Mick Hume - There is No Such Thing as a Free Press: ...And We Need One More Than Ever

Title page

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE PRESS

...and we need one more than ever

MICK HUME

SOCIETAS

essays in political

& cultural criticism

imprint-academic.com

Copyright page

Copyright Mick Hume, 2012

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Print edition published in the UK by

Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Print edition distributed in the USA by

Ingram Book Company,

One Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086, USA

2012 digital edition by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Dedication

For Ginny, my wife,

a model of true tolerance

Preface

This short book is partly about the problems within the UK press. But it is principally about problems with the way we view the press today. It has been written to challenge some distorted perceptions about the role of the media that are as confused as they are widely-shared.

My main concern is that a proper belief in the freedom of the press has gone out of fashion. Lord Justice Levesons Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the British media did not start these corrosive trends. But it gave them the stamp of official approval. As argued in the pages that follow, that judicial probe into the phone-hacking scandal at the late News of the World has been a pretext for a mission to purge the entire popular press, using high-profile victims as human shields, high-ranking celebrities as voice-over artists, and high-minded talk of ethics as a code for advancing an elitist political and cultural agenda.

Any doubt as to which way the wind might be blowing was pretty well dispelled as I was finishing the book, when it was reported that Lord Justice Leveson had phoned the governments top official to demand that Tory education secretary Michael Gove be gagged, after the minister had the temerity to point out that the Leveson Inquiry was having a chilling effect on the press. There are limits to freedom of expression for such heresies these days.

The aim of the book is to turn most of the widespread assumptions about the media on their head. To argue that, far from needing more regulation and regimentation, what the press needs is greater freedom and openness. And to show how, while everybody pays lip service to the importance of press freedom, in the real world it is being muffled under a chokehold of conformism.

Writing such a book has involved me dealing with some strange problems. I am a man of the Left who cut his journalistic teeth writing for and editing revolutionary newspapers and magazines. In the course of that career as a polemicist and propagandist (no, it doesnt mean liar, look it up), I have expended countless words criticising the bourgeois press, not least the tabloids, and might in the past have endorsed the traditional Left view that the press is only truly free for those who own it. I still find much of what is in the tabloid press not to my taste, though I admire their smart columnists and sharp sub-editing.

Yet in the atmosphere of today, when fundamental principles are at stake in the attempt to purge the press, I find myself far more concerned to defend freedom for the demonised tabloids - and their much-maligned readers - against the cultural elites who seem to think that popular is a dirty word and that press freedom is not an indivisible right, but a privilege to be doled out only to the deserving.

The strangest thing is that media liberals, political Leftists and civil liberties lobbyists have become some of the main players pursuing the crusade for firmer regulation and the ethical cleansing of the press. Many have effectively deserted the cause of liberty and gone over to the other side in the culture war over press freedom. That is why, instead of wasting time joining in the attack on the tabloids, these are the targets against which I often hit hardest here.

The other revealing news received just as I finished the book was a statement from the long-established Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, calling for the post-Leveson reforms to lead to a new regulatory regime to be established by statute. In other words, by the legal power of the state. Call me old fashioned, but I suspect the idea that campaigning for press freedom could mean demanding state-backed supervision might be news to those who fought for centuries to free the press in Britain from controls and regulations established by statute or by order of the Crown.

There are serious problems with the press. None of them are going to be solved by tighter regulation and a purge that can only make worse the absence of freedom, open-mindedness and plurality in the UK press today.

These developments come at a time when, in the midst of a social and economic crisis and the demise of the old politics, a free press has potentially become more important than ever. A crisis is not only supposed to mean a situation in which things get worse and worse. It means a crossroads, a time for decisions - in this case, about which way we want our society, politics and economy to go. There has been too little serious discussion in the UK or the West about such options or alternatives. This is where a free and open press, in all of its forms, could have a role to play in constructing a future.

Once, in the dim mists of history, an emerging free press became the focus of new democratic movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the young Karl Marx described it in his first newspaper articles arguing against Prussian state censorship in the 1840s, a free press was seen as the embodiment of a peoples faith in itself, the eloquent link that connects the individual with the state and the world, the embodied culture that transforms material struggles into intellectual struggles. That brief flowering of a free press as a champion of humanity and herald of change did not last long.

Now we are witnessing the exhaustion and hollowing out of the old moribund politics across the West. In the absence of other outlets, the media has become the sole venue for political life. There is surely an opportunity for a flowering of a free press once more, particularly via the internet, to host an argument about new visions and alternative outlooks.

Which is why, despite the fact that this book is not short of criticism, I am not at all negative about the prospects for the press. My concern is that an opportunity for a fresh era of a free press is at risk of being wasted.

We are talking here about the press in all its shapes and forms, not just the traditional newspapers. The press has been a generic term for anything published since the introduction of the original printing press to England in the fifteenth century. It is a very long time since anything was printed using that historic method, yet the label has persisted. In the same spirit I use it here to defend freedom for the press in all of its published varieties, from the world of print to the internet, where the future of press freedom surely belongs.

This book is not, however, really about the economic crisis and financial pressures facing the press and journalism today. We all know those problems exist, and they are beyond the scope of this argument. What is certain is that so long as people want news, entertainment and opinions the press will survive in some, perhaps many, forms. What matters is that journalism survives into the new age of the press as a serious, free, open and diverse form of communication. Whether newspapers are distributed for free or charge for online content in their struggle for economic survival, the important thing is that the press does not give away or sell its freedom in the process.