Tweet of the Day

We all know why Hugh Grant is so keen on curbing the freedom of the press. He's been the main figurehead for Hacked Off's campaign and was grabbing some more exposure reviewing papers on The Andrew Marr Show on the more than sympathetic to the cause BBC, when @gabrielmilland tweeted:

"Hugh Grant doing the papers on #Marr. A bit like King Herod reviewing prams."

 

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First They Came For The Press...

First they came for the press and I didn't speak out because I read all my news on the Internet. Then they came for the Internet... The call for press regulation will inevitably lead to internet regulation.

When trawling through my Facebook and Twitter feeds, I found it interesting how many people comment in support of state backed regulation of the press but against any kind of state mandated monitoring, let alone regulation, of the Internet.

Tom Watson and Stephen Fry are two big names who hold these views. They would argue that the press is dominated by over-mighty "barons" who have a disproportionate influence on content, while the Internet is a freely associating mass of individuals. They may have a point.

Perhaps its the freedom of the Internet and the social media it supports that has led to its exponential growth in popularity in recent years. Meanwhile, the dead tree press has declined, slowly at first but then more rapidly. The increasingly desperate search for readers led to the section of the press that wanted to continue to be described as "popular" to reach out to an ever descending common denominator; an audience that demanded salacious gossip, exposés of celebs as well as the high and mighty. Like a drug, the more they supplied the more their audience wanted. Eventually, the only way to supply this kind of content in ever vaster quantities was to use underhand, even criminal tactics. Not, always, to unearth wrong doing in the public interest, but to satisfy the salacious interests of a hooked public.

The press has been around for hundreds of years. Eventually, the print press technology became accessible to the masses and a myriad of pamphlets and papers spewed forth into the world. Ideas spread and progress was made. Eventually, individuals honed the art of journalism and sold more papers than other publishers. They grew to became influential and powerful within their industry and, as Leveson has illustrated, in pubic life too. Then, once an alternative medium came into the picture providing free content and access to information at a click of a button, the decline set in.

The Internet, however, is relatively new. Like a new Universe, not long after the big bang, billions of particles are flying around unchecked and unrestricted by systems or even gravity. 500 million Twitter users are generating billions of tweets. Nothing seems to control or influence them. Or does it?

The formation of the Universe eventually saw free particles start to coalesce and form stars that then attracted satellites to form systems that led to general order. We're already seeing something similar occurring on Twitter. And perhaps this goes some way to explaining the position of Messrs Watson and Fry. Because they are stars in the Twitterverse. Stephen Fry, for example, has amassed 5.1 million followers. He is highly influential. A Twitter baron, you might say. One tweet from him reaches far more people than an MP's speech in the House of Commons and more than an article written in most national newspapers. You see, they're happy to see the press regulated by politicians but not so keen on anything similar for themselves.

Perhaps they understand such regulation will only hasten the death of the dead tree press. Their hatred for sections of the press that have not been supportive of their brand of politics leads them to yearn for a day when we are rid of the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his Times, Sun and News of the World (well, one down...). This is humorously illustrated in Fry and Laurie's sketch back in mid-90s when The Sun was still heavily associated with support for Margaret Thatcher and the Tories (and before it started its 13 years of support for Labour during which time we heard NOTHING about the evils Murdoch from the left). But they are short sighted.



Once the traditional press is regulated and subservient to politicians, it'll be only a matter of time before it dies completely. Either through circulation collapse or suicide as publishers move on. But, it will only be the medium the dies. The content would have long since migrated onto the Internet. Once a successful business model is developed for Internet based publishing there's no stopping a wholesale move. The best writers, investigative journalists, commentators will coalesce around the web publications with the widest audiences.

A similar order that developed for the press will come to the Internet. And then, once they've lost their "most influential" statuses, you can rest assured the likes of Fry and Watson will be calling for it to be controlled and tamed.

If you want to see the press regulated more strictly than now, independently of the press barons and their editors, with improved and speedy redress for those wronged, but without recourse to statutory controls that would endanger press freedom, sign this petition:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/42582 (Unlike the Hacked-off petition pushing for statutory regulation, you can only sign this once!)

Leveson On Political Spin

All the focus following the publication of the Leveson report has been on the big issue of press regulation and whether or not we want our newspapers answerable to politicians (i.e. statutory "underpinning"). This is a big question and one that deserves extensive coverage and public debate.

But there are a myriad of other questions addressed by The Lord Justice, not least, Labour's serious accusations about the Tories relationship with News International and Cameron's handling of the BSkyB bid. Leveson's findings here also deserve attention but won't get it due to the gravity of the press regulation debate. However, Guido helpfully distils Leveson's judgements:

Labour claimed the Conservatives did ‘a deal’ with NI over BSkyB and other policy in exchange for their support.
But Lord Justice Leveson says ‘The evidence does not, of course, establish anything resembling a “deal”’.

Labour claimed Jeremy Hunt ‘was not judging the [BSkyB] bid he was backing it’.
But Lord Justice Leveson says ‘there is no credible evidence of actual bias on the part of Mr Hunt’.

Labour claimed ‘Cameron should never have given the decision to Hunt in the first place’.
But Lord Justice Leveson says Jeremy Hunt ‘was the obvious candidate to entrust with the decision because of his portfolio… The evidence does not begin to support a conclusion that the choice of Mr Hunt was the product of improper media pressure, still less an attempt to guarantee a particular outcome to the process’.

Labour claimed ‘Jeremy Hunt “was acting as a backchannel for the Murdochs”’
But Lord Justice Leveson says ‘Mr Hunt immediately put in place robust systems to ensure… fairness, impartiality and transparency’ and Jeremy Hunt’s ‘actions as a decision maker were frequently adverse to News Corp’s interests’.

Labour claimed the Prime Minister had discussions with James Murdoch about the BSkyB bid at a dinner on 23 December 2010.
But Lord Justice Leveson says the Prime Minister was ‘perfectly in order’.

God knows there's enough dodgy behaviour going on in public life without this kind of mendacious spinning. Perhaps the next public inquiry should be into the ethics of party political spinning* and the way parties attempt to smear each other at every turn. No wonder politicians are down there with journalists in people's regard.

* Somehow I suspect this is one inquiry Ed Miliband will not be calling for.

 

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It's Gone All Gordon

Hugo Rifkind wrote an excellent article in The Times (£) about Gordon Brown's evidence at the Leveson Enquiry this week. He compares Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's views on the press, views that expose the two men's very different outlook.

Tony Blair thought back then — and doubtless still thinks — that the British press was awful. “Of course the accuracy of a story counts,” he said. “But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be, but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.”

It’s a fairly devastating critique, this, painting the press as irresponsible and amoral; a nihilistic force of mob-handed destruction. In the wake of phone hacking and everything else, this does not seem inaccurate. But this is not what Gordon Brown thinks at all. He sees a press that is not amoral, but immoral. Or, to put it another way, Tony Blair would say that the press tore apart Gordon Brown because he was rubbish, because it was fun, because it was just so damn easy, because a mindless sort of group-think took hold and ordinary humanity flew out the window. Whereas Gordon Brown thinks it happened because two or three powerful men, for ideological or commercial reasons, entered into a conspiracy to get rid of him.

I would argue that this isn't just how Gordon Brown thinks but how many on the left think. The left sees News International as a political opponent (at least since its papers swapped sides) not as a news outfit whose failings are the same as other media operators. They genuinely believe that News International is in league with the Tories and out to get them.

It is this paranoid political outlook, allied with the commercial opportunism on the part of Murdoch's competitors, that has led to the unjustifiable amount of media coverage that Leveson and any Murdoch related story gets. Rifkind concludes...

“Attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment,” said Tony Blair in 2007. “It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.”

Quite. The Leveson Inquiry was born out of a sudden public awareness that print media had terrible problems. I’m not going to play those problems down. But they were Tony Blair problems, not Gordon Brown problems; problems about process, not motive. All the way through, I’ve had a sense of lawyers looking for problems with motive and simply not finding them. And thus, what started seven months ago (seven months!) as a righteous autopsy into grotesque wrongs done to ordinary folk has become a whirlwind of innuendo about whether the sidekicks of media bosses and Cabinet ministers are sending each other the right sort of text message.

This is why it’s getting boring. It’s gone weird. It’s gone Gordon.

My favourite comment under this article is from Stephanie Bennett...

"A politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea". - Enoch Powell