BackPress battles in the UK
Does Britain's fiercely competitive and aggressive press need adult supervision?
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Once again, Britain is caught in a bout of self-righteous apoplexy, as its politicians and celebrities have resumed their battle with the press. The issue at hand is whether Britain’s fiercely competitive and aggressive press needs adult supervision.
There is much to admire in the gutsiness of the British press—the feisty editorials and columns, the astonishing range of options: from scandal-mongering and muckraking, to hard-hitting investigations where facts are pushed and become part of an argument with a categorical point of view. And there is much that is appalling or irrelevant, such as wanton intrusion into the privacy of people who aren’t public figures, or the images of topless women on tabloids’ Page 3.
Last week, the Daily Mail marked a new low when it described the late Ralph Miliband, father of opposition leader Ed Miliband, as “the man who hated Britain". The senior Miliband came to Britain as a refugee and had criticized English jingoists in a diary entry written as a teenager. Nobody would have cared if his son wasn’t a likely future prime minister. But the Daily Mail got the chattering class excited, and many called the attack anti-semitic, and virtually every senior politician, including Prime Minister David Cameron, criticized the newspaper.
At any other time, the Daily Mail could have ignored the opprobrium. But this is the week the government was to announce plans to regulate the media under a royal charter. Loud noises notwithstanding, this is an unpopular move. Ultimately, the readers like these papers. They keep buying them. Tabloids outsell the broadsheets with their overtly partisan, sometimes lurid, sometimes witty headlines. But there is something to the British sense of fair play and decency: the public hates the tabloids when reporters target the innocent, such as when they hacked into the cellphone of Amanda Dowler—a teenager who was abducted in 2002 and later found murdered—to track her down. Many poured scorn on The News of the World, whose reporters were responsible for that hack. Rupert Murdoch, who owned the tabloid, shut it, hoping it would earn him reprieve.
But it wasn’t enough. Celebrities like actor Hugh Grant, who fronts Hacked Off, the activist group critical of the press, seized the moment to challenge the pervasive culture of intruding on people’s privacy. Meanwhile, one by one, reporters and editors began getting arrested; by one count, some 21 are facing trial over corruption charges—paying officials, including police, for information.
There are two battles under way between the press and the establishment. One, over what people want to read and what the celebrities don’t want published—salacious, gossip-filled news and photographs about the shenanigans of “the great and the good" of the country. Is that in the public interest? Who is to decide? Public interest is what interests the public, a tabloid journalist said, unabashedly, if accurately, to judge Brian Leveson, who inquired into the media’s conduct.
The second battle is the perennial one—between a government that wants to hide and a press that wants to disclose. Think of the current conflict between The Guardian and Britain’s security agencies over mass surveillance. Politicians are also angry, after The Daily Telegraph revealed in 2009 how politicians of all parties were inflating their expenses and charging taxpayers for luxurious home improvements.
That explains the battle lines. But why create a new statutory body to regulate the press? Journalists who paid money to get information from officials broke the laws against bribery. Journalists who were eavesdropping private conversations of people who weren’t public figures violated privacy laws. While under the 1999 Reynolds Privilege, British law permits criticism of public officials, even if defamatory, it is highly restrictive compared with what’s permissible in the US, following the Supreme Court’s 1964 verdict in The New York Times vs Sullivan.) There are laws in Britain to deal with journalistic misconduct.
The unacceptable invasion of the Dowler family’s privacy during their moments of anxiety and grief gave the establishment the opportunity to ride the wave of popular disgust. Fighting back, the press is offering stronger self-regulation, which the government is against. Leveson’s voluminous reports recommended that a statutory body should take responsibility for monitoring an overhauled Press Complaints Commission. The government’s stricter system includes a code of practice, a board independent of newspapers and politicians, and a new arbitration system that would theoretically reduce the cost of litigation. Newspapers are understandably wary of creating a body that would give politicians too much power over the press.
The press seeks a vote daily from its readers. It may have a better understanding of what its readers want. That explains who really hates the press—the people or the establishment. The press isn’t perfect, but nor is any government.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi
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