From: "John Hurst", [EMAIL PROTECTED] � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000 Why papers won't say our freedom is in peril By Peter Preston Welcome to question time on the Freedom Trail. Did you know that the Local Government Bill, now wending its way through Parliament, removes the statutory right of press and public to attend your local council's decision-making meetings? And to get agenda papers in advance? And to inspect the minutes when the decision's taken? Did you know that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill, in similar transition, hands MI5 the right to intercept any private email it chooses, without even prior clearance from a judge? Have you thought what that will mean for journalists' sources or for your own privacy? Did you know that the Freedom of Information Bill is 'grudgingly drafted... back to front: we haven't got anything at the front saying something like the Bill's purpose is to be as open as possible'? And that, pray, is the opinion of Elizabeth France, the first designated commissioner for FoI? Now, it's possible you might have been able to answer Yes every time. Perhaps you're preparing a university thesis on botched media law - or just a devourer of the Guardian. But, equally, some - and maybe all - of this will be news to you. Why isn't your paper keeping you abreast of such unpleasing events? Why (as the sainted Harry Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times, told the Society of Editors recently) does the press fight its battles so feebly? 'If we don't make a stand to maintain the freedoms of a half-free press, we shall be back to some of the worst periods of repression,' he said. Here - not much for anyone's comfort - is one big reason why. The struggle against censorship keeps falling victim to self-censorship. And if that sounds bizarre, look at what journalists mean when they talk about self-censorship. British newspaper and broadcasting editors and reporters are not, by and large, an introspective lot. But, happily, American journalism and foundation funding can supply all the sociologically-honed introspection we could possibly need. The Columbia Journalism Review - along with the Pew Research centre - has just polled 300 leading professionals across the States on the reasons why stories they think should be covered aren't covered at all. The third most regular reason why stories don't appear is - predictably - because they are 'damaging to the interests of the news organisation they're working for'. You can tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: but not in your own backyard. The second reason - cited by 43 per cent of national print men and 29 per cent of broadcasters - is that writing a particular story will expose you 'to ridicule by other journalists'. In short, don't break away from the pack. Conform: shape up, go with the gang. Or you'll be buying your own drinks next week. Some cynics may think that an everyday story of Westminster lobby folk. But the biggest reason why stories that the people involved think we need to know about seldom see the light of day, is something still more mundane. It's because they are 'too complicated'. Fully 62 per cent of the journalists polled thought, first hand, that 'too complex' stories which had considerable 'public interest' hit the spike or the cutting room floor because they were hard to tell or absorb. Eighty-four per cent said the same about stories which were 'important, but dull'. This is not dumbing down: it is dumbing out. So: who wants to pick away at the intricacies of the Local Government Bill, apart from a few devoted local editors determined to find out what's going on? Who cares about email privacy until some editor finds he's got weevils in his own mail box? Who cares about the Freedom of Information Bill, clause by clause? It's all a migraine of complexity, a slaughterer of attention spans. Let's find something simpler. Here, on reflection, is the ultimate irony. Big corporations employ large, expert teams to hone the news they think that papers and TV stations ought to carry. News management is a buoyant New Labour growth industry. Yet the people who actually manage the news don't run the stories that affect them and their audiences most immediately because (implicitly) they deem them boring. Any generalisation like this, of course, comes trailing honorable exceptions: reporters such as Nick Cohen, Richard Norton-Taylor, and Andrew Pierce among many others, editors around the land who see the point. But Harry Evans is still right to draw parallels with his own crusade long ago for the victims of thalidomide. That was protracted, expensive, difficult, complicated - and the rest of Fleet Street left it too feebly to the Sunday Times. Is there a case for the defence? Naturally. Editors are paid to guess what their readers want in a highly competitive trade. Is 'self-censorship', in this quivering American definition, any more than the necessity of choice? And anyway, everybody knows - or hopes they know - that nasty media law in this country tends to get dropped when the heavyweight barons of our business call on Mr Straw or Mr Blair in private at the eleventh hour. Realpolitik. But the trouble with that isn't just the difference between early warning and late bailing: it is that, as a process, it's exactly what the row about the Local Government Bill is all about. It leaves the reader as citizen in the cold, beyond a closed door: bereft of the questions, never mind the answers. "In England today we can do what we like, as long as we do as we're told." -- Marriott Edgar =============================================================== "The facts embodied in Magna Carta and the circumstances giving rise to them were buried or misunderstood. The underlying idea of the sovereignty of the law, long existent in feudal custom, was raised by it into a doctrine for the national State. And when in subsequent ages the State, swollen with its own authority, has attempted to ride roughshod over the rights or liberties of the subject it is to this doctrine that appeal has again and again been made, and never as yet, without success." Winston Churchill. A History of the English Speaking Peoples (1956) Vol. 1, p 201-202. www.magnacarta.demon.co.uk ================================================================= -------[Cybershooters contacts]-------- Editor: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website & subscription info: www.cybershooters.org
