The Levenson inquiry
by me.
Okay. So, I have some very strong feelings on the Levenson inquiry as well as on the effectiveness of media regulation in the UK.
In order to have a truly free press, the press has to be run in public interest, with no interference from the state. That is a given. It is our right as sovereign individuals to a press free from any bias towards the state, free from censorship. The press acts as a check to state activities, ensuring that, because the state behaves in the name of its citizens, it behaves properly.
However, given the extensive deregulation of business laws since the 1980s Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal attack, most of the press has become absorbed into larger corporations. A great deal of the actual news consumed by the public is owned by four companies: Newscorp, Trinity, Express and Associated Press.
This isn't unusual. When you narrow it down, there are only twelve key media players on the world-wide stage. Billions of people get their information and entertainment from only twelve sources! Obviously this is bad and humanity as a group needs to start redeveloping our monopoly laws!
But, back to ethics.
In Britain, the public funds the BBC. The BBC delegates some of this funding to other sources (such as channel 4) but for the most part, the media is run off of advertisements. Increasingly in the last twenty years, what's important is not the reader and public interest or good, but the audience as a commodity and especially the idea of the interest of the public by which I mean entertainment.
This has led to the abuse of celebrities by all of the major tabloids. When I say abuse I mean every single digging into their lives, every young girl who's opened a paper to find a calender ticking down to when she becomes legal, every single story shucked out of someone's phone without their permission. Celebrity stories are the ultimate narrative; the paper can exploit the connection the public already feels with the image that has been projected of the person. Often they employ strategies such as serious exaggerations (Michael Fassbender joking around tipsily with a bouncer turned into him being thrown out of a party, for example, or Charlotte Church going out for a night out and getting labelled an alcoholic) or bald-faced lies.
So what can you do against ethics violations by the press?
The Press Complaints Commission was set up to deal with complaints from the public. Its board is journalists and it uses ethics regulations from the National Union of Journalists as well as its own ideals to deal with any issues the public might have with the press. Sounds good, right? The board is all journalists, because they can be trusted to police their own. Right?
Right?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAhA
HAHAHAHA.
Nope. The following extract is on complaints about discrimination within right wing newspapers:
'The PCC believes that the purpose of the discrimination clause "is to protect individuals"...in a complaint about The Sun and a series of articles about asylum seekers...there was considered to be no breach of either accuracy or discrimination. The complainants particularly objected to "phrases such as 'scrounging Romanian Gypsies'"...The PCC in its adjudication claimed, "although some of the views expressed may have been offensive to some readers, these were clearly presented as matters of opinion"
consequently, according to the PCC, a story is not discriminatory if it: uses "robust" language (that might be offensive to some) is not about a particular individual concerns the nationality of the subject and is not significantly inaccurate
...The PCC's insistence...that complaints about racism affecting groups of people are really a matter of taste and decency, and therefore not something on which it can adjudicate, begins to look perverse at a time when there is a considerable public concern about perceived racism in some reporting of asylum seekers, the Iraq war and terrorism.'
-Chris Frost
The PCC is made up of ex-journalists and editors. They are asked to judge the accuracy and offensiveness of their former bosses and coworkers. Given the monopoly those four media companies I mentioned before have on the British readership, it is highly likely they used to work on the papers being complained about. Not only are there already rules in place to make them less than effective even if they want to be (complaints about the way a third party was treated will not be upheld, discrimination can be put down to "robust opinion", worried you're being racist about a person? Simply make it about their entire ethnic group or nationality and you're golden, etc) they have a history of putting their fingers in their ears and ignoring things. Example! They said before that they'd found no evidence of hacking. Unsurprising, given several of them had worked for Murdoch before.
What's also unsurprising is the lack of coverage of the inquiry in major newspapers that are owned by the four big companies. So far, broadsheets such as The Independent and The Grauniad are the best newspaper sources for inquiry coverage - the Guardian is the one that exposed much of the hacking. Aside from the Mirror (Trinity) which only differs in political standing (it supports trade unions and traditionally urges its readers to vote labour), the major tabloids are all right wing with similar values. So why ignore such a large story? Because they are aware - and have been for a while - that cooperation with the other majors is much easier than challenging.
So does this mean that RSAs such as the police force should step it up in attempting to regulate the press? Given just how much they've been implicated as helping along or not stopping the hacking, I'd say no.
So what now?
According to the Levenson inquiry, phone hacking and the overall lack of ethical of the journalists working for Newscorp and other media giants (the Daily Mail especially - look at how they treated Hugh Grant, for example, after he challenged them about bugging him) is a severe and far reaching problem in society. The police and the PCC did nothing about it. Each of the journalists convicted of hacking were actually members of the National Union of Journalists and ignored their ethical codes. Where journalists could not act, private investigators were hired to hack into phones and even intimidate police officers.
Hey! You might be shouting, the answer seems clear! Get rid of the PCC! Have the press answerable to the Department of Media, Culture and Sport! Simples.
So, the answer is get rid of the free press?
Oh wait, maybe that's not it! Have someone rewrite the PCC regulations! Appoint laypeople who are versed in ethics and some legal folk to the board! Aim to uphold as many complaints as possible rather than just one or two! Make it legal to force newspapers to publish large apologies rather than tiny type on page 75!
So who decides who goes on the board of the PCC? If the media does, that's easily manipulated into making things easier for them. If the government does, then that is the state interfering with the media and we no longer have a free press.
Until the media can prove itself able to regulate itself without destroying or ignoring evidence of wrong-doing, there are very few real options available for an ethical press that don't sail into the dangerous territory of state regulated. A state regulated press is a press which acts in the interests of the state, not the public. However, a self-regulated press ignores severe ethical violations in the name of infotainment and views the public as nothing more than an audience for advertising.
In that case, how might a press truly be an ethical one?
I believe, personally, the BBC is the most ethical source of media possible. It has rigorous standards and, because it is funded by public money, acts in the public interest. Should it need to perform an unlawful action, the reasons behind such an undertaken are carefully documented and weighed up. The editors of journalists working for the beeb who perform unlawful actions are ready to defend them in court.
It is my opinion that the rest of the media needs to behave more like the BBC, however I understand that financially, it is difficult to attain the amount of freedom the BBC has. The press in this country is paid for by the corporate world, through sales of adverts. Without adverts, there is no press. Without an audience there are no adverts. Therefore, it is within the interests of the press to put forward the most outrageous stories to interest the public in buying them. Essentially, that's why Newscorp did all that hacking: ad sales. A story about a popular celebrity, gained before the other newspapers, will allow them to have a spike in audience. They're bound by how many ads they can sell and how big a percentage of the public they can sell to; the BBC is given money automatically by anyone who buys a TV license.
So that's the real problem: the press needs to sell ad space to exist, they refuse to self-regulate properly and any interference by the state risks the loss of the free press.
What will happen in the future for newspapers?
Nothing.
More than likely Levenson will end with a call for greater respect of privacy and maybe (if we're lucky) an extradition order for James Murdoch. Nothing will change. Given the rapid decline in sales of newspapers, people will just shrug and wait for them to die out rather than attempt to radically change a dying field. The press monopoly will continue and I will be sad and write gigantic livejournal posts about the media for ever and ever.
Okay. So, I have some very strong feelings on the Levenson inquiry as well as on the effectiveness of media regulation in the UK.
In order to have a truly free press, the press has to be run in public interest, with no interference from the state. That is a given. It is our right as sovereign individuals to a press free from any bias towards the state, free from censorship. The press acts as a check to state activities, ensuring that, because the state behaves in the name of its citizens, it behaves properly.
However, given the extensive deregulation of business laws since the 1980s Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal attack, most of the press has become absorbed into larger corporations. A great deal of the actual news consumed by the public is owned by four companies: Newscorp, Trinity, Express and Associated Press.
This isn't unusual. When you narrow it down, there are only twelve key media players on the world-wide stage. Billions of people get their information and entertainment from only twelve sources! Obviously this is bad and humanity as a group needs to start redeveloping our monopoly laws!
But, back to ethics.
In Britain, the public funds the BBC. The BBC delegates some of this funding to other sources (such as channel 4) but for the most part, the media is run off of advertisements. Increasingly in the last twenty years, what's important is not the reader and public interest or good, but the audience as a commodity and especially the idea of the interest of the public by which I mean entertainment.
This has led to the abuse of celebrities by all of the major tabloids. When I say abuse I mean every single digging into their lives, every young girl who's opened a paper to find a calender ticking down to when she becomes legal, every single story shucked out of someone's phone without their permission. Celebrity stories are the ultimate narrative; the paper can exploit the connection the public already feels with the image that has been projected of the person. Often they employ strategies such as serious exaggerations (Michael Fassbender joking around tipsily with a bouncer turned into him being thrown out of a party, for example, or Charlotte Church going out for a night out and getting labelled an alcoholic) or bald-faced lies.
So what can you do against ethics violations by the press?
The Press Complaints Commission was set up to deal with complaints from the public. Its board is journalists and it uses ethics regulations from the National Union of Journalists as well as its own ideals to deal with any issues the public might have with the press. Sounds good, right? The board is all journalists, because they can be trusted to police their own. Right?
Right?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAhA
HAHAHAHA.
Nope. The following extract is on complaints about discrimination within right wing newspapers:
'The PCC believes that the purpose of the discrimination clause "is to protect individuals"...in a complaint about The Sun and a series of articles about asylum seekers...there was considered to be no breach of either accuracy or discrimination. The complainants particularly objected to "phrases such as 'scrounging Romanian Gypsies'"...The PCC in its adjudication claimed, "although some of the views expressed may have been offensive to some readers, these were clearly presented as matters of opinion"
...The PCC's insistence...that complaints about racism affecting groups of people are really a matter of taste and decency, and therefore not something on which it can adjudicate, begins to look perverse at a time when there is a considerable public concern about perceived racism in some reporting of asylum seekers, the Iraq war and terrorism.'
-Chris Frost
The PCC is made up of ex-journalists and editors. They are asked to judge the accuracy and offensiveness of their former bosses and coworkers. Given the monopoly those four media companies I mentioned before have on the British readership, it is highly likely they used to work on the papers being complained about. Not only are there already rules in place to make them less than effective even if they want to be (complaints about the way a third party was treated will not be upheld, discrimination can be put down to "robust opinion", worried you're being racist about a person? Simply make it about their entire ethnic group or nationality and you're golden, etc) they have a history of putting their fingers in their ears and ignoring things. Example! They said before that they'd found no evidence of hacking. Unsurprising, given several of them had worked for Murdoch before.
What's also unsurprising is the lack of coverage of the inquiry in major newspapers that are owned by the four big companies. So far, broadsheets such as The Independent and The Grauniad are the best newspaper sources for inquiry coverage - the Guardian is the one that exposed much of the hacking. Aside from the Mirror (Trinity) which only differs in political standing (it supports trade unions and traditionally urges its readers to vote labour), the major tabloids are all right wing with similar values. So why ignore such a large story? Because they are aware - and have been for a while - that cooperation with the other majors is much easier than challenging.
So does this mean that RSAs such as the police force should step it up in attempting to regulate the press? Given just how much they've been implicated as helping along or not stopping the hacking, I'd say no.
So what now?
According to the Levenson inquiry, phone hacking and the overall lack of ethical of the journalists working for Newscorp and other media giants (the Daily Mail especially - look at how they treated Hugh Grant, for example, after he challenged them about bugging him) is a severe and far reaching problem in society. The police and the PCC did nothing about it. Each of the journalists convicted of hacking were actually members of the National Union of Journalists and ignored their ethical codes. Where journalists could not act, private investigators were hired to hack into phones and even intimidate police officers.
Hey! You might be shouting, the answer seems clear! Get rid of the PCC! Have the press answerable to the Department of Media, Culture and Sport! Simples.
So, the answer is get rid of the free press?
Oh wait, maybe that's not it! Have someone rewrite the PCC regulations! Appoint laypeople who are versed in ethics and some legal folk to the board! Aim to uphold as many complaints as possible rather than just one or two! Make it legal to force newspapers to publish large apologies rather than tiny type on page 75!
So who decides who goes on the board of the PCC? If the media does, that's easily manipulated into making things easier for them. If the government does, then that is the state interfering with the media and we no longer have a free press.
Until the media can prove itself able to regulate itself without destroying or ignoring evidence of wrong-doing, there are very few real options available for an ethical press that don't sail into the dangerous territory of state regulated. A state regulated press is a press which acts in the interests of the state, not the public. However, a self-regulated press ignores severe ethical violations in the name of infotainment and views the public as nothing more than an audience for advertising.
In that case, how might a press truly be an ethical one?
I believe, personally, the BBC is the most ethical source of media possible. It has rigorous standards and, because it is funded by public money, acts in the public interest. Should it need to perform an unlawful action, the reasons behind such an undertaken are carefully documented and weighed up. The editors of journalists working for the beeb who perform unlawful actions are ready to defend them in court.
It is my opinion that the rest of the media needs to behave more like the BBC, however I understand that financially, it is difficult to attain the amount of freedom the BBC has. The press in this country is paid for by the corporate world, through sales of adverts. Without adverts, there is no press. Without an audience there are no adverts. Therefore, it is within the interests of the press to put forward the most outrageous stories to interest the public in buying them. Essentially, that's why Newscorp did all that hacking: ad sales. A story about a popular celebrity, gained before the other newspapers, will allow them to have a spike in audience. They're bound by how many ads they can sell and how big a percentage of the public they can sell to; the BBC is given money automatically by anyone who buys a TV license.
So that's the real problem: the press needs to sell ad space to exist, they refuse to self-regulate properly and any interference by the state risks the loss of the free press.
What will happen in the future for newspapers?
Nothing.
More than likely Levenson will end with a call for greater respect of privacy and maybe (if we're lucky) an extradition order for James Murdoch. Nothing will change. Given the rapid decline in sales of newspapers, people will just shrug and wait for them to die out rather than attempt to radically change a dying field. The press monopoly will continue and I will be sad and write gigantic livejournal posts about the media for ever and ever.