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THE GUARDIAN
Monday, 26 March 1990
As 'media policemen' proliferate in the name of consumer protection, Liz Forgan accuses the press and broadcasters of wanton carelessness with the precious right of free expression
The right we have wronged
BRITAIN is a country where freedom of expression is supposed to be part of the water supply. As John Betjeman put it:
"Think of what our nation stands for
Books from boots and country lanes
free speech, free passes, class distinction
democracy and proper drains."
But perhaps we take too much for granted.
I do not believe that there is a conspiracy to gag the press. I do not believe wicked men or women are intent on carting us off to the Lubianka. But I do fear that we are growing careless. I do believe that it is time to pay attention to a freedom that others fought and suffered for, and which we are in danger of failing to value properly. And I do think we are going for some quick fixes which may land us in long-term trouble.
The argument about freedom of expression is sometimes described as a conflict between the interests of the media and those of the public. Not so. The former only has any claim to legitimacy in so far as it represents the latter. The only relevant balance to be struck is that between good done by disclosure and good done by restriction and the only measurement of both is the public interest.
But the trouble with Britain is that almost every time we are called upon to sit down and judge where the public interest lies in a case of conflict between free expression and restraint we make the wrong decision, mainly because we have never got around to enshrining our commitment to freedom of expression in statute law.
I don't want to enter into the arguments about whether this statute should take the form of Article 10 of the European Convention or a bill of rights or something more akin to the First Amendment to the American Constitution. That game is more fun for lawyers than it is for journalists.
I simply want to observe that without some clear unequivocal statement in statute that says that this society requires first and foremost the right of freedom of expression as a guarantee of all its other liberties, and that it shall prevail over all other interests unless specified reasons justify an exception, we shall go on tackling every question backwards and in isolation and making fatally wrong decisions as a result.
IN BOTH the press and broadcasting the "media policemen" and the arbitrating quangos are proliferating in the name of consumer protection. And although they are seen as defenders of the helpless individual in the face of an all-powerful and uncaring media, they constitute an institutionalised erosion of the freedom of expression which should belong to us all.
Without a proper baseline against which to weigh the claims of those who would censor or restrict or protect, there is a real danger that while individual interests may get a more attentive hearing than ever before, the wider public interest in a free press may be at risk. So before we welcome more codes of practice and statutory arbitrators as ipso facto on the side of goodness, truth and beauty, consider the downside.
At least the oldest of these policemen, the Press Council under Louis Blom-Cooper, has real competence and experience both legal and journalistic to call upon in the exercise of its duties. Its new code of practice, in its final form, is an improvement on early drafts framed as to oblige the journalist in almost every case of conflict of interest to show cause why free speech should prevail.
But the council still appears determined to proceed with one proposal which comes perilously close to pre-publication censorship. It intends to invite people who fear that a paper may be about to infringe the code to telephone Mr Blom-Cooper who, though he can have not the slightest clue about the rights or wrongs of the matter at this stage, will undertake to have a word with the offending editor to let him know that a complaint has been made in advance of publication. Persistence might result in a more critical attitude on the part of the Press Council should the complaint eventually be upheld.
I don't envy the Press Council its job at this moment. Sections of the press have apparently gone out of their way to earn the maximum opprobrium. Threats of draconian legislation unless the press sets its own house in order are not safely to be dismissed. But let us not as part of the solution lose hold of the fundamental guarantee of free expression and let us also get all this in proportion.
Last year saw what was described as a record number of complaints to the Press Council - 1,484 for all newspapers and magazines, national and regional. A total of 73 were upheld, including 47 for the whole of the national press. Next year the Press Council is asking for a budget of £1 million. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission is cheaper at £200,000 for upholding 26 complaints of unfairness or invasion of privacy by television or radio. Whether it is better value, I leave to others with less of an axe to grind. But I do wonder whether it was right to order Plymouth Sound Radio to purchase advertising space in a local paper to announce that a complaint against it had been rejected by the BBC. Also whether, as is currently the case, Lady Anglesey's committee is really representing the public interest in investigating complaints against Channel 4 by the Sun newspaper's doctor.
The broadcasting bill, heading for the statute book this autumn, was once going to usher in a multi-channel age of light-touch regulation, pluralism and choice for the viewer. In the end it is heading towards a more complex net of controls and restrictions on the content of programmes than we ever had before.
The bill invents a wholly new broadcasting policeman in the shape of the Broadcasting Standards Council. It also lets the real policemen further into the control rooms of television by introducing the criminal law into the difficult area of taste, judgment and the balance between reporting the truth and inciting a breach of public order. And it restates a narrow, rigid definition of balance in programme content that is quite inappropriate for a multi-channel service aimed at grown-up viewers.
The extraordinary Clause 145, which would have given a fairly junior policeman the right to come and ask us on his own authority for scripts, tapes and film in advance of transmission if he thought an offence under the Obscene Publications or Public Order Acts might be about to be committed, has now been dropped from the bill. I am delighted about that. But the fact that we could have considered including such an outrageous provision in the first place underlines my principle theme that freedom of expression is unsafe in our hands until someone makes this sort of thing an infringement of a statutory right.
(Continued overleaf)
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