The Great Press Bonfire

Here are some stories to savour over:

1. Daily Express Madeline McCann Libel. Result: £550,000 compensation and front page apologies by Express Newspapers.
2. Daily Mirror (plus The Sun) Christopher Jefferies Libel. Result: £70,000 compensation. From Joanna Yeates murder, in which the real murderer has been sentenced to life in prison.
3. Daily Mirror: Iraqi prisoners abuse hoax (2004). Result: Piers Morgan sacked as Editor and front page retraction (as seen).
4. News International response to phone hacking scandal (Rupert Murdoch apology): Result: News of the World closed down and over £20 million set in compensation fund. Resignation of James Murdoch as Director at NI.

Just what is the meaning of journalism? A nice, meaty 'exclusive' at the expense of other publications? Or is it Hugh Grant's opinion that, quite simply, "hate sells"? Here is an example of what the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) says about what the public interest of newspapers should serve:

i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation.

2. The public interest is freedom of expression itself.
3. Whenever the public interest is involved, the PCC will require editors to demonstrate how the public interest was served.

When you have descriptions of the press as 'violated', 'invasion' or 'disgusted', the democratic feeling of "Freedom of Expression" somewhat loses its sparkle. There is perhaps little justification with celebrities being chased down late at night to the downright fiction which the McCann's suffered (body in the freezer?) and due to the sudden rewrites of modern British press ethics, it is completely inevitable that some form of adjustment is going to have to be made. Even those journalists who are perhaps the most honest are now seen as no better than parasites who plague the earth and are no better than the cowboy politician. Change, no matter how budding journalists reject the gagging of free speech and investigation itself, is inevitable if those who defend the little man against the big corporations are ever going to be trusted again. For those who have not lost all faith in the vanguard of a free press and the development which so many repressed countries can only dream of, this is for all the Clive Goodmans and Richard Desmonds out there

i) Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home health and correspondence, including digital communications.
ii) Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent. Account will be taken of the complaint's own public discourses of information.
iii) It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent.

Imagine how JK Rowling felt when she had to move from her own home due to press invasion alone... The Leveson Inquiry is only one factor that shows the rich history of British journalism is going to dramatically shift once more. With the cuts in the BBC, the closure of News of the World and the press on the reactionary stance, with the Mail calling Hugh Grant's testimony "mendacious smears", it is a losing battle when the war has barely yet begun. Let alone the rise in technology, it is newspapers that warrant a bonfire as well as being abandoned in favour of the tablet PC. How does one even begin to regulate free speech? Why do the 'vulgur' tabloids continue to rise in sales when the largely decent newspapers fall in year on year sales? These are questions that are just too subjective and unpredicatble to give a firm answer to. Lord Beaverbrook, one time owner of the Express, once said  "I run the paper for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive".  However it is this point that I want to defend why a free press should still be valid.

From Fleet Street to the Wapping Revolution in 1986, it is the progression of technology over the years that have allowed plurality and diverse political agendas of newspapers to appeal to different audiences. Without Wapping, there would be no Independent. Without investigative journalism, we wouldn't have had the MP Expenses exposed or the torture uncovered across dictatorial regimes around the world. If you're Eurosceptic, read the centre-right newspapers, if not read the centre-left ones. Propaganda or not, we are lost without having means to discover what it is like there around the territories we ourselves would never see in our lifetimes. Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind once said "Until you've lost your reputation, you never realise what a burden it was or what freedom really is." This freedom for our newspapers has really now come too late and perhaps tarnished, no matter how campaigns for self-regulation are touted for. And I could not agree with Lord Patten more, current head of the BBC Trust, who said that newspapers play a fundamental role in our lives and that in itself would be a tragedy if we had the real villains in society, now trouncing and kicking down the press when they must be exposed. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15712992

Think of images that you see when children were running to nowhere when napalmed in the Vietnam war, thanks to journalism. Think of all the opposition to wars and hostility, when besides from the press, you only had political voices making up their minds for you in the Iraq/Afghan wars. But then, what of the privacy and 'Big Brother' states which newspapers condemn so often, but yet follow it themselves. And when victimised families of serious crimes are paraded as the guilty ones when the press ignore the real criminals who need naming and shaming.

It is a matter which only one side can be taken. Do we put the right to express dissenting voices to the grave, or is there still something worth saving from the bonfire that will grow regardless of anybody's actions? It's a decesion that is almost certain to change any person's thinking for the progression of democracy itself...