21 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
This article first appeared in the Guardian
Two cheers for Ed Miliband. In calling for an independent review of the way newspapers behave he is taking a big political risk, opening the door to concerted hostility from media magnates. He also happens to be right on the principle that freedom of expression and holding truth to power are not synonymous with dodgy journalistic practice. He might deserve a third cheer if it were not for the brazen opportunism he and his party are showing by taking on Rupert Murdoch only now that the love is lost.
Before the caveats and the cavilling, credit should be given where it is due. Miliband is seeking to take on the good work carried out two years ago by the cross-party Commons select committee on culture, media and sport. When the MPs issued their report they correctly identified and separated out three related strands: the need for libel reform; issues of privacy; and press standards.
Their inquiry looked at the media in the round, but also at some egregious cases of abuse. This included the hounding of Gerry and Kate McCann, and the bugging of telephones of politicians and celebrities by the News of the World – which News Corporation is only now, drip by drip, beginning to admit.
The MPs made a point that should be blindingly obvious to the media profession – that legitimate investigation is vital to keeping checks on the powerful, but that intrusion into people’s lives, particularly through subterfuge, is not.
Seen from one level, the British media are forced to operate under considerable constraint. Until now England and Wales have been global pariahs, sporting some of the most restrictive libel laws in the developed world. It is a tribute to all political parties, but mostly the coalition, that the Libel Reform Campaign led by Index on Censorship and its partners has produced draft legislation that goes some way to removing the chill on free expression and investigative journalism. Sure, the bill is not perfect, but the great should not be the enemy of the good. After all, this is the first serious attempt in 70 years to tackle the problem.
Privacy is the thorniest problem. Hypocrisy should be exposed. What about the celebrity who parades their private life in choreographed photoshoots for glossy magazines but then wishes to hide from public view when things go awry? That is a moot point. Assuming you are a public figure but you make no pronouncements on lifestyles or ethics and you do not parade your life in the glare of the cameras, surely you are entitled to privacy? You are, thanks to the Human Rights Act. But as ever, our suspicious judges are interpreting the legislation in a manner hostile to a free media.
Ranged against the long lens is the epidemic of the super-injunction. The master of the rolls (the second most senior judge in England and Wales) is due to report on an issue that serves as a perfect example of rich man’s justice. The very idea that the media should be gagged and that the public is prevented from knowing that such an order exists is more in keeping with a dictatorship.
This brings us back to media standards. One of the biggest hindrances to strong investigation is cost. Editors and the bean counters who oversee them are reluctant to invest in long-term projects that might prove fruitless. The democratic deficit in the demise of investigative journalism is immense. But gossip, spleen and prurience are no substitute, and no remedy for budget cuts and falling sales.
As for dodgy practice, this is where taste meets the law meets expediency. Chequebook journalism? Secret recordings? Fine, one might think, if properly authorised and if in the public interest. Where should the line be drawn?
To take a few famous recent examples: the Telegraph’s use of young and attractive female reporters to trap Vince Cable into making indiscreet remarks about Murdoch and other public figures (dubious but compelling); the same publisher’s use of a stolen computer disc to reveal MPs’ expenses (now seen as triggering a clear-out of parliamentary sleaze); or the Guardian’s publication of unauthorised US state department data, otherwise known as the WikiLeaks affair or Cablegate. Everyone has their own view about the ethics behind these incidents and more.
The News of the World phone-hacking scandal is of a different order. Allegations of illegal practices are being investigated. Its pond might be considerably murkier, but nobody’s is entirely free of weed. Nobody has come out of the Screws affair well – least of all the police or the Press Complaints Commission. The commission has still to apologise for, or learn from, its supine approach to the affair. As the last hope for self-regulation, for keeping politicians and meddling judges away from the Fourth Estate, the PCC is under scrutiny as never before.
The commission gives frequent assurances that it really doesn’t work as a shop steward for the industry but as a protector of free speech and of fairness, accuracy and standards. Its appointment of three senior and respected figures to its board bodes well, but there is a long way to go.
Miliband, in his interview in the Guardian, said he had no grand plan for a review into print media – while making clear it should be fully independent of government “and from those involved in the day to day running of newspapers”. He added: “I think that would help the industry. There has to be a sense that the future is not going to be like that past. Wider lessons have to be learned.”
He is entirely correct but selective in drawing his conclusions. For more than a decade New Labour was slavish to the Murdoch empire, and initially too to the Daily Mail and Associated Newspapers. Tony Blair did everything – including flying around the world to an Australian island – to ingratiate himself with Rupert Murdoch. It was only after the empire had dumped Gordon Brown in favour of David Cameron that Labour ministers such as Peter Mandelson began to bleat about media cross-ownership and assorted injustices.
Would Miliband now be making these same noises if he had not been left out in the cold by the omnipotent Antipodean? Of course not, but that does not make him wrong. Free speech is not threatened by good practice. It is defended.
20 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
This article was published on Comment is Free
Police warnings that anyone attempting to burn a union flag during the royal wedding next week will be arrested are part of a worrying drift towards a legally sanctioned fetishisation of symbols both religious and secular in Britain. The warning came following an application by the far-right Islamist group Muslims Against Crusades (an offshoot of the outlawed al-Muhajiroun) to protest near Westminster Abbey on 29 April.
Earlier this week, Andrew Ryan, an English Defence league member with a history of public order offences, including racial chanting, was sentenced to 70 days in prison for burning a Qu’ran (he also received a 30-day sentence, to be served concurrently, for stealing the book from a local library).
The symbolic burning of books is wrong. The imprisonment of English Defence League member Andrew Ryan for burning a copy of the Qur’an is wrong. These two sentences are not contradictory.
In January, Ryan stole a Qur’an from a Carlisle library (that is definitely wrong, by the way), took it to Carlisle town hall and set fire to it with a cigarette lighter, while shouting derogatory slogans about Islam. It was, district judge Gerald Chalk commented when sentencing Ryan, “an act of theatrical bigotry”.
This is true: but does it amount to racially aggravated harassment, for which Ryan was convicted?
One could claim so if Ryan had taken his one-man protest to a local mosque, or Islamic cultural centre, or actively sought Muslims in the area. But he went to the town hall. So it’s difficult to see who exactly he was harassing. “Harassment” suggests targeted action.
He could, perhaps, have been convicted instead under section 5 of the Public Order Act, which is the law that did for al-Muhajiroun member Emdadur Choudhury, fined £50 for burning poppies on Armistice Day. That law itself is deeply insidious in its vagueness, and has been used several times in the arrest of street preachers putting forward conservative Christian views on homosexuality.
It’s worth mentioning Choudhury’s paltry fine, because that is certainly what Ryan’s supporters in the English Defence League will do. Why is it that one act of theatrical bigotry merits a fine, and another a 70-day jail sentence? Why does the desecration of a symbol of national mourning merit less punishment than the desecration of a religious text? While judges’ decisions are independent, this will only add to the EDL and its supporters notion that there really is “one law for them … “.
The English Defence League will be keen to portray Andrew Ryan as a martyr. They now have their very own shahid, persecuted for his beliefs by the deadly combination of Islamists and an establishment all too keen to capitulate.
So here, then, we have a practical argument against both these convictions: when we privilege certain types of speech, we create grievance. When we privilege in law certain ideas, we create resentment against people who hold those ideas. We see this in every impotent rage against “political correctness”; every indignant howl on the protection of religion and believers. The social cohesion argument that underpins so many government and police curbs on free expression does not really seem to be working.
Choudhury and Ryan were both convicted for actions that some might find upsetting. Their convictions legitimise and deepen the culture of taking offence that will not be resolved unless we begin to accept that free speech is not always easy to defend, but vital if this not to become an island of seething, hidden resentments masquerading as a coherent nation. More jaw-jaw, less law-law?
11 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has some interesting thoughts on free expression in this morning’s paper.
Inspired by a discussion at Oxford Literary Festival with Index chief executive John Kampfner, Times writer David Aaronovitch and Guido Fawkes blogger Paul Staines, Albhai-Brown questions whether free speech should be seen as an absolute right.
She starts well enough:
Too many states use brute force to quell and gag their people. In our western democracies, governments withhold information, stop legitimate protest, control speech and even thought. All wrong, must be resisted, agreed.
And then comes the “but” that will forever plague arguments for and about restrictions on speech:
Most of us, though, will not speak with one voice on the burning of the Koran by Sion Owens, a BNP candidate for the Welsh assembly. And what about the website that sells cheeky Jihadi, al-Qa’ida baby T-shirts and maternity clothes? Tory MP Robert Halfon is apoplectic and wants the site closed down. Are you with or against him? Do we teach children that words can wound or that their entitlement to speak trumps everything else?
That last sentence is a false dichotomy. Words are powerful: words are important. Otherwise there would be little point in defending free expression. As soon as one feels comfortable placing proscriptions on speech, one leads inevitably to a position where certain speech is favoured. Moreover, there is no contradiction between free speech being a right and free speech being used responsibly.
We continue:
Some in the real world, too, are enviable absolutists who believe the slightest tremor of concern is a concession and invitation to authoritarianism. Their God is Voltaire, who decreed that even when one hates what is being said by somebody, one must “fight to the death” for the right of that person to hold forth.
Voltaire never said that. It comes from a 1906 book entitled “Friends of Voltaire”. Minor point, but something one should know if you’re writing about free expression. But lets go on.
We come to Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney, banned for two matches for swearing at a Sky Sports camera (exacts words “What? Fucking what? What? Fucking Hell!”) after scoring a hat trick against West Ham.
The FA is deciding what to do with Wayne Rooney, who swore horridly on TV. The footballer – who has apologised – must be crying into his champagne. I hope he gets his comeuppance.
See? He’s rich, therefore all other arguments about his rights and liberties are obscured.
Rooney had just scored a hat trick. As The Streets’ Mike Skinner once put it, “geezers need excitement”. Moreover, Rooney’s job is not to be presentable on TV, or (shudder) to be a “role model”. His job is to score goals for Manchester United, and he was having a very, very good day at the office.
Next up:
In 1919, the US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decreed that the only limits to freedom of speech were words that activate immediate danger, like a man shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. But what about when individuals set out calculatedly to provoke unrest and anger, which then happens? Like the burning of the Koran. Of course the offended should not rage and die for it – but that was the intention. The inciters are surely as culpable as the man in the theatre. They raise hatred, which eventually leads to violence.
The “eventually” is key here. Who is responsible for the incitement that lead to the murders of UN workers in Afghanistan? The Floridan pastors who burned the holy book? Or the imams who preached to the faithful about this insult to Islam? Alibhai-Brown does not seem to count these as the inciters. But they were the ones with the power to incite the mob in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Nearly finished:
Another thing to consider is that most of us are biased. We want some words to be free, and others not. Will the Koran burner be backed by libertarians, atheists and Muslim bashers? Or will he face the same opprobrium as those Muslims who burnt Salman Rushdie’s book? I await Fay Weldon and Ian McEwan’s beautifully expressed outrage
Two problems here: Earlier we were asked to criticise absolutists. Now we must condemn relativism.
More insidiously, there is the implication that Fay Weldon and Ian McEwan are being hypocritical and possibly even Islamophobic. But Weldon and McEwan and others, in their stand in support of Rushdie, did not attack the right of Muslims to protest against the Satanic Verses, or even to burn it. They defended a fellow novelist against a death sentence from a foreign tyrant. Not the same thing, is it?
10 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
