Seeking truth

A FREE press is essential in a democracy and the right to offend politicians by holding them to account is firmly in the public interest.

The threat to punish newspapers with an expensive Leveson II inquiry after exhaustive judicial hearings in 2011-12, and particularly a Kafkaesque legal forfeit requiring publications to pick up the bills of powerful figures who sue and lose, were so aggressive they could’ve been invented by a totalitarian state.

We don’t often praise this Government yet it is right to finally lift these threats.

A free press must be responsible and the day it is no longer able to speak truth unto power would be a dark day for our democracy.