Under press-ure

I like Peter Oborne on the whole, a centre-right commentator unafraid to give those on the opposing side of the spectrum due credit when he thinks it is appropriate.  Although I have had cause to find him not always so oracular, I do concede that he was right on Syria to oppose their mooted air strikes, something borne out by a BBC report that while the Syrian rebels fighting for democracy of a roughly liberal democratic kind were a disappointing 30% of the fighters, their effective fighting capability was a pitiful 10% of the whole rebel effort.  Although Assad is a barbarous butcher, a diplomatic solution seems all the more pressing with the news that the Libyan prime minister has been kidnapped by militias supposedly loyal to Tripoli.

Oborne’s stand on press regulation I find though is a party-line, both from his employers at The Spectator and The Telegraph and from his political Conservative home, as any curtailment of the press would be a curtailing of the in-built right-wing majority.  By playing the partisan, he degrades his credibility on the issue.

The invocation of ‘press freedom’, in much the same way that fanatical US right-wingers are always denouncing any liberal legislation as an attack on some nebulous abstract ‘freedom’, is designed to mislead and paint those sickened by calumnies and actions of tabloids in particular as enemies of one of democracy’s building blocks.  Oborne’s assertion that the “best means of dealing wither newspaper abuses is through the law of the land,” is plainly wrong.  Yes, people are finally being prosecuted in significant numbers after it has been exposed that phone-hacking was not confirmed to one bad apple and his private detective.  But this is only after years where the politicians and the press were determined to sideline the issue as a few celebrities who deserved no sympathy.  Saying the police were slow to act is also misleading – they buried prima facie evidence (why else would John Yates quit as Met Assistant Commissioner?), yet I understand the legal sensitivities preventing Oborne from stating as such.  Action only began long after The Guardian was forced off the Press Complaints Commission for refusing to retract its allegations – it took The New York Times reporting of it before wheels were greased.

The nastiness of the UK press is internationally infamous and this was before phone-hacking and the revealing of the payment of public officials thousands of pounds in bribes.  Ten years before Ed Miliband took on The Daily Mail for lying about his father’s feelings for Britain as a way of attacking the Labour leader, Hari Kunzru, a novelist, rejected the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys prize for his debut The Impressionist, because the award was sponsored by the Daily Mail and General Trust plc.  In 2003, The Guardian asserted that “[m]aking an enemy of the Daily Mail is a little like putting your head in a lion's mouth and then inviting it to bite.”  Kunzru boldly outlined his reasoning: “As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line. The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it.”  There is nothing the law of land can do here because the ‘violence’ Kunzru spoke of indirectly springs from the pages of right-wing rags, such as lumping together a few immigrants who have (allegedly) committed crime as representative of all immigrants from poorer countries.  Curiously, journalists don’t like being lumped together and represented as being the same as those colleagues who are alleged to have engaged in crime.

Crime is a big seller.  The reputation of Christopher Jeffries was so comprehensively trashed before he had stood up in dock, let alone convicted, that the Attorney General Dominic Grieve charged The Sun and The Daily Mirror with contempt of court, the former, at bay with the phone-hacking scandal, sucked it up but the latter had the gall to appeal, even though at this point Christopher Jefferies had been completely exonerated and the real killer of Joanna Yeates apprehended and convicted.  The Mirror lost.  Jefferies later won damages from a panoply of newspapers but he continues to be ostracised where he lives and had to change his appearance, including dyeing his hair, to live a semi-normal life.  No money in the world can compensate for the psychological damage inflicted on an innocent man.  The law of the land ruled in his favour but I’m sure he would have swapped all of the money for the incident to have never happened in the first place.  I think Lord Justice Leveson was most appalled by the workings of this case amongst all the evidence brought before him.  Phone-hacking came about because journalists thought they were immune – no-one would get at them because they and their colleagues would destroy them.  The hatchets jobs on the famous and the hitherto obscure alike bred the culture that led to phone-hacking and the bribing of officials.

One last word on 'the law of land' should be for Charlotte Church who was catapulted to celebrity-status long before she understood the significance of it all as a prepubescent teenager.  One of the tabloids targeted her family, leading to the break-up of her (non-famous) parents’ marriage.  So, Mr Oborne, what law of the land is best for stopping that happening?  Determined to pursue News International for having her phone-hacked and not be ‘bought off’ as the group was doing left, right and centre with other celebrities, she only relented to an out-of-court settlement because Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers wanted to put her mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown and was close to suicidal, on the stand with an aggressive cross-examination.  Church compromised to save her mother.  Like Steve Coogan, she was not going to have the life of herself and her loved ones on trial when it was not her that had committed any crime.  Mr Oborne, the law of the land manifestly failed here and thus is patently not the best means for regulating the press. 

The ‘intrusive assault’ of a royal charter you allege would carry more weight if you had not used scare tactics, talking about Rubicons, slippery slopes, one-way processes and regrets.  Other western European countries have certain restrictions without becoming like Belarus.  Germany, especially given its past, has a vibrant press that know the boundaries and don’t overstep them, without emasculating themselves.  Denmark, whose statutory system is very similar to what is proposed, hasn’t descended into a totalitarian hellhole.  Unless Oborne is suggesting that there is something peculiarly dark in the character of the British establishment, that high-ups in the Anglo-Saxon-inflected world are prone to an unslakeable thirst for 1984-style control, the arguments advanced by himself and his right-wing kin are risible.  No level-headed person is saying democracy is about to be rolled back and TV broadcasters are far more tightly regulated. 

Oborne previously wrote that as a commentator he has no ability to change the course of events and there is some truth to that, but the collective right-wing corps can bring about a shift in broad societal attitudes on certain issues (the entire press is responsible, say, for the demonisation of GM ‘Frankenstein’ foods and no public debate was not coloured by it).  The fear is that the influence of the right will be pruned back as they are reduced in their capacity to tell open lies and, ultimately, that will be felt at the ballot box in the election of fewer Conservative candidates.