Thin Ends and Wedges
The sudden announcement of a cross party deal (also known as a late night stitch-up) on press regulation - has prompted a flurry of thought provoking comment articles in the media.
Including this one by Hugo Rifkind writing in The Times the other day - in which he makes a strong case, with great wit and humour, that what we are witnessing (potentially at least) - is the thin edge of a very big wedge.
So despite the best laid plans of the three main parties at Westminster - my best bet is that this is whole press regulation business is definitely a 'game of two halves'.
And that there's all still to play for - as the wider public debate unfolds in stark contrast to the late-night, 2.30 am meetings by a handful of hand-picked people - in the House of Commons.
This charter is out to get you as much as us
By Hugo Rifkind
Suddenly the published word has become the State’s business. That means your comments, your blogs, your tweets
So look. Let’s cut through all this guff about this thing being underpinned by that, whether Hugh Grant gave Ed Miliband a Chinese burn, or whether a Royal Charter looks prettier with a dab of statute behind the ears. Really, there’s only one thing you need to understand about press regulation of the sort agreed upon yesterday. Either it’s nonsense, or it’s awful. It all depends on whether it works.
It’s nonsense because it probably won’t work. Because they’re targeting an industry that is melting away anyway, like butter in a hot palm. You can make the argument, if you like, that newspapers had grown too powerful by the end of the previous Labour Government and could monster anyone because everyone was scared of them, and if it wasn’t for the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre then only nice things would be written and Gordon Brown would still be safely ensconced in No 10, throwing phones at people. But even if that was all ever true (and it wasn’t) then it certainly isn’t true any more.
It’s not tabloids that traduce reputations today, but Twitter. It’s not The Sun that reveals nude photographs of the Royal Family, but American showbiz websites, and it’s not a phone call from the political editor of the Daily Mail that makes a dirty minister go pale, but maybe one from the political blogger Guido Fawkes. Lord Justice Leveson examined the past, a time before any of this, and made recommendations based upon nothing else. And while this was obviously a problem from the moment his very, very long report started thudding on to Westminster doorsteps, nobody really cared. Everybody was having too much fun. Sometimes, politics becomes a barrel rolling down a very steep hill. Once it gets going, all the good sense in the world won’t make it stop.
Although actually, it’s worse than that. If the quest for press regulation had ploughed on completely regardless of the whole internet problem, then all this — the Charter, the board, the notions of arbitration — would fall safely into the “nonsense” category; as a thing we could all safely forget about after the last ever proper newspaper has rolled off the last ever printing press. Instead, they tried half-heartedly to fix it. And, in doing so, they veered into the awful.
Allow me to direct you to the draft Royal Charter, schedule 4, paragraph 1, section (b), subpoint (ii). Yeah, I know, you’ve read it already, but humour me. In defining “relevant publishers” that ought to be regulated, after listing the obvious (newspapers, magazines) it includes “a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)”. The Crime and Courts Bill, amended to allow for exemplary damages to those who don’t join, uses language much the same. This might seem innocuous until you grasp precisely what has happened here. Which is that somebody, somewhere, has thought to themselves: “Actually, this whole traditional press idea is a bit too narrow, isn’t it? So, let’s stretch it, very slightly, to include everything said by absolutely everyone!”
Hyperbole? Only a bit. Everyone is online now and there is nothing special about traditional journalism. Journalists struggle to accept this because they like to feel special, and MPs and Hugh Grant struggle to accept it because they’re self-important old men frightened of their own looming impotence. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. The world they want to regulate is no longer the world that there is.
The rise of self-publishing — blogs, comments, Twitter, starting your own website about the way the council wants to knock down a tree — is the beginning of a media revolution, not the end. Indeed, it’s not even a revolution confined to media. This is what the internet does to professions that used to rely on access to information and systems that the masses lacked. It blows them away. Remember how your High Street had travel agents on it? Remember that?
How many accountants, I wonder, look at online self-assessment forms that can be filled in by any old idiot — even me — and feel the chill of their own pending obsolescence? How distressed are opticians by the way we no longer need to visit their branches to buy our contact lenses? It’ll be lawyers, one day. Poor lawyers, eh?
For good or for ill, the internet allows us to step outside structures, even buying medicine regardless of what doctors think about it, or drugs and pornography regardless of whether they’re allowed in shops. This is what the future looks like. It’s a sprawling, anarchic mess, in which anybody can do almost anything. The control passes from middlemen to the individual, and the State, at best, can wade in afterwards. Sometimes this is bad (you probably shouldn’t be ordering your own antibiotics), but sometimes it’s popular empowerment in action.
Journalism belongs in the latter category. That’s why it’s not like law, or engineering, or medicine, or architecture, or teaching, any one of a hundred other professions best avoided by the amateur. Sure, the professionals do it far better, because training, culture and experience count for a lot. But the right to dig or analyse, to scrutinise and investigate the powerful, or just to write down what you think of them or anyone else (within reason) and push it out to the world — well, that ought to be the right of pretty much everybody alive.
Press regulation, as proposed, is nonsense if it doesn’t grasp that anyone can be a journalist, and awful if it does. Think about that again. “A website containing news-related material.” That’s not an industry or a group. That’s anybody with a point to make or an accusation to level. Are we truly to be a country that regulates that? This is why it matters. This is what I’ve been wailing about these past few months, feeling like Cassandra, feeling like a mad prophetess whom nobody understands or even hears.
Born out of the best intentions, Hacked Off has become a malign force. Every time they wheel out Evan Harris or one of those deathly professors I genuinely start to fear they’d be regulating the notes on my fridge if they could. How did it ever come to this? Royal Charter or not, the published word has suddenly become the State’s business.
And everyone gets published now; that’s the thing. There will be comments, most likely, under the online version of this column telling me that I still don’t get it; that the press has been “drinking in the last chance saloon”, that we “had our chance at self-regulation and blew it” and that the press “has only itself to blame” and is “getting what it deserves”. But it’s not me who doesn’t get it, angry commentator, but you. Me? I’ll be fine. This newspaper’s got my back, at least for now. Who’s got yours?
