The Press: an end to bullying and intrusion?

Photo courtesy of The Daily Telegraph website

To have read some reports of the newly-sealed Royal Charter you would think that politicians are thinly disguised fascists intent on muzzling a gloriously independent Press that is the envy of the world.  The full power of the Press has been manifest in their constant lobbying ever since the publication of the Leveson Report.  We forget that newspaper editors are intimates with, if not friends of, our top politicians; that journalists are the people interviewed on television and radio as experts in their field; and that they frequently count journalists on other newspapers as their friends.  None of this is intrinsically wrong, but it means that we are not dealing here with a group of highminded crusaders issuing informed opinions from their ivory towers, but highly influential opinion-formers with wide-ranging power.  

Just how low-minded some journalists can be has emerged with startling force in the court proceedings involving Rebekah Brooks and her colleagues on the former News of the World.  I was reminded of a dinner-party I was at, some thirty years ago, where there were a number of journalists present from the more eminent broadsheets.  When I suggested that a particular story being run by one of their employers was inaccurate (I can't now remember what it was) one of the hacks laughed and said "Journalism's not about the truth, Antony - it's about selling papers".  Much mirth from his colleagues, but I thought it wrong then and I still think it wrong.  Truthful journalism and selling newspapers are not mutually exclusive.  Nor, for the purposes of truthful journalism, do you need to resort to phone-hacking or payments to public officials for information.  

The Independent, more balanced in its views than some of its better-selling rivals, published the full text of the Royal Charter the other day, and I have been going through it with some care.  I had thought that the Charter set out the precise terms of a new regulatory body.  It does not.  Its main purpose is to establishment a Recognition Panel, which will have the function of recognising a new self-regulatory body.  The Charter then goes on to specify the requirements for the members of the Board of that body.  It should not include serving editors, for example, and a majority of the members must be independent of the Press.  In hearing complaints, the Board must balance the interests of freedom of speech against the interests of individuals.  They must act fairly and impartially.

In none of this - nor indeed in any of the other provisions of the Charter - do I discern the attack on press freedom that is heralded by some of the more alarmist journals.  There has been a serious attempt to distort and discredit efforts to implement the recommendations of Mr Justice Leveson with their full rigour - efforts that have redounded less to the credit of our Prime Minister than to the Hacked Off group of individuals who have been the victims of blatant bullying and intrusion.  

One of the objections of the Press to the Leveson Report was that the main abuses established were already breaches of the law.  Whether that is the case or not, the law was either out of reach of many persons affected or, in other instances, lacked teeth.  Hopefully the Charter is the start of a process that will see some rebalancing in favour of the individual, against a group of newspaper-sellers more powerful than we realise.  

Antony Mair