Media misbehaviour no cause to damn our press
Crucial questions over how to protect the Fourth Estate
ABOUT two-and-a-half decades ago I spent a couple of years working on a British tabloid newspaper – albeit one of its tame offshoots.
Sunday Mirror Magazine, published with the mass circulation Sunday Mirror (about 3.5 million circulation, I recall), offered Hollywood photo shoots, glossy fashion spreads, celebrity features and pages of horoscopes. Familiar fare now, but back then quite novel.
Although relatively junior, I was paid about as much, if not more, than I have been paid since. I moved from the fiefdom of the late and unlamented Robert Maxwell to a quality national daily newspaper called The Independent. My salary took a dive, but my social standing soared. At parties with the legal set, or whomever, people were impressed, interested, respectful.
Returning to newspapers in this country was, then, something of a culture shock: unashamedly local, embodying rather successfully and for the most part in a restrained manner, the hybrid impulses of both ‘‘tabloid’’ and serious, highend journalism, yet almost universally, at some level, castigated in the popular imagination: politicians, car salesmen, journalists . . .
It seemed to me there was a serious disconnect in that imagination as to the watchdog role the press can play in any liberal democracy.
Why this might be so is a meditation for another day, but there has been, in any case, much soul-searching of late over that role here and elsewhere.
This has been prompted in part by the release of Lord Justice Leveson’s report, ‘‘An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press’’, in turn set in train by the furore over phone hacking, corruption and cosiness between various arms of state power in the United Kingdom.
Leveson himself, nodding to the sanctity of press freedom, started the ball rolling.
He quoted John Milton, from 1643: ‘‘Give me the liberty to know and to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’’; he threw in Thomas Jefferson’s ‘‘Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe’’, though not, to my knowledge, ‘‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’’ often, wrongly, attributed to Jefferson.
Amid the growls of indignation, largely from the press, that greeted Leveson’s much awaited report, there was a collective intake of breath and a rush for the dictionaries of quotations to illustrate the centuries-old principles reportedly at stake.
I’d be surprised if George Orwell’s, ‘‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear’’ hasn’t found its way back into print. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald last week, columnist Richard Ackland came close, although rather than leading a charge against the supposed assault on free speech contained in Leveson’s recommendations – arguably a misinterpretation – he was altogether more sarcastic: ‘‘The freedom to tell lies should not be tramped on!’’
Amid all this it would be a mistake to equate the media in this country with that in Britain, just as it would the Leveson report with the work being done by the New Zealand Law Commission.
The commission’s issues paper, ‘‘The News Media Meets ‘ New Media’: Rights, Responsibilities and Regulation in the Digital Age’’, is largely prompted by media convergence in the digital age and the lack of regulatory parity and accountability for new media undertaking ‘‘news-like’’ activities.
Should bloggers and other purveyors of digital information, opinion and ‘‘news’’ enjoy the statutory privileges of traditional media; and should they be subject to the same responsibilities and legal constraints?
These are difficult and meaty questions with which liberal democracies around the world are grappling.
They do indeed concern the media, freedom of expression, and democracy.
And they are, in large part, prompted by public concern at that ubiquitous and seemingly unconstrained digital environment in which little heed is given to such notions as privacy, defamation, hate speech, cyber-bullying and the like.
So how do we protect the crucial traditional freedoms of the Fourth Estate – which incidentally have never been absolute – while bringing new media under an appropriate regulatory regime?
Leveson doesn’t really grapple with that. His inquiry was set up to look at the excesses and illegal activities that had become ingrained in branches of the media in the United Kingdom.
There is no indication that such a culture exists in this country.
That both he and the Law Commission’s issues paper call for a look at the adequacy of current regulatory models is largely coincidental and the two should not be conflated.