| Are we doing too much to defend press freedom or not enough? |
There seems to be much talk of the boundaries of press freedom in the wake of the Leverson enquiry ( which incidentally cost circa £6m to put on). What can people report about other people without straying into their private and personal points of view and works? People do have a right to privacy but not if any actions they undertake, which may harm certain sections or indeed the whole public, go un-reported. There is a judgement to be made about whether a report will inform society about a group or individual who is pursuing actions which can harm any element of society. In that case it can be argued that that particular person\group has foregone the right of privacy over those particular potentially harmful actions. The press does report on the human interest dimensions of celebrities for example their sexual partners or even their preferred films, theatre shows etc.It is argued that society is interested in the lives of celebrities and therefore the press has a right to report on those lives. To an extent that argument is true, however celebrities must also be treated with care as regards aspects of their personal lives just like everyone else, however to be a celebrity and in the public eye means that a person must be aware that they will be under much greater press scrutiny than if they were just normal people and they will need to behave accordingly. This latter point is inevitable. If a celebrity pursues certain courses of action he\she will be aware they are in greater danger of wider exposure of this than you or I.
How do we define the press? Given the explosion in blogging and the interweb we are all crypto journalists now. We can write blogs,state opinions and make arguments. Arguments about press freedom do not just apply to the professional journalist but to everyone who writes opinion pieces which are accessible over the web and elsewhere. We now have a greater flexibility to express our views but an increased responsibility to ensure that our views are expressed fairly and honestly without causing needless offence and heartache to any third party. This means we have to act responsibly both the professional journalist and the amateur blogger. This is doubly the case because any e-mail you send or any electronic\digital comment you make cannot be hidden from the wider community - therefore we do need to think carefully sometimes about what we say and report.
Freedom of speech is cherished in the UK but it is under pressure in certain instances.Absolute freedom of speech does not exist here because it is illegal to incite racial hatred or physical violence against third parties and perpetrators of these acts can go to prison. Similarly the libel and slander laws in the UK are very strict in the sense that if you say or write something that a certain group does not agree with (libel) or you say something directly about that person or group that they do not like (slander) -- you can find yourself in the eye of a very expensive legal case. Sometimes the threat of such action is enough to silence critical reports about a person or group's activities. A journalist recently made some comments about the state of Bahrain concerning its lack of democracy and treatment of political prisoners and was threatened with a writ.The late great Robert Maxwell was a great exponent of this. When there were critical reports about his financial empire and dealings he would resort to the courts and this would emasculate a "free" press when in reality the activities of such a person should have been given the full glare of publicity and public scrutiny. The UK in recent years has become a safe haven for very rich and powerful people, often foreign oligarchs who have used its legal system to protect themselves from controversial though valid scrutiny and challenge. Journalists have become frightened by this class of people and have sometimes not reported the stories they should have but reported other stories they shouldn't have.
The press and others should report on issues that will significantly affect us all in the way we live our lives -- However they should do this in a responsible way. The responsible approach is often missing. All the issues around phone hacking were and are illegal and should be dealt with as such. Clearly those journalistic actions were irresponsible although I am uneasy about the state steeping in to determine which stories should be aired in the public interest and which should not be.
Whatever the final approach - journalists and bloggers should not feel fettered in reporting very important and pertinent issues about individual and groups -- if that were the case then wrongdoers like Jimmy Saville may have been exposed much earlier. A major exception to this could be issues of national security however these issues can be properly considered by experienced counsellors.
I would not like to see a society where press freedom becomes so emasculated that reports about occurrences which people need to know about and act upon are hidden from them. That really would not only be a crisis of press freedom but of democracy itself.
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