Is gutter journalism the price of a free press?

Great Debates
1

In the UK parliament have just agreed to expand regulation of the press, following recent scandals such as phone hacking at the News of the World.

Many journalists, particularly those working for the tabloid end of the market, are outraged and view this regulation as something more suited to a tin-pot dictatorship than a free democracy.

Newspaper editors point to recent investigations into MPs’ expenses or the murder of Steven Lawrence and other public wrong-doing as evidence that a free and totally unregulated press is essential.

But others will argue that these noble ideals of a crusading press shining a light into the darker recesses of public life have been ruined by a steady stream of grubby sensationalism and a cavalier approach to the truth.

The current press regulator is voluntary and is widely seen as toothless, which gives “ordinary” people very little redress if they are stitched-up by the tabloids.

My view is that I hate the idea of press regulation, but I put a large part of the blame onto the newspapers themselves: by constantly trawling the depths of taste in pursuit of cheap headlines they’ve undone the good work they do in speaking truth to power.

As an aside I have reasonably close experience of this… a senior manager at our main customer (who worked in our office) was “exposed” as having an affair with a member of his team. It was claimed that he’d promoted her from a £40k/year job to a £170k consultant post, and that they’d used public expenses funds to go on holiday etc.

This expose was given a full page spread in the Daily Mail and both his and her reputations were totally turned over: they’d chosen the worst photos possible and some of the reader comments were awful.

It turned out that it was all technically above board… perhaps not very professional but nothing illegal. But he was still asked to resign as he’d lost all respect from his team, and we’re a niche industry so everyone who might hire him knows the details.

Once an inquiry had exonerated him the report was pulled from the Daily Mail website, and a small apology was issued, but it’s still available at many news aggregation sites if you google his name.

So is the price of a free press that we also have gutter journalism, or if newspapers cannot regulate their own excesses should the state do the job for them?

2

I loathe large parts of the UK press, but am unsure what to do about it. (For US readers, Fox News is a beacon of sober-thinking truth and in-depth analysis compared to the Daily Mail or The Sun).

Much of the behaviour that sparked Leveson is illegal anyway, so I’m not sure there needs to be more on that front, and I’m generally uncomfortable with restricting press freedoms. It’s just a bit dispiriting what they do with that freedom, and that it is a commercially viable.

One thing I think might be a good idea, is that all apologies, retractions and fact corrections should be printed on the same page, in the same font as the offending stories.

3

I sympathize with the need to get rid of blatantly false, slanted, or misleading news. The problem is trusting the government (or anybody) with getting rid of it. In a nation with a good government, having a restricted press is fine. You can trust the press to be as unbiased and factual as one would hope. It’s when the government starts to get corrupt that worries come in. That’s when you need unregulated news because the regulated one will hide the corruption – and it will be hard to judge what’s real and what’s not.

Of course, then there’s the question about whether or not allowing trash news undermines this quality to begin with. If there’s a huge amount of noise, will people even notice that suddenly the fringe news is the real stuff and the mainstream stuff is fake? Like, if there suddenly was some horrible liberal agenda to destroy the nation and put King Obama on the throne and Fox was the legitimate go to source would it be just as useless if Fox wasn’t allowed to exist at all in favor of PBS News (obviously this is a US example)? Again, though, only having PBS News may result in more informed people with less warped world views, which would be a great boon when the government isn’t incredibly corrupt.

In the end, I prefer to side with the unregulated news because at least there’s a chance the alarms will sound early enough for change to happen, but I can see either perspective as having merit.

4

There’s ‘Free’ and there’s ‘irresponsible’. There’s ‘lively political debate’ and ‘crude theats and blackmail.’

The Murdoch, the Barclay and whoever owns the Daily Mail cross so many lines it’s not even funny. The mass campaign of illegal wiretapping, the harrassment of anyone they don’t like, the outright political blackmail and intimidation and the bare-faced lies told in pursuit of a right wing political agenda means they have bought this upon themselves.

IMHO the large media groups should be broken up. no one should control more than one media outlet.

These press laws are extremely mild. All they say is ‘If you lie you apologise as prominently as the lie and you pay up.’ It replaces an Independent Press Complaints Commission that was purely the creature of the same offending press with one they don’t control.

The only difference is it’s now more independent and allows victims an affordable form of redress when in the past there was none unless you were rich. These vermin stop tapping phones, these people stop harassing and persecuting people, these people stop threatening and blackmailing politicians, these people stop telling outright lies (all things they were not meant to do anyway but were never held to account by their pet poodle regulator) then the Royal Charter has no effect on them.

It does not enable politicians to kill stories, it does not stop investigative journalism.

And if they don’t want to sign up they don’t have to. If they don’t sign up and continue doing the illegal activities they have been doing then they will face ‘exemplary’ damages.

And quite right to.

5

Well if they don’t check their facts and use illegal means to get a scoop then fuck them. The free press like free speech itself has limitations.

6

Governments often press into service the media to do their propaganda and change the focus of the people towards its overall goals. When the media looks at the government, it often doesn’t like the treatment it gets because its one of the only ways the public finds out about the stupid and or illegal stuff its elected representatives are up to. Stuff like Phone tapping should be illegal no matter if its the press or the government or anyone else, and I think that should indeed be stopped. But regulating the press in general would do two things. It would make the press far less useful to the government in both its propaganda’s believability if its nothing but the governments stooge already (Ahem… Fox news usually) and it will also have one less check against its corruption: Truth and public shame.

The very notion that the UK would want to do this should not be taken lightly by the public.

As an aside, gutter journalism would exist no matter the free press. People love to make scandals out of the weakest things just to sell the paper and I feel bad for the man in your example.

7

Yes - that’s what the Charter is saying should happen. And it is one of the points the Murdoch papers, the Telegraph and the Mail object to. They also object to paying fines and they object to not having a veto over the Complaints Commission membership.

In other words what they want is to keep the old system that allowed them to do whatever they like without any consequences.

8

I wonder if disallowing news organizations from making profits would help at all. Then there’s no real appeal in catering to an audience and feeding them what they want to hear. The question is how they get funding. Donations doesn’t seem like a great idea, but subsidizing it bears the same problems as just having a government news organization – they can withhold funding to those they don’t like. Granted, the fringe organizations would still be allowed to continue running if they found another non-profit generating way to stay afloat in this scenario, I guess.

9

The proposal themselves are very clumsy, and even try to bring online news sources (incl. blogs) under the remit of the regulations.

The idea is that any organisations who don’t sign up would be hammered by “exemplary damages” and court costs if they are successfully sued for libel. But if you’ve signed up to regulation you only get reasonable costs awarded.

There’s a gaping hole for websites such as Guido Fawkes which is hosted off-shore. The Guardian and the Independent are likely (IMO) to go mostly online in the next couple of years, which opens up a different landscape for regulation.

10

If I understand the proposals correctly the exemplary damages only are applied during (civil) libel cases, in which case the proposals do nothing to stop the illegal wiretapping and hacking that we have seen. Which brings me on to my point: nobody has yet to explain why when the law on wiretapping and phone hacking is as clear as day we need an additional body supposedly designed to prevent this, nor how it is going to be any more effective than the Police. Further, nobody has yet to explain why giving British libel courts the ability to apply even more punitive punishments to news organizations (and even blogs!), given the mess that is British libel law, is a good thing.

11

It explicitly excludes blogs through the contributor number cut-off. The Huffington Post isn’t a blog no matter what they say. And the offshore ‘loophole’ has not been tested in law and won’t help the organisations who have caused this mess.

12

Aren’t the press scandals in the UK the result of crimes? You know, stuff that already was illegal, that doesn’t need further regulation? Sounds like an excuse for the government to re-interpret that secret constitution y’all have and crack down on their critics.

13

Because this is another chance for the Press to independently regulate itself. As the same press had bribbed, corrupted and cowed the legal and political processes it did not matter one whit that these things were ‘illegal’.

The police saw nothing, the crown prosecution service saw nothing, the politicians saw nothing and the voices of any poor person caught were buried under the weight of legal costs because the industry self-regulation also did nothing.

Nothing worked. This reform allows poeple to call the industry on their shit for no cost and to an independent regulator not controlled by the industry or by politicians. But a regulator that now has pooeple watching that it does a proper job. There is no free speech issue here. That is all just a self-interested smokescreen. This is purely an issue of compelling the industry to effectively self-regulate according to a code of conduct the industry will (again) draw up or face effective sanctions imposed not by politicians but by the independent regulator.

Punitive punishments are needed to get these people to stop abusing free speech.

14

That is completely wrong. The illegality was not recognised and both the law and politicians were too intimidated to do anything. It took a both the determined investigation of another newspaper (that the Crown Prosecution Service looked at and dismissed) and a completely fortuitious lucky break when it emerged that a child murder victim’s phone was hacked for the public outrage to get so loud even the government was forced to act.

This is independent regulation with no mechanism for political interference. Do not fall for the hand-waving of the right-wing media conglomerates.

15

They can report what they like. They do, however, need to be responsible and accountable.

That’s all that’s being asked.

What happened in the recent past is that the press became too powerful and cowered both the police and the political class. This inc. in 2003 admitting breaking the law in front of a Parliamentary Committee and absolutely no one doing anything about it.

Absolutely and fundamentaly unacceptable.

“We have paid the police”

16

Quite. This is an industry that openly intimidated political enemies by literally saying ‘we’ll come after you and your family’. An industry that would just tell lies about people safe in the knowledge that they had unlimited legal resources.

This is an industry literally able to accuse people of murdering their own child with complete impunity.

17

So you’re saying the law and the politicians didn’t do anything about the crimes so the solution is to further regulate the press? Yeah, right.

18

If the Police could be corrupted by the press, why can’t this new regulator? It seems the better response would be to actually root corruption out of the Police and prevent the type of cozy relationships between journalists and senior figures in the Police that led to the Police turning a blind eye, no?

19

Yes, if by ‘regulate’ you mean ‘set up a self-regulation system independent of the press and politicians to hold the press accountable to the code of conduct they draw up themselves’. Damn right.

20

So you don’t think the politicians and the legal authorities should start enforcing the law, and just letting the press self regulate will fix the problem? In other words, no change from the current system except for some window dressing.