Will they bring the popular press to heel this time?
Recently, there has been much coverage of an inquiry, known as the Leveson inquiry after the presiding judge, into improper practices at a number of British popular newspapers. This started when it was revealed that the News of the World had employed private investigators who tampered with the voice-mails of not only celebrities but also victims of prominent crimes and other ordinary people, a practice which had gone on for decades, which in one case led the parents of a murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler) to believe she was alive when she in fact was not. Recently, a number of those whose lives have been damaged by press malpratice have been giving their testimony.
These include Hugh Grant, who testified that he had received press phone-calls demanding a statement regarding the birth of a child conceived during a brief liaison, which deterred him from visiting the mother or his child for fear of giving the press their story. Grant also reported that, when celebrities called the police to report a mugging or burglary, they often found that a press photographer appeared before any policeman. Yesterday, the former adviser to the model Elle Macpherson reported that she had been accused by the model of leaking secrets to the press and forced into a rehab unit, when in fact the secrets were being obtained by the press directly from Macpherson’s voicemail. She is suing News International for loss of earnings.
The other night, I heard a discussion on the BBC London late-night programme, hosted by Joanne Good (with whom I have previously had this exchange), on whether people who are in the limelight of their own accord, such as actors, forfeit their right to privacy. (They also took a call from the father of Russell Brand, who accused the press of twisting things he had said to or about his son and making stories out of them.) I do not see how anyone can think people give up any right to a private life simply because they become famous — people want entertainment, and they get it from the music, films or comedy these people produce. While it is the press’s prerogative to report on crimes and corrupt behaviour, the private lives of such people, unless they have deliberately made a public show of it.
The press have also published articles attacking the morality of both Grant and Steve Coogan, who has also been outspoken in his criticism of the press’s standards since the closure of the News of the World. It is notable that the press still hold celebrities to standards of morality that normal people are simply not held to anymore when, for the most part, they never claimed to be saints or proposed themselves as moral guardians. (This is in stark contrast to politicians who preach “family values” while carrying on affairs, let alone religious leaders and the like.) The press’s ferocity against Grant and Coogan reflects a sense of entitlement — they imagine that people owe them a story and thereby a living — and consider themselves entitled to be moral arbiters, not those they expose.
However, their behaviour causes far more damage than a footballer having an affair. The parents of a schoolgirl who was stabbed to death at school in Glasgow in 1991 testified that their son had committed suicide and was found with copies of the offending articles in his hands. The articles claimed that the victim was a school bully, which they insist was untrue; the murderer was also convicted of an assault on their daughter which happened at school the day before. I read one of the articles at the time, and it did not actually give the real names of either party, but it did imply that the girl had been sentenced to an indeterminate period in prison for the equivalent of a “battered wife” killing (in fact, she was released in 2000, after serving eight and a half years). The parents have been seeking a change to the law in Scotland that dictates that a deceased person cannot be defamed (i.e. that the press can print what they like about them). Gary Flitcroft, a footballer with Blackburn Rovers who was exposed as having an affair in 2002 (after the courts removed an injunction banning the revelation), told the inquiry that the story resulted in his children being teased at school and his father, who suffered from depression, no longer going to matches because he could not tolerate the chanting about his son’s private life; he believes it may have contributed to his father’s suicide.
The tabloid and mid-market press have also done considerable damage to the interests of entire sections of the population by running distorted and, in some cases, fabricated stories about people getting special favours from the state or benefits that they really are not entitled to. Frequently, these stories are presented as favours to one particular minority (such as Muslims) when in fact they often had nothing to do with Muslims at all: a classic example is the story of the swimming pool having their windows blacked out after requests from Muslims, when in fact the pool’s ground-floor windows had reflective film applied (which is normal) after complaints from a wide section of the community, not just Muslims. More recently, they have turned to attacking benefit recipients, alleging massive fraud in order to justify scrapping allowances which are vital to the lives of many, particularly disabled people.
Of course, comment should be free and I have no problems with divergent views being expressed, whether it be about religion, the welfare state or anything else, but this does not give any organisation the right to present propaganda as news, by using screaming headlines which are not borne out by the content of the story, or by manipulating statistics (by rounding some figures up and others down, for example) or cherry-picking facts. The nature of running a newspaper is that it is expensive, and control is likely to be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, who have a vested interest in preserving their wealth and who know that their readers would rather not share their incomes with anyone, regardless of whether that be for the common good or not. Some American proprietors are known for letting local editors decide on their papers’ editorial lines, but British owners (notably Lord Beaverbrook, former owner of the Daily Express) have been fairly explicit in that their newspapers are for propaganda; that claim was made in the 1960s, but it holds true for the title (and its nearest competitor, the Daily Mail) today.
It is not just in the UK where the political process is held to ransom by powerful media owners: in Italy, the former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns a very large section of the country’s print and broadcast media, and while Berlusconi was in opposition from 2006 to 2008, the media that was outside his control refrained from criticising him too harshly, as they knew he could easily win another election. Tobias Jones’s assessment of the new “technocrat” administration is that it could cut through a lot of the old-boy networks and protectionism that have made Italy a very expensive and frustrating place to live, but believes that Berlusconi’s media interests will mean he remains barely a step from power:
He’ll no longer be the prime minister but, with his epic media empire still intact, he’ll always be the king-maker, able to make or break a government. He will effectively hold a veto on all major decisions. In recent years his TV channels and newspapers and magazines have hammered anyone, including Gianfranco Fini, who dared to criticise him. There’s no doubt that the same will happen to anyone who threatens his empire and, especially, his immunity. He will always be the elephant in the room.
So, breaking up his empire must be the new government’s first priority. This, of course, is unlikely in the UK where the major media owners support the present government, but the Labour government had from 1997 to 2010 to reform media ownership and regulation and blew it — if anything, they ran scared from it. If this government refuses to take the matter seriously (or the inquiry’s report is sympathetic to the media corporations), Labour should make it a priority the next time it gets into government. Freedom of speech is essential, but this does not equal a right for a small number of very wealthy men and their lackeys to a bully pulpit from which to dictate public opinion. It is not about freedom; it is about power.
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