North Korea, Turkmenistan, or any of the usual suspects languishing in the half-light at the very bottom of world press freedom indices.
The country in the dock was Britain: bastion of free speech and home to the legendary – if now virtual – Fleet Street, which had once exported its own brand of frank, fearless and free journalism as a model to the world. For the UK, this was ignominy on stilts; a shaming moment.
WAN-IFRA found Britain guilty on two counts. First, parliament’s response to Lord Justice Leveson’s report into press standards, triggered by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, had produced a cure worse than the disease. It proposed, without adequate legal or public scrutiny, that the UK should adopt a system of press regulation involving a royal charter – a peculiarly British device, arcane and unfathomable – with statutory underpinning, ending 300 years free from state controls.
Second, the UK government had acted heavy-handedly with The Guardian after it published Edward Snowden’s US National Security Agency leaks, which had earned the paper a mixed reception of acclamation and condemnation.
But what concerned WAN-IFRA most was not the effect of these actions in Britain, but abroad. It would give autocratic leaders, worldwide, a bogus legitimacy to tighter media regulation. Britain, once an exporter of press freedom, could soon be exporting media controls. This was not merely a theoretical risk. It was already happening.
Cue President Rafael Correa of Ecuador. “Foreign countries show that Ecuador is right,” said this defender of some of Latin America’s most repressive media laws. “The United Kingdom has created a communication law to regulate the excesses of a certain yellow press in that country.” Latin Americans might be entitled to a jaundiced view of yellow journalism, given that the 1898 Spanish-American war was fanned by a hysterical newspaper battle between rival US publishing giants, William R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. But contorting the current UK proposals to justify press repression a century later was naked political opportunism by an exponent with form.
There is also evidence of the ripple effect from Sri Lanka, where the Leveson Report is privately cited as having prompted a government proposal – later shelved – to impose a harsh statutory code on the press.
Nor is it only authoritarian regimes that seize the moment. Even before Leveson reported, the Australian and New Zealand governments had instinctively set up parallel inquiries, without any evidence of media phone-hacking. In a shrinking world, legislative contagion is the new pandemic.
But the real debate, which the UK crisis has brought into focus, is within journalism itself and wider society. What is journalism for, where is it going in the digital age – and has it gone too far? Everyone – including most leaders of those countries at the bottom of the press freedom indices – agree with the principle of press freedom. Very few agree on the practice. A line from Night and Day, the post-colonial satire by British playwright and one-time journalist, Tom Stoppard, sums it up: “I’m all for a free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”
Perhaps he wasn’t joking. On the day WAN-IFRA’s report condemning parliament’s royal charter was published, fullpage advertisements supporting the charter appeared in newspapers, signed by a glittering list of the great, the good, the right, the genuinely-wronged and the high-minded elite. It comprised leading media figures, professors, philosophers, lobbyists, former editors, senior journalists, broadcasters, authors, artists, actors, comedians and playwrights – including Tom Stoppard. Most of them, as public figures, would consider themselves as victims, or potential victims, of press abuse. The list also included some very ordinary, otherwise anonymous, people thrust into the public spotlight by circumstance, who described themselves simply as victims of press abuse, sometimes rightly: the press is rarely the subtlest messenger of fate.
The advertisements were organised by Hacked Off, a private pressure group for press reform so influential that it had been present when, in the small hours – and in the absence of any press industry representation – political party leaders had agreed the terms of the royal charter. Hacked Off’s celebrity campaign was a calculated and striking contrast to the WAN-IFRA report, which had been produced by very senior independent press observers representing 15,000 newspapers worldwide and constituted an authoritative view from the coalface of international journalism.
In its way, this synthesised the problem: a growing and seemingly unbridgeable chasm between two schools of modern journalism. In broad terms, one has its roots in social philosophy and high moral purpose; the other in producing compelling journalism that can deliver a commercially successful audience. In reality, it is far more nuanced than that, often blurring the traditional lines between the quality press and popular journalism, and between left and right. A common interest in freedom of expression allows them to agree on the principle of high standards, but they fall out over the practice, especially on issues of privacy.
Britain, like much of the world, has become a celebrity culture. Its media, especially – but by no means only – the tabloid media, reflects that. It sells. Often, it sells for the celebrities, too, who live by their fame or notoriety, and spend much of their lives courting the media and profiting by it. But they don’t like the downside, when the press gets critical or questioning, which suddenly is an invasion of privacy. They want to switch the spotlight on and off, as they might in the world of theatre. That is not a game the press wants to play on their terms. So the celebrities see themselves as victims, as the Hacked Off list suggests. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. It is often a personal judgement. The public, too, is fickle, often swapping sides in the debate on a case-by-case basis.
It has become a battleground, but this is often a war of false opposites. Critics of the UK press accuse it of bringing the crisis on itself: phone-hacking was invasive, shameful and illegal. Added to the litany of charges against tabloid journalism of intrusion into privacy; of trial by media; of bribery; and of subterfuge, it was just one media excess too far: end of story. But it is nowhere near as clear-cut as that. In a free society, where the press is performing its proper function, there can be a justifiable role for trial by media, bribery or even intrusion.
Trial by media was essentially the method by which the Daily Mail brought to justice the murderers of Stephen Lawrence – a young black man killed by white thugs – where years of police-work had failed. “Murderer” said the page one headline over pictures of the gang members – challenging them to sue the paper, if it was wrong. They didn’t sue.
A form of bribery allowed the Daily Telegraph access to the un-redacted files that revealed members of Parliament fiddling expenses on an industrial scale, outraging public opinion.
Undercover investigation had been employed legitimately by the News of the World for many years, to expose corruption, especially in sport, and lead the culprits to jail. And of course it was the dogged investigation by The Guardian, rather than the police, that exposed the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.
So these are all legitimate devices in the journalistic toolbox, if used in the right way and on the right occasion. But who decides that – and how? It is often subjective: a value judgement. The same people who condemn tabloid excesses will often be the first to defend The Guardian‘s stand on leaked NSA files. And it is here the industry itself and its critics become polarised.
“Who guards the guardians?” asked Lord Justice Leveson on his first day in his role as the UK’s appointed arbiter. More than a year and two million words of inquiry report later he had not found the answer. He was sure it shouldn’t be the politicians. He was sure the solution should be acceptable to the press and the public. But they can’t agree either.
So where does it go from here? The majority of the UK press has rejected any form of statutory regulation, including the royal charter. It is pressing ahead with its own, radically improved system. It will be more independent, with rigorous external oversight of appointments. No serving editors will be allowed on complaints adjudication panels. It will have an investigative arm to proactively monitor press conduct. It will have power to impose fines of up to £1 million.
It still won’t satisfy Hacked Off’s celebrities and professors. It will cause angst among many in the newspaper industry – and not just in the UK – who will feel the press has surrendered too much. But it will be free of government, self-imposed and will be the toughest system of its kind in the world.
And, as the journalistic Thunderbirds of WAN-IFRA might reasonably ask: quite what will President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and his fellow repressers around the world make of that?
