Politicians must support rather than suppress press freedom
Comment John Mclellan
Tomorrow, MPS will vote on some of the most drastic curbs on press freedom the UK has known, potentially ushering in an era where news publishers can be punished in the courts for having the temerity to reject any notion of political interference in what they do.
That is essentially the effect of amendments to the Data Protection Bill, by which any publication not part of a state-sanctioned regulation system will have to pay all costs in a trial involving allegations of data protection breaches, win or lose.
Another amendment by defeated Labour leader Ed Miliband would establish a wide-ranging public inquiry into the use of data by all media companies, a cack-handed way of reigniting the Leveson Inquiry.
Media companies battling with the digital monopolies being established by Google and Facebook would welcome a probe into the ways tech giants handle personal information, but Mr Miliband’s intervention aims to find ways of further shackling the established free press, not helping it.
All this comes when the UK has slipped further down the World Press Freedom Index to 40th, behind most of Western Europe and the biggest Commonwealth countries. But the UK also comes out poorly in a European Broadcast Union (EBU) survey of media trustworthiness, with a score of -51 for the written press compared to the best score of +44 for the Netherlands. It should be no surprise that the UK press should be held in low regard after the battering it has taken since the phone hacking scandal first broke, and when the message is reinforced by political claims that further press controls are needed.
But since the EBU survey samples were taken in 2016, the system of press selfregulation has continued to evolve, most notably with the acceptance last week of compulsory arbitration by the national members of the Independent Press Standards Organisation.
British people have the poorest opinion of the media of all countries in the EBU survey, but those that come out well on trustworthiness are also at the top of the Press Freedom league, with Holland in the top five for both.
For too many politicians, the answer to a lack of trust in the media is more law when it appears that trust and freedom are not unrelated. Tomorrow, politicians get the chance to show if they really understand press freedom or pay lip service to it. ● Dame Frances Cairncross will be at Glasgow Caledonian University this Thursday for discussions with Scottish publishers and journalists about her review of the sustainability of the press. ● This is the last Tuesday media column, but media issues will feature regularly in my new Saturday slot in the main news section, the first appearing this weekend. John Mclellan is director of the Scottish Newspaper Society and a City of Edinburgh Conservative councillor.