21 May 09 | Uncategorized
Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press
By Michael Schudson
Polity Press (£16.99)
This review is a guest post by John Lloyd
Democracy is served in curious ways: and one of these may have been the outburst last week of Michael Martin, the Speaker in the UK’s House of Commons, to a chamber struggling to frame an appropriate response as details of expense claims by members of parliament began to emerge. Ill humour bursting from his ruddy cheeks and avid to discover the source of the leak, Mr Martin was caustic with fellow MPs for “telling the media what they wanted to hear”. It was the voice of privilege challenged — but also of frustrated fury. Who are newspaper reporters to get so high and mighty about expense fiddles? What right have newspaper editors, in thrall to politically interventionist proprietors, to blame politicians for bringing democracy low?
These are good questions, although the Speaker was unwise to raise them in the middle of a moral storm in which the part of Jove the Thunderer is played by the British media. For this time the press — led by the Daily Telegraph, the receiver of the golden details — is right. Unlovable, hypocritical, slavish — it has done its job.
It has uncovered a scandal: and not just a scandal. The amounts of money are trivial and the infractions are mainly minor; but the public exposure of men and women deploying their creativity to wring every possible advantage out of their allowances is deeply unedifying. In some cases, it is shocking. These are the people who make the laws that tell us what to do on pain of fine or imprisonment. One does not have to be a hyperventilating tabloid columnist to expect better behaviour than that which has been revealed.
Revealed, we should remember, by the unlovable press. Michael Schudson, among the best of the academic writers on the media, has seen in the raucousness and hype of newspapers a pearl beyond price: the instinct to create trouble for the establishment, the panjandrums — them. In this collection of essays, the central one — which shares the book’s title — lays out four elements of necessary unlovability. These are: a love of the unplanned and the disruptive; an even greater love of conflict and dissent; a scepticism about the claims of politics; and a willingness to name names and connect the names with crimes and misdemeanors.
Schudson writes: “That is what serves democracy: the irresistible drive of journalists to focus on events, including those that powerful forces cannot anticipate and often cannot manage”. Thus when Matt Drudge began his subsequently richly rewarded career by showing, from his bedroom laptop, that President Bill Clinton was an adulterer; or when bloggers uncovered a speech made in 2002 by Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, which pointed to racist views; or, more recently, when Paul Staines, a British blogger operating under the incendiary nom de guerre of Guido Fawkes, uncovered a sleazy plan on the part of prime ministerial aides to tar leading Conservatives with sex scandals – in all of these cases, the people glorying in their ill-gotten power and tearing down the powerful did well by us.
They fulfilled one of the necessary prerequisites of the free press: that it is free. In the words of Walter Meers ,a veteran AP reporter quoted in another of Schudson’s essays: “There are too many excursions into trivia,too much play for the public opinion polls, too many words about who’s ahead and who’s behind. There’s a reason. That is what people want to know.”
But here is the rub. Schudson is writing of American newspapers. In the much more overheated conditions of the British press — where populist tabloids far outsell upmarket broadsheets and where, in any case, the latter are just as liable to sink their teeth into politicians as the former — there is a larger problem. The expenses revelations come after many years in which, in diverse ways, the media have made of politics and politicians a cross between a spectacle, a reality show and a farce.
Recently playing in the cinemas has been State of Play, an Americanised version of a BBC television series that showed leading politicians to be monumentally corrupt, and In the Loop, a farcical rendering of the spin culture of the New Labour governments. A new, web-based radio station, Sun Talk, launched by the country’s most popular tabloid, fills hour after hour with political denigration. The second most popular but arguably more influential tabloid, the Daily Mail, is organising legal challenges to errant MPs.
This is part of a long struggle between the media and the political class for the allegiance of those whom the first call the audience and the second, the electorate. How far that competition is in our interests is another matter; and one for another day.
This review originally appear on the Financial Times website
15 Mar 93 | Magazine Editions, Volume 22.03 March 1993
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Belarus and Ukraine, the March 1993 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
By Andrew Graham Yooll
Britain has the best press in the world; or, if not the best, near enough the top. Its variety is rich and, even in its tabloid sector, there is a sense of public service as well as much entertainment and good humour. This opinion is offered as a footnote to the publication of Calcutt II (Review of Press Self-Regulation, Sir David Calcutt QC, HMSO, London, January 1993) and to the recent hearings of the House of Commons Heritage Committee.
The British press is being cowed by the leaders and spokesmen of a government operating in a virtual one-party system, a government which has been caught lying on several occasions and whose actions smack of increasing corruption. It is quite natural that, in such circumstances, the only valid existing opposition, the print media, should come under pressure.
Encouragement, from within government, of discussion about the possibility of statutory restrictions on press freedom reflects the fact that the government is not satisfied with its already very substantial powers. Any government official will, of course, deny this; the pressure will be presented as a desire to protect privacy. Much of the press can be accused of turning Tory at election time and the government can be expected to want to keep its support after the results are in. But the search for year-round and unwavering submission is now going too far.
If recent circumstances have even cowed — according to his own statement to the Heritage Committee on 21 January — the ineffably brash Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, the threats must be serious. The Sun is a paper some may not like, but its existence symbolises the rich mix that is British society and the British media — and its outrages have a redeeming cleverness.
The government has used the time honoured practice of ‘threatening the press by report’. The ‘report’ is a mechanism for keeping Oxbridge chums employed and for frightening the general public; it has very little to do with democracy and everything to do with political expediency: its findings can be entirely ignored, or only some of its recommendations implemented. Following — indeed preceding — publication of then latest report by David Calcutt QC, Prime Minister John Major rejected the idea of statutory controls on the press, and a privacy law is unlikely because it is too complex to produce; but, now that the threatening document is actually in print, departments of government can select clauses piecemeal and threaten indefinitely.
The press obviously deserves to be blamed for many of its present problems, principally for wringing its hands and indulging in internecine sniping while the threats were mounting. There was no lack of warnings. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, in its 1987 report Attacks on the Press, published in March 1988, ranked the United Kingdom among ’13 Cases of Concern’ — alongside Bangladesh, Chile, Haiti, Kenya, and others. The CPJ’s warning, which followed the British government’s attempts to restrict the press in the Spycatcher case {Index 2/1988 p3) seems to have gone unheeded by the British press.
Then, at the time of Calcutt’s first report published in June 1990 (Index 7/1990, pp2-3), the Association of British Editors organised a seminar at which the results of a recent MORI poll on public attitudes to the press were discussed. The attitudes, mainly negative, came from just 813 adults, in a country that buys over 10 million newspapers every day. The poll’s findings were invoked by three MPs who proceeded to chastise some of Britain’s leading journalists. Instead of calling the MORI poll rubbish and telling the MPs to take a walk, the editors, in a sad little scene, proceeded to blame one another, — and most of all The Sun — for their poor image. They even damned the Sunday Sport, a comic (not represented at the meeting) which can by no means be considered part of the ‘press’, since it has never pretended to be a supplier of information, news or comment — nor even much sport.
Thus the United Kingdom arrived at 1992, the ‘Annus Horribilis‘, and another MORI poll, this time entitled Public Attitudes to the Press, almost as negative as the first, and based on a sample of 1,061 adults.
And now there is a bill introduced by Clive Soley MP, a Labour sepoy for the Conservative government, which seeks to rule on accuracy in the press in the name of protecting its freedom. Soley’s ‘Freedom and Responsibility of the Press’ bill had its second reading on 29 January. Mr Soley is a man of good intentions whose dog’s dinner of a draft will be used by government, any government, to enact those sections which best serve its own convenience. The one thing the press does not need is protection by laws. Press laws are a recourse of dictators.
The only proposal that could be salvaged for the present times, the ‘Right to Know’ bill, submitted by Mark Fisher MP, Labour, is a noble, catch-all freedom of information bill packed with good intentions and therefore worthy, but not worth hoping for. Fisher’s bill got its second reading on 19 February. (Index on Censorship supports it.)
The press should be subject only to the laws of the land; it has no need of special regulation. Journalists are no different from ordinary citizens, do not claim to be, and should not be considered so.
With hindsight, it is clear that the political, legal and bureaucratic Establishment cares not a whit what the press uncovers under the sheets of Charles Windsor or Diana Spencer, or whether Sarah Ferguson is pear- or plum-shaped.
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The fact that the First Family’s privacy is invoked is largely to satisfy the yappers on the Tory back-benches’ and a few pseudo-monarchists in Her Majesty’s Permanent Opposition. But by appearing to plan to close the bedroom doors of the Royal Family, access to information about elected members of government, and any attempt to hold them accountable, is firmly barred. And therein lies the substantial cause and motive force of the Calcutt reports.
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If anything is wrong with Britain it is the one-party system that has overtaken the country since 1979. The press is one of the best things left in Britain when all about it is in decline. More important, it is the only democratic opposition voice remaining. If anything, the press should be even more intrusive into the affairs of a First Family which, by arrangement with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in July 1990, upped its bill to the UK taxpayer to £7.9 million per annum.
Of course, there will be casualties caused by an intrusive press, victims not only of The Sun or one of the other tabloids, but also of the broadsheets. The Press Council’s successor body, the Press Complaints Commission, was set up in 1991 to ensure that the press would be concerned about tidying itself up; its function must be strengthened but no other imposition should be necessary.
There can be little to be proud of in old stone piles which nobody can live in, or in government by anachronism. But the press in Britain is something the British can, and should, still be proud of. The variety to be found in the dottiness of Peregrine Worsthorne (Sunday Telegraph) or Julie Burchill (Mail on Sunday), the genius of Hugo Young (Guardian) or Neil Ascherson (Independent on Sunday), the wit of Bernard Levin and Matthew Parris (Times), and the fruity invective of Keith Waterhouse (Mail), as well as in the stimulating contributions of many, many others, including the entertaining outrages of Kelvin MacKenzie’s staff (Sun), are part of the fabric of a society that is still admired and envied all over the world — for a few things. To weaken any part of the press will be a serious loss.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]The winter 2017 Index on Censorship magazine explores 1968 – the year the world took to the streets – to discover whether our rights to protest are endangered today.
With: Ariel Dorfman, Anuradha Roy, Micah White[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”96747″ img_size=”medium”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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15 Feb 81 | Magazine Editions, Volume 10.02 February 1981
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UNESCO’s threat to press freedom. the February 1981 issue of Index on Censorship magazine
By Hugh Lunghi
Over thirty years ago, in 1946, the United Nations solemnly resolved that ‘freedom of information is a fundamental human right and the touchstone of all the freedoms’. The newborn UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation promised ‘to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image’.
Last November the 154 UNESCO member states enjoined the Organisation to define and create a ‘new world information and communications order’. There are in the world barely a score of states where the press can be considered free. Paradoxically, governments with a virtual monopoly over information in their countries have complained most loudly of the developed nations’ monopoly of world information, demanding a new ‘order’.
Two issues have become, deliberately it seems, intermingled: first, the imbalance between developed and developing countries’ communications resources, symbolised by the ‘Big Four’ news agencies; secondly, whether journalists should be free to report without regulation or whether states should instead use the media for various national purposes.
At the 1970 and 1972 UNESCO conferences Soviet delegates proposed telling governments to ‘forbid’ use of the media for propaganda purposes on behalf of war, racialism and hatred among nations, leaving governments to decide what constituted such propaganda. The resolutions sought to justify the closing down of news sources, especially non-communist radios, unpalatable to Soviet bloc countries. After years of argument a modified resolution was presented to the 1976 UNESCO conference in Nairobi.
The resolution contained a great deal about the ‘ duties’ of the mass media, nothing about the free flow of information within nations. The International Press Institute, with its long record of supporting journalists in exposing racism, apartheid and war propaganda, warned that the ostensibly laudable objectives could be used to sanction controls on the media detrimental to the free flow of information. UNESCO had turned its attention to devising rules which could limit that freedom. To meet such criticism UNESCO set up, in 1977, a Commission under former Irish Foreign Minister Sean MacBride, a Nobel and Lenin Prizewinner.
In 1976 a Non-aligned Countries’ summit conference in Colombo had addressed itself to the North-South imbalance in communications resources. The imbalance and the Third World resentment was recognised by journalists, news agencies and governments in the developed world. Practical help in training, equipment and funds amounting to several million pounds worth, have been extended to Third World journalists.
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Governments and their UNESCO officials are not satisfied to leave practical help and responsibility for fair and accurate reporting in the hands of journalists and editors.
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Indeed UNESCO has greatly reduced its practical help to third world media. UNESCO debates have shown that some governments simply believe that people should be told only things about which they ought to care. Other governments simply do not like any reporting at all of ‘corruption, coups and calamities’, as was demonstrated so vividly during the latest UNESCO conference by the arrest of a French news agency man in Zambia for reporting, accurately as it proved, the threatened coup against President Kaunda’s government.
The crucial debate between the concept of a free press and the press as a tool of government
will be formally resumed by UNESCO. This number of Index on Censorship is largely devoted to the document on which the debate is based – the report of the MacBride Commission. It is criticised by Frank Barber, whose work as foreign correspondent for the liberal daily News Chronicle and others, including the BBC, embraced many Third World countries.The other major article on the subject is by Raphael Mergui, a Moroccan journalist writing for Jeune Afrique. We hope readers, whatever their views, will respond.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”What price protest?”][vc_column_text]The winter 2017 Index on Censorship magazine explores 1968 – the year the world took to the streets – to discover whether our rights to protest are endangered today.
With: Ariel Dorfman, Anuradha Roy, Micah White[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”96747″ img_size=”medium”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
Subscription options from £18 or just £1.49 in the App Store for a digital issue.
Every subscriber helps support Index on Censorship’s projects around the world.
SUBSCRIBE NOW[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
