Abstract
A campaigner for freedom of expression asks why papers call for censorship, yet demand to publish what they like
The publication and aftermath of Lord Justice Leveson's report have been the occasion for numerous ringing endorsements of press freedom in the newspapers. Indeed, on the day on which the royal charter proposal was to be discussed by the Coalition and Labour, The Sun carried quotes from no less than John Wilkes, Benjamin Franklin, Ghandi, Walter Cronkite, Napoleon, Samuel Johnson and Nelson Mandela, all extolling the virtues of a free press. It also devoted the whole of its front page to a photograph of Sir Winston Churchill overlaid with his remark that “a free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny. Where men have the habit of liberty, the Press will continue to be the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen”.
But what exactly do newspapers mean when they talk about press freedom? In particular, are they simply arguing that they should enjoy the same right to freedom of expression that is enjoyed by individuals? And, if so, do they believe that this right should be enjoyed by other forms of media? Or are they laying claim to a special kind of freedom to which only they should be entitled?
Their recent encomia to press freedom notwithstanding, British newspapers’ attitude to freedom of expression in general is actually very far from positive. In this respect it was particularly instructive that, when the Human Rights Act was passing through Parliament, it was opposed every step of the way by most of the British press, even though Article 10 established for the first time in Britain a statutory right to freedom of expression – something which journalists might be expected to welcome with open arms. But no — because Article 8 was thought to introduce a privacy law “by the back door,” the press fought the HRA tooth and nail, leading Hugo Young to complain in The Guardian, February 12, 1999: “Unembarrassed by the fact that the Human Rights Bill is a general law, applying to every citizen in his or her relationship with state authority, [newspapers] demand that the press be treated differently … They propose that the press, alone among institutions with public functions, should stand above international human rights law”. The fact that many newspapers have subsequently led the calls to abolish the Act and to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, in doing so frequently distorting out of all recognition the judgements of British and European courts, says a very great deal about their peculiar, highly selective and partisan attitude to the question of freedom of expression.
But it is when we turn to the attitudes of significant sections of the press towards the freedom of other media that the limits of those newspapers’ commitment to freedom of expression, other than for themselves, become all too visible. For it is a sad, but quite easily illustrated fact, that when it comes to public rows of the “ban this filth” variety, one will find most newspapers unhesitatingly on the side of the would-be censors, as in the present moral panic about internet porn.
For example, when home video first arrived at the start of the 1980s, it was the bulk of the press, led by the Mail with its “Ban the Sadist Videos” campaign, which endlessly railed against “video nasties” (a term invented by The Sunday Times), eventually landing us with state video censorship in the form of the Video Recordings Act 1984. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that it was sections of the press which actually took the lead in this matter, not least by giving Mary Whitehouse and other moral entrepreneurs acres of uncontested space in which to prosecute their case, and by refusing to give their opponents any space at all. It needs to be understood that the Conservative government at first actually set its face firmly against any form of statute, until the intense pressure generated by the newspaper campaign eventually forced it to change its mind. And again, in the wake of the murder of James Bulger, which many papers entirely erroneously blamed on the influence of “video nasties” in general and of Child's Play 3 in particular, it was sections of the press which urged that the already stringent Video Recordings Act be tightened still further, and the Conservative government which resisted this course of action, until the press-engendered cacophony became simply too loud to resist. (See my “In Defence of ‘Video Nasties’,” in British Journalism Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1994).
But it's not just “filth” that has attracted the wrath of sections of the press and led it to support or demand the censorship of other media. Take, for example, the attitude of certain newspapers towards controversies involving the public service broadcasters. That newspapers resent broadcasters for having contributed to the decline of their readership is a commonplace, but there are deeper reasons for certain newspapers to dislike the PSBs, and the BBC in particular. For Murdoch, of course, they are rivals to BSkyB, and for him and for other proprietors, the BBC website represents serious competition for the web-based versions of their own papers. But I would also argue that the PSBs operate with different conceptions of journalism, and indeed from different ideological positions, from those of much of the press. Let me give just two examples of what I mean.
In January 1987, in scenes reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc, Special Branch raided the offices and homes of those involved in making the Secret Society series for BBC Scotland and writing about it for the New Statesman magazine. The six programmes in the series investigated unconstitutional behaviour by secret cabinet committees, government emergency powers in the event of war, the growth of data banks (what we would now call the surveillance society), the powers of the Association of Chief Police Officers, and the spy satellite, Zircon, the cost of whose construction and launch had been entirely concealed from Parliament. It was this last programme which brought about the raids on BBC Scotland, the New Statesman and three journalists, and, in the course of the raid on the BBC offices, all six programmes were seized. It was alleged that the Zircon programme breached the Official Secrets Act, but in fact it turned out to be no more than highly embarrassing politically. Eventually it was admitted that no breach of the Official Secrets Act had occurred, the material was returned, and five of the programmes were eventually transmitted. However, by this time the BBC Governors, led by Marmaduke Hussey, had unceremoniously sacked the BBC Director General, Alastair Milne. The BBC also refused to show the programme on secret cabinet committees on the grounds that it was inappropriate to do so in a pre-election period. It was eventually re-made by an independent company and shown in Channel 4's Banned season in 1992.
Now, how would you expect our free press to report this? Well, most papers simply blamed the BBC for making the programmes in the first place, and for hiring the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell into the bargain. Thus an editorial in the Telegraph, January 23, stated: “This newspaper strongly supports the concept of defence secrecy, and opposes the actions of Duncan Campbell,” whilst the same day's Evening Standard argued “the chief offender is the BBC. The Corporation was naïve if it expected Mr Duncan Campbell of all people to observe the guidelines of the Official Secrets Act”. On January 25 the Sunday Express asked: “Just what in God's name did the BBC think it was doing making a programme like this in the first place?” The Sun, February 3, in an editorial headed “Who Cares?” declared that “the Beeb have only themselves to blame. Again and again – and notably over the Falklands and the IRA – they have shown they cannot be trusted to defend the national interest. It was monumentally irresponsible to employ a left-wing journalist whose sole purpose in life seems to be to undermine our security services”. And so on, and on.
It was left to Duncan Campbell, in the New Statesman, December 11, 1987, to draw the disturbing moral of this story: “In the new BBC, Secret Society has become the history of how not to do things – a failure to control programme-makers and wild-eyed journalists from the far north, rather than a failure to fight the BBC's ground for independence from government, and against such disgraceful events as the unlawful search warrants that were issued against BBC Scotland.” How different things might have been had the free press stood shoulder to shoulder with the BBC to defend the values of independent and investigative journalism.
A rather better-known example of a press campaign intended to discredit and, if possible, silence, a broadcaster is furnished by Death on the Rock, a 1989 episode of the Thames TV series This Week. This concerned the shooting dead by the SAS of three members of the Provisional IRA in Gibraltar on March 6, 1988. The official version of events was that the three were about to trigger a car bomb, and were shot in order to prevent them doing so. However, it transpired that they were unarmed, and that the SAS had given no warning prior to opening fire. Death on the Rock attempted to find out and explain what had actually happened on the day in question.
Since most of the British press saw their role as quite simply parroting the official version, as is amply confirmed by Ian Jack's Gibraltar, his truly eye-opening contribution to The Granta Book of Reportage, it is unsurprising that Death on the Rock found itself the target of a press firestorm, particularly from the Murdoch papers. So, for example, The Sun, April 29, 1988, in an editorial headed “Blood on Screen – Thames’ Cheap Telly Scoop is Just IRA Propaganda,” lambasted the Independent Broadcasting Authority for not banning or at least postponing the programme (which is what the government wanted) and complained that “under the quivering geriatric chairmanship of ex-Dandy editor Lord Thomson, it does not merely lack teeth. It has not a fibre of strength or guts in its entire being”. Much of the press also smeared one of the programme's chief witnesses, Carmen Proetta, witness headlines such as “The Tart of Gib” (Sun), “Shame of SAS Smear Girl” (Star), “Trial by TV Carmen is Escort Girl Boss” (Express), “Shamed! Drug and Sex Secrets of Wife in SAS Telly Storm” (Mirror). Such stories were to prove extremely costly in terms of libel actions. But it was The Sunday Times which waged the most concerted campaign against the film, leading three of its journalists to complain about how their material had been misused. One of these, Rosie Waterhouse, wrote a memo to the Insight editor, Robin Morgan, in which she argued that the paper's coverage “left the ST wide open to accusations that we had set out to prove one point of view and misrepresented and misquoted interviews to fit … You were not interested in any information I obtained which contradicted your apparent premise – that the Thames documentary was wrong, and the official version right … It became almost impossible to make any point which contradicted the official line” (quoted in Roger Bolton, Death on the Rock and Other Stories). And even after an independent report commissioned by Thames vindicated the programme, The Sun, January 27, 1989, ran an editorial headed “The Verdict: Still Guilty” which stated that “Death on the Rock was an irresponsible, mischievous, deeply shaming episode. It should NEVER have been made. It should NEVER have been broadcast.”
If certain newspapers see it as their bounden duty slavishly to follow the official line at the slightest whisper of “national security,” as in the current brouhaha over Edward Snowden, then that of course is their prerogative, although how this can be squared with the ideals of the Fourth Estate, and particularly the notion of press freedom, is hard indeed to fathom. But what is of greatest concern here are the consequences for the freedom of those media which come under attack from the press for exercising their freedom. Duncan Campbell suggested above that the controversy over the Secret Society series led inexorably to what we would now call the intensification of a “culture of compliance” within the BBC, one which, of course, would be only further strengthened in the wake of the “dodgy dossier” affair, in which the Murdoch press in particular once again faithfully backed the government against the BBC. But the aftermath of Death on the Rock was equally disturbing and damaging. Thatcher and her allies in the press were by now even more hostile to ITV than they were to the BBC, and the 1988 White Paper on Broadcasting made it clear that ITV was to be drastically reshaped along much more commercial lines, and the despised IBA replaced by the Independent Television Commission. As a result of the thoroughly destructive changes wrought by the Broadcasting Act 1990, Thames lost its franchise, and current affairs series became increasingly commercially unviable on ITV: the last episode of This Week was broadcast in 1992 and of World in Action in 1998, the death of the latter being described by Geoffrey Goodman in the British Journalism Review, Vol. 11, No.2, 1999, as “the most dramatic example of the triumph of commercialism over programming excellence” and “a media tragedy on a major scale”. This is also an absolutely classic case of censorship by market forces, and to the extent to which certain newspapers helped to bring this situation about, their commitment to anything other than a narrowly self-interested, partisan and press-centric notion of freedom of expression has to be seriously in doubt.