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THE GUARDIAN
Monday, 26 March 1990
Leading article:
Tentacles of media regulation
IT IS a question of balance. Liz Forgan's notable lecture on media freedoms in Britain - which we publish today on page 25 - is telling because it eschews all hysteria. It does not pretend that the temples of democracy and free expression are tumbling down. But it sees the woodworm in the beams; it notes the flaking stonework; it demands to be taken seriously.
A newspaper journalist who moves to television and rises to become Controller of Programmes for Channel 4 is well placed to see a difference that newspapermen and their readers may easily miss, turning a page. Newspapers do not, yet, live in a world of statutory control; for broadcasters, it is the world they know and find ever-more encircling. Quite the most fascinating part of Miss Forgan's James Cameron lecture concerns the proliferation of statutory bodies, with their assorted codes of practice, their guidelines about taste and balance, through which a broadcaster who wishes to do anything new and challenging, as opposed to old and routine, must cut. Remember: the Government's aim was regulation with the lightest of touches. The argument of market forces seemed clear: since television particularly was expanding like a magazine rack in a corner newsagents, it was no longer appropriate to regulate it with heavy battalions of invigilators. But that has all faded fast. The situation programme makers face is more bureaucratic, and more farcical, because it seeks to impose rationing on a banquet of plenty.
Worse still, the supposedly separate patches of press and broadcasting grow ever-more intermingled. The law, as it applies to one, may suddenly be found to apply to the other: so that, for example, the use of prior restraint to prevent, by injunction, a paper from telling its readers about a particularly important story (like Spycatcher) may become a common burden for broadcasters too. And now, in the wings, hovers a still more unwelcome development: the belief that if, a few weeks hence, the Calcutt Committee on Privacy, summoned into action because of the antics of some tabloid newspapers, recommends a statutory solution to these problems, then it must promptly be widened (beyond Calcutt's brief) to include the broadcasters as well: even though they have behaved in an exemplary fashion under their existing statutory tutors. Calcutt may - and if he doesn't a Labour Government will - recommend a statutory Press Council, drawing on broadcasting experience. But will one Press Council then be enough? Broadcasting already seems to need three.
Miss Forgan is right to draw attention to this slow slop of regulation, this thoughtless accretion of statutory restraints on free expression: and dead right, beyond that, to seek the countervailing force, on behalf of the reading and viewing public's right to be informed, that steps like the incorporation into British law of the European Convention on Human Rights would bring in train. But there is one point she did not go on to make, but which daily becomes more poignant. These small, costly and redundant tentacles enfold the British media at the moment that far bigger tentacles are being unceremoniously cut off in Europe and beyond. In Britain we still debate whether Sinn Fein MPs may be allowed to utter a word on television. In Czechoslovakia or East Germany last year; in Nicaragua and in Outer Mongolia this year, the restrictions are garbage, awaiting collection. And, in part, this burst for freedom from Vilnius to Cape Town is not insulated. People in Ulan Bator can now see and read what has been done elsewhere, what people like them have achieved; and they know that the force is with them. What a potty moment, as James Cameron would have said, to carry on now diminishing that force in Britain.
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