Julian Petley | ukwatch.net

Citizens, Communications and Convergence

Ellie Keen — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0000

We reproduce the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom’s response, published this week, to the Ofcom discussion paper ‘Citizens, Communications and Convergence’. Ofcom is now considering the responses and will publish a further paper in due course.

The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom is an independent organisation which campaigns for greater diversity and accountability in the media. We have intervened on a range of important policy issues in media and communications since our foundation in 1979. We have a longstanding interest in the issue of broadcasting as a public service, and have campaigned vigorously against the re-regulation of broadcasting in the corporate interest and against the citizen interest, a process usually referred to misleadingly as ‘deregulation’.

1.1. As one of the civil society groups which lobbied tirelessly, and against a great deal of powerful opposition, for the inclusion of the word ‘citizens’ in the Communications Act 2003, we are naturally pleased that Ofcom has published this discussion paper. However, we are also disappointed, but not altogether surprised (for reasons which will become clear below), that it has taken so long for Ofcom to publish a paper ‘specifically discussing how we seek to promote the interests of citizens’ (1.3).

2.1. As the discussion paper makes clear, the government had considerable difficulty with including the word ‘citizens’ in the Act: ‘The Government was advised that this would not be possible to articulate in law because “citizen” had a specific meaning in immigration statutes which meant that it could not be used in a broader sense in the Communications Bill’ (2.9). Frankly, we never believed this for a single moment during the passage of the Act, and still less do we believe it now.

2.2. As no less an authority than David Marquand puts it in Capitalism, States and Citizens (1997): ‘The notion of citizenship has, at best, an insecure place, in the British political tradition. The British are subjects of a monarch, not citizens of a state’. As a consequence, ‘the terminology of citizenship has rarely figured in political discourse’ in Britain. It is, incidentally, quite pointless to argue that the British Nationality Act 1981 technically redefined the British as citizens. In order to be worthy of the title of citizen people have to be treated as citizens, not simply labelled as such. In the light of even these preliminary considerations, then, it is thus not surprising that Ofcom faces some difficulty in defining what is meant by the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’.

2.3. As John Clarke et al note in Creating Citizen Consumers (2007): ‘The citizen is an egalitarian figure, lodged in a republican imaginary of liberty, equality and solidarity’. This immediately suggests exactly why the political classes in England have had such difficulty with the term, since it is so redolent of values of which they, ever since the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic era, have been at best fearful and at worst highly sceptical.

2.4. As a consequence, when the words ‘citizen’ or ‘citizenship’ have been employed in political discourse at the Westminster level, they have had quite different meanings from those which adhere to them elsewhere in western Europe and in the US. For example, traditional, one-nation Conservatives have proclaimed the ideal of ‘active and responsible citizenship’, building on the old English tradition of ‘voluntary service’, with local voluntarism being conceived as a replacement for what they see as the morally debilitating ‘nanny state’. A good example of this extremely limited conception of citizenship was provided by the then Home Office minister John Patten when he wrote in 1989 that: ‘The active citizen is someone making more than a solely economic contribution to his or her community; nothing more, nothing less’.

2.5. However, neo-liberals (of both Conservative and New Labour persuasion) adhere to yet another concept of the citizen and of citizenship. An absolutely key part of the neo-liberal project has been to narrow the scope of the civic sphere, to privatise not only public institutions but public purposes as well. In this process, people’s roles as ‘citizens’ have been very deliberately re-conceptualised in consumerist terms. For example, John Major’s so-called ‘Citizen’s Charter’ sought to ‘give the citizen a better deal through extending consumer choice and competition’. Thus essentially political questions about what public services people should be entitled to, and the appropriate levels of public service provision, were replaced by the imposition of an entirely inappropriate market model on the public services, which involved the setting of performance targets and large-scale privatisation – all in the name of an entirely spurious notion of ‘consumer choice’.

2.6. Under New Labour this process has continued unabated, indeed with even greater vigour, only now the issue of citizenship has also become embroiled in debates about ‘communitarianism’. To put it bluntly, as the result of nearly 30 years of neo-liberalism in the economic sphere is a society falling apart at the seams, governments have looked to new ways of attempting to discipline people and to legitimise the heavy hand of the state in this respect. (The fact that this is the selfsame state which neo-liberalism wishes to see drastically shrunk is simply one of the more obvious contradictions of this particular project). Communitarianism stresses above all people’s duties and responsibilities (in return for the exercise of which they are granted rights), and in this vision of things, being a ‘good citizen’ amounts to little more than fulfilling one’s social obligations and behaving ‘properly’. Not altogether surprisingly, this distinctively moralistic and one-way conception of citizenship has all too often resulted in the perception that what citizenship is really all about is being bullied and hectored into leading what the authorities consider to be better lives, but which actually amounts to little more than knowing one’s place.

3.1. So much for the government’s difficulties with the concepts of citizens and citizenship. But what of Ofcom’s position on this matter? We welcome Ofcom’s brief narrative of its use of the words ‘citizen-consumer’ and ‘citizen’ (2.11-2.15), but although we have no wish to re-fight old battles here, we have to say that we are somewhat sceptical about Ed Richards’ remark at his lecture to the Westminster Media Forum on 16 October 2007 that: ‘We have always had the balancing act of meeting these twin objectives [furthering the interests of citizens and consumers] at our heart and in our minds. Let me say personally that I have never had any difficulty with this notion, indeed I have always been a strong supporter of this relatively straightforward concept’. It is not that we doubt his sincerity, but that we feel, for reasons which will become apparent below, that Ofcom operates with a far too narrow conception of what constitutes the citizen interest, and that this is the inevitable consequence of Ofcom’s primarily economistic approach to the communications sector.

3.2. One example of this kind of thinking was of course Ofcom’s early insistence on using the appellation ‘citizen-consumer’, which nowhere appears in the Communications Act and which does indeed assert the primacy of the economic and subsume the citizen into the consumer. However, just because ‘citizen-consumer’ is no longer used by Ofcom this does not necessarily mean that it has ceased to think in the terms which that compound noun implies. We could cite any number of examples which suggest to us that this has been and still is the predominant view within Ofcom. For example, speaking to the Oxford IPPR Media Conference on 13 January 2004 Stephen Carter let slip the surely remarkably revealing remark that ‘we are fundamentally free-market and light-touch, tempered by a bit of social justice’. And speaking to the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference in April 2004 he stated that: ‘Externally and in our regulation, the promotion of civic values must infuse all our actions; economics should be the basic tool which underpins all our actions. Neither can be hermetically sealed from the other’. But as Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt have pointed out in a paper in Media, Culture and Society, this is ‘a formulation in which civic values may inspire goals, but economic realities will dictate outcomes’. At the same conference he also stated that: ‘Throughout the three years of debates that led up to the Communications Act, there were two clear counter-currents: those who hoped or feared that Ofcom would approach its tasks wholly through an economic prism and would sweep away anything subjective that could not be encompassed by a market analysis; and those who hoped or feared that Ofcom would give primacy to the cultural and political themes and would intervene subjectively and distortingly into market choices – twelve of the great and good sitting in an ivory tower deciding what the rest of the population should get’. However, this formulation inevitably suggests that although those viewing the communications sector through an economic prism may be looking at it from too narrow or limited a perspective, it is at least an ‘objective’ one, a suggestion which we would most emphatically challenge.

3.3. In response to the above, Ofcom might argue that Stephen Carter is no longer with Ofcom, and that his remarks reflect past thinking within the institution. However, our suspicion that this fundamentally economistic perspective remains dominant at Ofcom is amply confirmed by the assertion in the discussion document that: ‘We tend to think of a market as a vibrant, enticing place where consumers interact, but there is not an equivalent metaphor for the way that citizens interact in civil society’ (2.31). This is really quite breathtaking, for two reasons, the second of which will be discussed at 4:4.
3.4. We (that is, the CPBF) would be extremely interested to know who exactly is this ‘we’? It most certainly is not the CPBF and its members, nor, we would suggest, the numerous civil society groups with whom we interact. Furthermore, with the world financial system facing meltdown and global recession looming as the direct and inevitable result of what George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz, Will Hutton and many others have quite rightly identified as the prolonged and rigid application of the dogmas of economic fundamentalism, we doubt that it is the view of most of the citizens whose interests Ofcom is supposed to be furthering. It may be, of course, that Ofcom is referring not to the market in an abstract sense but to actual markets in real towns and villages. But, even if that is the case, anyone who has any experience of such markets will know that, unless they are extremely well regulated, these are places in which consumers are frequently ripped off, sellers engage in price fixing and other uncompetitive practices, and where new entrants are not exactly welcomed as competitors by already-established sellers – just like the much vaunted ‘free market’, in fact.

3.5. Ofcom is, however, peculiarly addicted to delivering remarks which, superficially, appear to be authoritative but which turn out to be mere bromides, and highly questionable ones at that. For example: ‘Competitive markets often provide an important contribution to delivering diversity and plurality’ (2.13). Yes, but equally often they do not, and especially not in broadcasting, which is particularly prone to various forms of ‘market failure’, as Gavin Davis, David Lipsey, Patrick Barwise and many others have conclusively demonstrated. It is thus difficult to disagree with Georgina Born in her book Uncertain Vision (2004) when she argues that: ‘While Ofcom doctrine espouses evidence-based regulation based on tight definitions and quantitative data, basic issues appear simply as articles of faith. The statement “[In] a fully digital world … consumers will have access to much greater choice” begs the crucial and opaque question of just how “choice” in broadcasting is defined or even measured’, and indeed with Don Redding, formerly of Public Voice, when in a paper in Screen he complains of Ofcom that many of its statements are simply ‘beliefs and assertions – that is, ideology’.

4.1. The discussion document points out ‘the need for Ofcom to consider separately the interests of citizens and consumers stems from section 3(1) of the Communications Act 2003. This requires Ofcom to: (a) further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters; and (b) further the interests of consumers in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition’ (2.2). The document adds that: ‘It is notable that the section sets out a mechanism for furthering consumers’ interests – promoting competition – although it is recognised that this will not always be appropriate. The Act does not specify a particular mechanism for furthering citizens’ interests’ (2.3).

4.2. In order to help to define what is meant by the citizens’ interests, and to suggest ways in which these might best be met, the document refers briefly at 2.15 to a speech by Ed Richards to the Westminster Media Forum in 2003. The direct quotation, however, comes from a speech by Ed Richards to that body in 2004, in which he discussed the citizen case for market intervention in broadcasting and in which he very usefully laid out ‘four core purposes of PSB that reflect the potential of broadcasting (not just television) to benefit society more generally, beyond our interests as private consumers’. These are:
• ‘To inform ourselves and others and to increase our understanding of the world through news, information and analysis of current events and ideas
• To reflect and strengthen our cultural identity through high quality UK, national and regional programming
• To stimulate our interest in and knowledge of the world, including the arts, science, history through content that is accessible, encourages personal development and promotes participation in society
• To support a tolerant and inclusive society through the availability of programmes which reflect the lives of different people and communities within the UK, encourage a better understanding of different cultures and perspectives and, on occasion, bring the nation together for shared experiences’.

4.3. Similarly, the discussion document states that in relation to media and communications services, all citizens have equal rights of access to ‘the services and content that are needed to participate in society’ (2.21) and that ‘in furthering the interests of citizens, we focus on what is good for society as a whole, but there will be direct benefits for some individuals. For example, public service broadcasting benefits those citizens who watch it, while all citizens benefit indirectly from living in a better informed society. Other policy interventions may be aimed narrowly at particular social groups, such as older people or people living in remote parts of the UK, but have wider benefits like enhanced participation in society or greater fairness (2.30).

4.4. These seem to us usefully broad, inclusive and productive ways of thinking about the citizen interest in broadcasting, which is why we are so surprised that Ofcom believes that ‘there is not an equivalent metaphor [to the market] for the way that citizens interact in civil society’ (see 3.3 above). The metaphor is in fact the ‘public sphere’, first developed by Jürgen Habermas in his seminal book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), and which, implicitly or explicitly, has fed into all the key debates about the negative consequences for citizens of the ‘deregulation’ of public service broadcasting in the UK since the 1980s, as well as many other debates about citizenship in modern societies. And, drawing on a rather more US-based tradition of thinking about citizens’ rights to be informed, one might also point to the well-established and well-known metaphor of the ‘marketplace of ideas’.

5.1. Unfortunately, whether because Ofcom is unfamiliar with these ideas, or because it is simply unwilling to deploy them in its policy-making, it tends generally to work with a much narrower conception of the citizen interest than that outlined by Ed Richards above. In the Ofcom view of things, furthering the interests of citizens seems largely to boil down to ensuring that everyone has access to a wide range of communication services, making sure that people know how to use the new digital technology, protecting listeners and viewers from content which it deems undesirable, and ensuring that minorities of one kind or another are not totally ignored. Thus, for example: ‘Ofcom serves citizen interests in many ways, by promoting widespread access to communications services, ensuring plurality in the supply of radio and TV services, promoting media literacy and ensuring that disadvantaged groups of consumers are protected against market failures’ (1.3) and: ‘Ofcom’s role in furthering the interests of citizens involves ensuring that people have access to the services, content and skills needed to participate in society, and that they are protected appropriately (2.27).

5.2. The narrowness of Ofcom’s concept of the citizen interest in communications was sharply illustrated by Philip Graf’s recent speech to the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, 2 October 2008, which stressed access to services and what we would regard as consumer (not citizen) protection issues to the virtual exclusion of anything else. Thus laying out ‘a practical agenda that addresses equality, inclusion and plurality’, he revealed this as amounting to: ‘Promoting the widespread availability of key services whether broadcast or broadband; enhancing access to services and content by all groups in society, with particular focus on the disadvantaged; ensuring that the wireless spectrum is used for the benefit of all citizens’. On the protection issue he stated that: ‘With industry, we have designed content filtering and classification systems to help parents and carers protect children online. We are actively participating in and supporting the UK Council on Child Internet Safety, set up following the Byron Review’, and also added that Ofcom had ‘modernised the standards codes. Citizens today benefit from broadcasters’ freedom of expression; but still need protecting from harm, offence, unfairness or invasion of privacy. Dealing with these issues is one of the bedrock functions of the Content Board’. Protection from a different kind of harm was also the subject of his comment that: ‘We have punished those who betrayed the viewers’ trust in broadcasting through the phone-in scandals. We have also put in place systemic remedies to prevent any re-emergence of the culture that led to those scandals in the first place’. Finally, the disadvantaged were the subject of a comment about Ofcom substantially increasing broadcasters’ quotas for subtitling, signing and audio-description, along with a range of other access services for disabled people such as text-relay.
5.3. Narrowing the ever-widening information gap in our society – of which the ‘digital divide’ is but an aspect, albeit an extremely significant one – is of course extremely important. However, in our view Ofcom is too narrowly concerned with ensuring simply that people have access to a wide range of communication services and not sufficiently concerned with the contents and ownership of those services. We also contend that, just as Ofcom habitually conceptualises public service broadcasting as a relatively narrow range of programming, so it also tends to characterise citizenship issues as concerning, primarily, vulnerable minorities and not the public as a whole.

6.1. We can illustrate these points more precisely by reference to the Ofcom Annual Report 2007-08.

6.2. On the subject of access to services, the Report by the Chief Executive Ed Richards argues that: ‘Citizens and consumers are already reaping the benefits of competition. Over half of all households have broadband from one of more than 500 different providers. There are 22 million UK households with digital television, whether it is terrestrial through their aerials, satellite or cable. Today, there are more mobile phones than there are people in the UK, with services offered by five network operators and many more retail-only providers. And one in five adults now owns a digital radio set, offering listeners a choice of up to 60 stations’. Significantly, in his Report ‘consumer’ or ‘consumers’ are mentioned thirteen times, ‘citizen’ or ‘citizens’ six. As so often when reading Ofcom documents, one ends up feeling that the word ‘consumer’ has been used throughout, with the word ‘citizen’ added in later here and there as an afterthought.

6.3. On the subject of protection, Richards points out that: ‘During the year we moved to restore trust by introducing a series of new regulations to make broadcasters directly responsible for consumer protection, particularly in relation to the use of premium rate telephone services. We took enforcement action against a number of broadcasters for breaching that trust and imposed the biggest fines in broadcasting history’.

6.4. Richards also notes that: ‘In our investigations into broadcasting standards, we issued sanctions against television and radio companies who had breached our Broadcasting Code, which is designed to protect consumers’. Elsewhere, the Annual Report reveals that the chief culprit in this respect was the treatment of Shilpa Shetty in Celebrity Big Brother: ‘We launched a full investigation while the programme was still on air, and found that Channel 4 had made serious editorial misjudgements, compounded by a major failure in its compliance process. The channel was found to be in breach of the Broadcasting Code, and Ofcom imposed a statutory sanction on Channel 4 (and S4C), requiring it to broadcast a statement of its findings on three separate occasions’ However, the issues raised by this programme were citizen and not consumer ones, and we cannot help but find it significant that Richards refers to the Code only as being ‘designed to protect consumers’, thus ignoring its crucially important citizen aspects.

6.5. We are also concerned that the section of the Annual Report headed ‘Improving compliance and empowering citizens and consumers’ is entirely about telecommunications. The subjects covered are: clamping down on mobile mis-selling; enabling faster ‘number porting’ (switching mobile phone operators whilst keeping the same phone number); introducing new rules against ‘slamming’ (having your phone account moved to another provider without your knowledge or consent); and investigating other forms of fixed-line mis-selling. How any of this can be in the citizen, as opposed to the consumer, interest, is entirely unclear to us.

6.6. In our view, the only parts of the Annual Report which relate to Ofcom’s furtherance of citizens’ interests in communications matters are those brief sections which relate to its investigation into complaints about Undercover Mosque, its PSB review, its options for C4’s long-term future, and its report The Future of Radio. These take up a mere two pages.

7.1. Let us now turn to the matter of spectrum sell-off, which Ofcom, in announcing the findings of its review of the matter, called ‘one of the most important decisions we have ever made’. We would agree. We also think it one of the very worst, and a complete betrayal of the citizen interest in communications. But there again, Ofcom’s Annual Report lets slip the all too revealing remark that: ‘This approach means that companies and organisations will have the freedom and incentive to offer services using the spectrum that are highly valued by customers’. Precisely: customers.

7.2. We thus find incomprehensible the statement in the discussion document that: ‘Another example [of Ofcom’s attention to the citizen perspective] is provided by the debate about how the spectrum freed-up by the switchover to digital TV should be released to the market, and whether any of it should be reserved for particular uses. Our starting point is that markets will normally ensure that spectrum is used in the most optimal way, but we have carried out research to find out what, as citizens, our preferences would be for the use of the spectrum and whether they differ from the likely outcomes that would be produced by market forces’ (2.25).

7.3. First of all, the remark that: ‘Our starting point is that markets will normally ensure that spectrum is used in the most optimal way’ (a) immediately begs the question: optimal to whom? and (b) is yet another example of Ofcom’s tendency, noted at 3.5 above, to present what are basically articles of faith as matters of fact. Secondly, those civil society groups which we would regard as representing the citizen interest in this matter and which managed to respond to an extremely complex and technical consultation most emphatically did not want this particular outcome, as a survey of their responses will rapidly reveal. The CPBF certainly made it abundantly clear to Ofcom that spectrum should be seen as a public asset and not a commodity, and that it should thus be used primarily for public purposes.

7.4. Indeed, the consultation process itself revealed in a particularly acute way a problem which we have raised before, namely that although Ofcom’s consultations appear to be democratic (and thus in the citizen interest), in that theoretically they are open to anyone, they are in fact heavily weighted against civil society groups, who quite simply lack the resources to respond adequately to any but a handful of them. Corporate interests, on the other hand, employ armies of staff precisely to respond to such consultations, which for them are quite simply another aspect of their extensive lobbying activities (which in themselves raise serious citizenship issues about the workings of the democratic process at both the UK and EU levels). Furthermore, the digital dividend involved particularly complex technical issues, and these inevitably were much easier for corporate rather than civil society interests to deal with.

7.5. In our view, taking a market-led approach to awarding the digital dividend, which in effect means flogging it off to the highest bidder, is nothing short of a total disaster from the point of view of the citizen interest. Again, Ofcom in reporting the result of its digital dividend review simply resorted to highly questionable assertions posing as authoritative judgements. For example: ‘We recognise that many services can provide broader social value, but we do not think that support via implicit subsidies in the form of spectrum is necessary to realise this. Explicit support through direct funding is more transparent and can achieve a better outcome’. Again, two blindingly obvious question immediately arise: ‘better’ in what way, and ‘better’ for whom? Further articles of faith follow in the remark that a spectrum auction ‘reflects our view that an auction is the fairest and most transparent way to award rights to use spectrum and that it is superior to a beauty contest. We think that market mechanisms are the most effective tool available to encourage efficient use of spectrum and should be used unless there is a compelling case to the contrary’. But on what, exactly, is this ‘view’ based? And by what precise standards is ‘efficient use’ being judged here?

7.6. To read one particular section of Ofcom’s report of its digital dividend review is immediately to realise just what a desperate betrayal of the citizen interest Ofcom has committed in deciding to auction the spectrum: ‘Many stakeholders have suggested to us that we should ensure the digital dividend is used for particular uses or by particular users. Their proposals have included PSB in HD, local television, mobile television, wireless broadband in rural areas, public safety services, healthcare, education, community development, and providing new services for people with disabilities’. These will now never happen. Experience – not economic theory – very strongly suggests that those media interests which dominate the current media landscape will snap up the spectrum, and that which isn’t used for purely commercial purposes will simply not be used at all, since Ofcom has refused to insert any ‘use it or lose it’ clauses into the terms of the spectrum auction. And all this at a time when the conventional local media – in particular local ITV news services and local papers – are in a more parlous state than ever before. Consider, for example, that in France there are 112 local digital TV channels – that is one channel for every 199,000 viewers. In Spain there are about 1000 such channels: one for every 19,000 viewers. In Latvia there are 24: one for 33,000 viewers, Britain has precisely ten: one for every 2,480,000 people. Utilising the digital dividend in the citizen interest could quite literally have revolutionised local communications, but Ofcom has ensured that this will never, ever happen. In our view, Ofcom is quite extraordinarily fortunate that the mainstream media – all of whom, of course, had a vested interest in backing the spectrum auction option – effectively prevented most people from realising what extraordinary democratic and communications benefits the digital dividend could have brought them.

8.1. For all the various reasons outlined above, then, the CPBF, like many other civil society groups, has very little faith in Ofcom as a body which can ‘further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters’.

8.2. In particular, reading the discussion paper and Ofcom’s many other documents we are once again struck by the sheer alien-ness of the language and concepts routinely used by Ofcom. The institution seems largely unwilling or unable to come to grips with the qualitative dimensions of the communications system, and as Sylvia Harvey has pointed out in a paper in Screen: ‘Its language and organising concepts are suitable for an analysis of markets and competition, but not of social significance and cultural value’. The result is what she calls a ‘distinctive myopia’. This is most certainly not the way in which those who work in media and cultural studies (who are, after all, unlike economists, experts in the media and culture) discuss the subject. Still less, and more importantly, is it the way in which audiences discuss it. No sane person would scroll through the EPG and remark: ‘Tonight’s choice of viewing represents a clear example of market failure’, nor, having watched a programme which they disliked, complain: ‘That programme had very definite negative externalities’. Sylvia Harvey refers aptly to Ofcom discourse as a kind of ‘lunar landscape’ and argues that ‘the emphasis on measuring at the expense of evaluating suggests a kind of institutional autism characterised by a sharp focus on facts and an inability to see the bigger picture or to sense the shifting tones and textures of a social and cultural environment’. Indeed Ofcom’s emphasis on facts (or what it takes to be facts) irresistibly suggests to us a comparison with Mr Gradgrind’s school in Hard Times. So what, we wonder, does Ofcom think girl number twenty should know about the citizen interest in communications?

8.3. As Sylvia Harvey concludes: ‘It is arguably the case that the twin factors of the drive to digital and a fascination with market transformation have had the effect of flicking off a key switch in the Ofcom institutional brain. The off-switch is currently set against four key issues: the communication requirements of citizenship, the cultural quality, value and impact of television programmes, the support measures required for creative, critical and innovative programme-making and the “value for money” represented not just by the BBC but also by the other “free to air” broadcasters’. The fact that these are, in our view, the four most important issues facing the communications sector at the present moment makes Ofcom’s switch-off all the more worrying. We do of course wonder if the global cataclysm finally unleashed by the deregulation of the financial markets will make Ofcom wonder if the deregulation of broadcasting is such a good idea after all, but we are not particularly hopeful. In our experience, when events fail to turn out in the way in which theories suggest that they should, institutions in thrall to those theories blame reality for not behaving as they think it should and redouble their efforts to make it do so.

Julian Petley. Professor of Film and Television, Brunel University. For the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.
October 2008

Review: Flat Earth News

eddie — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:59:13 +0000

Nick Davies (2008) Flat Earth News, London, Chatto & Windus. 408 pages. ISBN-13. 9780701181451. £17.99 paperback

The Bigger Picture

Journalists, especially those working for newspapers, are notoriously sensitive to criticism, even from their fellow workers. Indeed, when Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army uttered the immortal lines ‘they don’t like it up ‘em’, it was clearly journalists and not Germans that he had in mind. As Nick Davies puts it in Flat Earth News: ‘dog doesn’t eat dog. That’s always been the rule in Fleet Street. We dig into the world of politics and finance and sport and policing and entertainment. We dig wherever we like – but not in our own back garden’. It was thus not altogether surprising that journalistic responses to Nick Davies’ best-selling book were not entirely positive – particularly amongst the upper echelons of Fleet Street, at which the bulk of his barbs were aimed.

A common line of attack was to accuse Davies of harping back to a golden age of the press. Thus in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on February 8th, 2008, Simon Jenkins argued that journalists ‘should not chastise themselves with fantasies of past virtue’ (see link below) whilst Peter Preston in the Guardian the following day developed this theme further. According to Preston, Davies, whom at one point he gratuitously refers to as Saint Nick, ‘believes that, once upon a time, the press enjoyed a golden age. He can’t quite put a date to it … But in any case, things ain’t what they used to be. Then (whenever then was) journalists had time to check agency copy, make their own calls, go out and order coffee; time to think. Now all that’s gone to hell on a turbo-charged handcart’. However, for Preston the supposed ‘golden age’ was also the era of ‘Beaverbrook, union disputes stopping the presses, and regional mini-barons intervening to keep their Rotary Club chums out of the headlines. It is a dream and a confection. It is also chock-full of self-deception’. And in the Press Gazette February 15th, David Leppard, former editor of the Sunday Times Insight team and the subject of considerable criticism in the book, claimed that: ‘according to Davies, nearly all of us – except him – have abandoned the standards of some bygone golden era’.

The only problem, however, is that Flat Earth News, which is very well informed about the history of journalism, quite explicitly rejects the notion of any golden age. Thus, as Davies clearly states: ‘there never was some kind of golden age when all journalists were free to tell the truth. They have always had to work against the clock and they have always been the targets of attempts to interfere in their stories. They have always been – as they still are – restrained by media law which, in Britain, remains particularly restrictive in its approach to official secrecy and libel. There always were accidental screw-ups and deliberate lies’. Davies furnishes various examples of just how bad journalism could be in the past, most notably coverage of black people by the US press in the nineteenth century which was distinguished by ‘casual news reports about meetings of the Ku Klux Klan as a good Christian organisation; plenty of comfortable jokes about the stupidity of poor niggers’ and reports such as ‘the lynching picnic was postponed until Saturday … A thrilling time is expected here’.

But what is really at stake in such criticisms are not different views of the history of journalism but different conceptions of journalism itself – in particular the old dispute about whether journalism is a trade or a profession. On this point, Preston is clearly a tradesman, arguing that ‘low blows and dodgy statistics are also a part of the business all journalists really belong to – which … is a trade, and a rough one, at that’. Preston concludes that ‘one inescapable point about journalism is that, base or lofty, ruthless or idealistic, it is a mess, and always has been. That shouldn’t stop us from trying to clean it up point by point, problem by problem. We can’t afford not to be serious about our serious trade. But nor – like rather too many tremulous tradesmen – should we wallow in a froth of self-loathing that blots out the good and the necessary and the essential, too’.

A similar, if more cynical, line was followed by Tom Fort in the Sunday Telegraph, February 24th, who stated that: ‘Nick Davies is a distinguished reporter who specialises in very long and depressing stories for The Guardian on subjects most other journalists prefer to leave untouched, such as poverty and the failings of the criminal justice system. He has now turned his virtuous investigative eye on his own profession. His reaction is almost spinsterish in its horror. Davies’ notion of what journalists and journalism are for is idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. Whoever told him that this is an industry “supposedly dedicated” – as he puts it in his prologue – “to telling the truth”? Where did he get the idea that journalists should be, or ever have been, reluctant to lie, cheat, deceive and resort to low tricks of every kind?’

However, the clearest evidence that Davies’ conception of journalism is very different from that of some of his colleagues is provided by a particularly revealing response to one of the most symptomatic examples of ‘churnalism’ in the book, which concerns a story put out in 2006 by the Press Association about a football fan who insured himself against emotional trauma in the event of England failing in the World Cup. As Davies himself puts it: this story contains all the ‘essential ingredients for the concoction of all Flat Earth News – an unreliable statement created by outsiders, usually for their own commercial or political benefit, injected via a wire agency into the arteries of the media, through which it then circulates around the whole body of global communication. And, most important, at every stage, as it passes through the hands of all those journalists, nobody checks it’. Many people might react to this tale with horror, or simply weary resignation, but not Jon Harris, the managing director of Cavendish Press, who responded in the Press Gazette, February 15th that it was ‘clearly a fabricated stunt and has been done to death before, but if it still entertains the reader, then who cares?’ Harris is clearly a total stranger to irony, as nothing could illustrate more starkly Davies’ contention that one of the rules of modern journalism is ‘if we can sell it, we’ll tell it’, and that editorial judgement has collapsed under the enormous pressure to ‘give people what they want’.

Particularly crass though it may be, Harris’ response actually shares a tendency with some of the more positive responses to the book, namely to miss the bigger picture and to fail to see the wood for the trees. Drawn as they are to easily communicable and digestible statistics (not to mention press releases), most journalists homed in on the fact that, out of 2000 news stories in The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent and Mail, only 12per cent were wholly composed of material researched by reporters, and 80 per cent were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. (The make-up of the remaining 8 per cent was unclear). Furthermore, the ‘facts’ had been thoroughly checked in only 12 per cent of the stories. As Davies himself put it in the Guardian, February 4th: ‘the implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have geneally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda’. Furthermore, Davies’ researchers discovered that ‘the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time. Add that to all of the traditional limits on journalists’ trying to find the truth, and you can see why the mass media generally are no longer a reliable source of information’.

However, this is only part of the story, albeit an important one. Particularly in Chapter 4, ‘The Rules of Production’, Davies broadens his analysis very considerably to take in all the various factors which combine to ensure that certain kinds of stories are routinely accepted as being newsworthy and that others are equally routinely rejected. And although Davies doesn’t actually say so, what we have here is nothing less than a version of Herman and Chomsky propaganda model, with the five filters replaced by ten rules. These include: run cheap stories, select safe facts, avoid the electric fence, select safe ideas, give them want they want, and go with the moral panic. Davies sums up his model thus: ‘the rules of production of the news factory themselves impose their own demands as media outlets pick easy stories with safe facts and safe ideas, clustering around official sources for protection, reducing everything they touch to simplicity without understanding, recycling consensus facts and ideas regardless of their validity because that is what the punters expect, joining any passing moral panic, obsessively covering the same stories as their competitors. Arbitrary, unreliable and conservative. Most worrying, however, this flow of falsehood and distortion through the news factory is clearly being manipulated, by the overt world of PR and the covert world of intelligence and strategic communications’. And in a particularly telling comment he remarks that ‘there is no need for a totalitarian regime when the censorship of commerce runs its blue pencil through every story’, although what is especially chilling about the book is the way in which it shows commercial and political forces working together to produce forms of censorship the more dangerous for being largely covert and invisible.

Davies concludes that ‘what we are looking at here is a global collapse of information-gathering and truth-telling. And that leaves us in a kind of knowledge chaos, where the very subject matter of global debate is shifted from the essential to the arbitrary; where government policy, cultural values, widespread assumptions, declarations of war and attempts at peace all turn out to be poisoned by distortion; where ignorance is accepted as knowledge and falsehood is accepted as truth’. Perhaps, then, it’s no wonder that Fleet Street journalists ignored the wider picture.

Link:

Comment by Simon Jenkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/08/politics.media

The Crazy World of Anthony Browne

Alex Doherty — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:34:00 +0000

The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain (2006)

London: Civitas. 120 pages. ISBN: 10: 1 – 903386 – 50 – 10. £9.50 paperback.

Occasionally one encounters a book that reads like a totally satire-free version of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, or of Henry Root’s World of Knowledge. A recent example is Anthony Browne’s The Retreat of Reason, subtitled: ‘Political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain’ and published by the conservatively inclined think-tank Civitas. Dismissed by the Independent as ‘reactionary bilge’ (which Browne mistakenly believes to constitute an ad hominem attack), it’s like being buttonholed by the pub bore, whose endless views on everything are asserted with supreme self-confidence but appear to have been shaped entirely by the tabloid press, whose every utterance is taken as gospel.

Like Britain’s conservative newspapers, this is a book which will simply confirm certain readers’ existing beliefs, but whose peevish, aggrieved tone and cavalier approach to adducing evidence for its arguments will almost certainly alienate the already unconverted after a few pages. The whole thing, not least the postscript to the second edition, boils down to a particularly shrill and unappetising mishmash of self-aggrandisement (I’m a stalwart lone voice of truth) and self-pity bordering on paranoia (but the horrid liberal conspiracy of the BBC, Guardian, Observer and Independent won’t listen). As such, the book’s title is an extraordinarily unwise hostage to fortune, as is the reminder of Lord Macaulay’s remark that ‘he does not seem to know what an argument is’.

Its title notwithstanding, the book actually defies engagement on a rational basis. Browne himself is an admirer of the tabloids as ‘torch-bearers for truth by daring to write deeply uncomfortable things that others refuse to’, and his method of argument is the same as theirs: set up a straw man, then knock it down with a few killer facts and a dose of ‘common sense’ (in other words, received wisdom). The only problem is that, as usual, the straw man bears little or no relation to reality: PC is defined as ‘an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated’. But who actually holds such views? Certainly nobody whom I know within academia, the liberal media or NGOs, institutions which Browne takes to be particularly badly infected by PC.

Many of the ‘facts’ turn out, on examination, to be no such thing. All too often, no sources are given for stories of alleged PC outrages, or sources are tendentious and unreliable (as in the case of the Daily Express, for example). Where one knows something about the subject in question, elementary errors are obvious, making one instinctively distrust Browne’s accounts of subjects about which one knows less. A good example of his way with the ‘facts’ is his assertion that: ‘the canteen of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies upbraided one German student for asking for white coffee because it could be construed as racist: she was told to ask for coffee with milk’. The first problem is that no such School exists, but presuming he means the School of Oriental and African Studies, there is no ban on anyone asking for white coffee there. It’s possible that the remark was made by an ideologically over-zealous individual, or perhaps by someone gullible enough to believe the myths about such bans routinely peddled by the press. Alternatively, the incident might never have taken place at all. But the reader is simply not in a position to make a judgement on the matter, and this one concluded that all we have here is a piece of unsubstantiated tittle-tattle.

In similar vein, no council has ever banned black bin-bags as racist; this is another press-generated myth, as I demonstrate at some length in Culture Wars: the Media and the British Left (Edinburgh University Press 2005). When the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh was killed, Index on Censorship did not ‘automatically side with the comparatively powerless Islamic Dutch-Moroccan killer’, nor is it ‘on the brink of turning from an organisation that campaigns for freedom of speech to one that campaigns against it’. This is simply pernicious nonsense. School curricula have not ‘re-written’ history to portray Shakespeare and Florence Nightingale as homosexual, whatever the occasional individual school text may (or may not) contain. Multiculturalism does not require people ‘to give up feelings of tribalism and belonging and … to prefer “the other” to the familiar’, nor does it believe that those coming to this country should isolate themselves in ‘parallel societies’. Quite apart from the fact that both these claims are false, they’re also mutually contradictory. Again, it’s demonstrably untrue that ‘there are virtually no pressure groups that promote politically incorrect views’, still less that the ubiquitous Migrationwatch UK is ‘a lone group campaigning for less immigration’ which is ‘almost totally blackballed by the BBC’.

Need I go on?

The Retreat of Reason would not be worth engaging with at all were it not for the fact that, with ludicrous fantasies about ‘banning Easter’ and stopping schoolchildren singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ once again flooding conservative newspapers, the book ‘seems to tap into something approaching a zeitgeist’, as the Independent noted. But before engaging with it on even a symptomatic level we need to remind ourselves of what is generally meant by ‘political correctness’.

The widespread use of the term dates back to the beginnings of the 1990s in the States, although the struggle against PC both there and in Britain is but the latest stage in a long-running assault by conservative opinion on secular liberal values. Its roots are intimately tied up with the ending of the Cold War, as Valerie Scatamburlo points out in Soldiers of Misfortune: ‘Redirecting the wrath once reserved for commies and pinko compatriots, the New Right concocted a new adversary comprised of Left intellectuals and multicultural sympathisers, and embarked upon an ideological struggle to reclaim the last bastion allegedly controlled by radicals – the academy … Suddenly, those intellectuals who had begun to speak out against sedimented forms of racism, debilitating practices of patriarchy, and xenophobia were cast as anti-democratic and anti-Western. Conservatives interpreted demands for inclusive curricula, canon revision, and pedagogical reform as signals that Western civilisation itself was under siege by the “new” barbarians clamouring at the gates’.

Right-wing triumphalism in the wake of the Iraq war also played a role here, for just as Mrs Thatcher turned on the miners and other trade unionists as the ‘enemy within’ in the wake of the Falklands, so, in the US, Operation Desert Storm gave way to Operation Campus Storm. Particularly significant here was the speech given by President Bush at the University of Michigan in May 1991, in which he claimed that PC:

‘replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits. What began as a cause for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship … In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity’.

This gave the nascent anti-PC campaign a tremendous boost, and in the ensuing years the notion of PC has enabled conservatives to unify into a single conspiracy against their pet hates such as multiculturalism, affirmative action, speech codes, and gender and sexual politics. PC has become an extremely useful form of ideological shorthand, a loaded epithet frequently brought into play by today’s guardians of the status quo to decry, as Scatamburlo argues, ‘any position that challenges the virtuosity of capitalism, the nobility of right-wing cultural values, or the notion that oppressive relations of racism and sexism are still pervasive in America’. It has endowed conservatives with a master trope, which enables them summarily to dismiss criticism, quell dissent and stifle critical discourse, all the while presenting themselves as fighting a conspiracy to destroy freedom of speech. Thus are liberal ideas distorted and demonised, thus come into being oxymoron’s such as ‘liberal fascism’ and ‘femi-Nazis’, thus have conservatives attempted to project themselves as moderate and objective in relation to Left-wing lunatic extremists, and thus is censorship legitimised.

In both the US and the UK the campaign against PC has been greatly aided by the media. For example, on December 24th 1990 a Newsweek cover warned readers to ‘Watch What You Say’ and splashed the words ‘Thought Police’ across the middle of the cover in large block letters. But the anti-PC campaign was given its greatest boost in the US by the radio ‘shock-jocks’ such as Rush Limbaugh, and, more recently, by the openly partisan Fox News; however, its progress was somewhat hindered in the US press by many American papers’ insistence on fact-checking (a practice which many British journalists regard with unconcealed contempt and derision), which prevented some of the more ludicrous stories finding their way into print.

In Britain, the anti-PC campaign first took the form of a sustained attack on the alleged antics of ‘Loony Left’ London councils in the second half of the 1980s, but in the following decade it came to focus on almost anything of which conservative opinion disapproved, especially any Labour policy which it deemed overly liberal, the notion of human rights, and the activities of most NGOs (and in particular of those which, in conservative circles, it appears to be absolutely obligatory to call the ‘race relations industry’). But where the anti-PC forces in the US were hampered by a national press, which was predominantly liberal in outlook, in Britain they were massively aided by an overwhelmingly conservative, and indeed predominantly illiberal, one.

Unlike Anthony Browne, let’s just get our facts straight here. The dominant view emanating from Britain’s press is profoundly conservative in terms of the social values which it espouses, and, in specifically party political terms, the Mail, Telegraph and Express openly and consistently support the Conservatives and the Murdoch papers are clearly waiting for the party which they have traditionally backed to become more obviously electable before transferring their atavistic allegiances back to them. This leaves just the Guardian, Independent, Financial Times and (on a good day) Mirror as representing Britain’s socially liberal newspapers, whose combined circulation in August 2006 was a mere 2,696,995 against the 8,836,853 of the conservative press.

This fact alone makes a complete nonsense of Browne’s claims that ‘by the early twenty-first century, political correctness had completed its long march through the institutions of Britain’ and that ‘the long march of PC through every nook and cranny of national life, was helped by the fact that there is little competing ideology’. The very fact that it is Britain’s conservative press that has served as the main conduit for anti-PC stories in Britain (many of which are uncritically trotted out here) immediately gives the lie to these assertions, as does the openly and avowedly illiberal stance taken by that press on matters such as human rights, ‘Europe’, immigration, the judiciary, crime, in fact all the major issues of the day. Indeed, it is the ferociously illiberal and stridently populist (which Browne characteristically confuses with popular) manner in which these issues are routinely framed by the conservative press which makes it so difficult to engage in sensible public debate, let alone legislate, on these matters. Fascinatingly, Browne’s strictures about the phantasm of PC can actually be applied entirely without alteration to the all-too-real phenomenon of the conservative press (as can his quote from Lenin to the effect that ‘a lie told often enough becomes the truth’). For example: ‘counter arguments to politically correct beliefs are dismissed without consideration, or simply suppressed’; ‘people who transgress politically correct beliefs are seen not just as wrong, to be debated with, but evil, to be condemned, silenced and spurned’ (a particular speciality of the Mail); ‘the politically correct build impregnable castles around their beliefs, which means, like royalty, never having to justify and never having to apologise’ (Paul Dacre to a T); ‘the stifling of public debate, the preference for emotional comfort over reason, and for political correctness over factual correctness, can often make it very difficult for policy makers to deal with growing problems’ (most obviously ‘Europe’).

Significantly, however, neither the media as a whole nor the conservative press in particular loom large in Browne’s book (although there are a few sideswipes at the allegedly over-liberal BBC and the unholy trinity of the Guardian/Observer/Independent). But, of course, Browne is a journalist (Europe correspondent at The Times), and, as such, adheres to the increasingly threadbare and discredited ideology that the media are simply passive reflectors of the society on which they report, as opposed to key players in it, and in the political process in particular. As John Lloyd argues in What the Media are Doing to Our Politics: ‘the media have an unwritten rule not to divulge their power … They make and re-make the versions of the world with which we live – and yet when the news media represent the world, they largely excuse themselves from it’. Or as David Walker puts it in his contribution to the New Politics Network pamphlet Invisible Political Actors, journalists ‘rarely write about themselves or their own political responsibilities, and they almost never write about the organisations and interests of the organisations they themselves write for’. From the way in which most journalists write and speak about their work, one would never guess that they are employed by what are now some of the most powerful institutions in society. Furthermore, because they refuse to acknowledge their power they also refuse to acknowledge the responsibility and accountability that go with power – whilst at the same time, of course, constantly insisting on their right, and indeed their duty, to scrutinise and hold to account all other power holders. Consequently, as Will Hutton put it in the Observer, August 17th 2003: ‘Britain’s least accountable and self-critical institutions have become the media’.

The basic dishonesty and un-tenability of this position is perfectly illustrated by the role played by anti-PC stories in the current rise of the British National Party (BNP). It cannot but damage community relations if the majority white population is constantly regaled by the conservative press with stories that ethnic communities, or organisations acting in their interests, are demanding apparently absurd or excessive changes to traditional British ways of life. Most people are simply not in a position to understand that the vast majority of these stories are either inaccurate, wildly exaggerated or indeed entirely fabricated, and when, disgracefully, by dint of sheer, grinding repetition in the conservative press, some of these stories manage to bounce themselves onto the broadcast agenda as well (Today take particular note), it is perfectly understandable that they feel resentful. Indeed, as far as the press is concerned, this is the very purpose of such stories. In the run-up to the local elections in May 2006, Tory MP Philip Davies accused mainstream politicians of failing to debate asylum and immigration sufficiently, thus making voters feel that their concerns on this issue were being ignored and so turning to the far right. He was quoted in the Observer April 23rd 2006 as saying:

‘People feel nobody is standing up and talking about [asylum and immigration] issues. The whole thing about political correctness is a key driver of that. They feel the only way they’ve got now to express their opinions is to put a cross in a secret ballot for the BNP. The fear is if you are white and you say something that may be considered derogatory by somebody about an ethnic minority, you are going to be sacked or locked up’.

Now this may have been simply a ploy to try to get his party to become tougher on these issues, but it is nonetheless the case that the BNP has indeed played the PC card for all its worth. For example, its 2005 General Election manifesto argued that ‘our dearly-bought birthright of freedom is under mortal threat once more. The political elite are nearing the end of a process which will outlaw any expression of opinions deemed to be politically incorrect’ and promised that ‘all laws against traditional free speech rights will be repealed, starting with the vague, politicised, and hypocritically enforced laws pertaining to race and religion, which are virtually never enforced against foreigners attacking the racial and religious groups indigenous to Britain’.

British conservative newspapers currently lamenting the rise of the BNP should seriously consider the role, which the myths they have created about PC have played in this process. And Anthony Browne in particular should reflect on why he has such a fan in the American website V-Dare, an affiliate of the Center for American Unity, which is concerned with ‘whether the United States can survive as a nation-state, the political expression of a distinct American people, in the face of these emerging threats: mass immigration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and affirmative action’. Why, closer to home, the BNP website is selling The Retreat of Reason, and why it is lauded there as a ‘powerful critique of political (sic) correct thinking’, ‘long overdue’ and an ‘excellent read’. Curiously, this encomium is missing from the Amazon reviews page.

This review first appeared in Index on Censorship, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2006.

Re-Think Press Freedom?

eddie — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:55:40 +0000

In 1997 a report by the Runnymede Trust entitled Islamophobia: a Challenge For Us All concluded that closed, and negative views of Islam are routinely reflected by the British press, and that such views ‘are seen with particularly stark clarity in cartoons’. Since then, and particularly in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7, these views have been expressed by newspapers with ever greater frequency and intensity – and yet not one British national paper re-published any of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons which caused such a stir in February 2006, cartoons which mirror with uncanny accuracy the attitudes of most of the British press towards Muslims and Islam. Why should this be the case?

Let’s begin with the liberal press, in other words the minority papers in Britain’s overwhelmingly conservative, and indeed illiberal, press culture.

Though by no means above criticism of their coverage of Muslims and Islam, the Guardian and Independent have been consistently less negative and more open in their coverage than most other national dailies, whose Islamophobic tone they have frequently criticised. Their decision not to re-publish any of the cartoons was thus perfectly consistent with their editorial stance on reporting this whole area. Thus a Leader in the Independent, February 3rd, argued that: ‘There is, of course, no doubt that newspapers should have the right to print cartoons that some people find offensive But there is an important distinction to be made between having a right and choosing to exercise it’, which could be seen both as ‘throwing petrol on the flames of a fire that shows every sign of turning into an international conflagration’ and as infringing the ‘right for people to exist in a secular pluralist society without feeling as alienated, threatened and routinely derided as many Muslims now do’. Maintaining that, in this instance, the responsibility to respect others’ beliefs outweighed the right to publish, the paper concluded that: ‘There is a deceptive borderline between controversial and irresponsible journalism. Especially in these troubled times, we must take care that it is not crossed’. And the following day, a further Leader argued that re-publishing the cartoons would have been a ‘cheap gesture’, concluding that: ‘There is no merit in causing gratuitous offence, as these cartoons undoubtedly do’.

The Independent on Sunday, February 5th, took a similar line, Ziauddin Sardar arguing that the idea notion that the ideals of liberal secularism are superior to the ideals of other cultures is ‘Eurocentric and arrogant’, and reaching the conclusion that the limits to free expression:

‘are to be found in the social consequences, the potential harm to others of an exercise of free speech. Tolerance is easy if there is nothing to offend. We become tolerant only when we defer to the sensitivities of those with whom we profoundly disagree on matters we do not believe can or should be accepted. Forbearance is the currency of peaceful coexistence in heterodox society’.
In similar vein, the paper’s Leader stated that, in its view, re-publication would be regarded by Muslims as a ‘deliberate insult’ adding: ‘When the deeply held beliefs of so many people have been made so clear, it requires a particularly childish kind of discourtesy to cause offence knowingly’.

Meanwhile the Guardian adopted a similar stance. Thus a Leader on February 3rd stated that: ‘The right to publish does not imply any obligation to do so’, especially if putting that right to the test inevitably causes offence to many Muslims at a time when there is ‘such a powerful need to craft a more inclusive public culture which can embrace them and their faith’. In the following day’s paper, Gary Younge argued that: ‘The right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. There is no contradiction between supporting someone’s right to do something and condemning them for doing it’, whilst Emily Bell made the point that the paper could and should not ignore the impact of publishing the cartoons – ‘not least on our correspondents working in Europe and the Middle East’. Unsurprisingly, then, the paper’s leader announced that:

‘The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend. It would be senselessly provocative to reproduce a set of images, of no intrinsic value, which pander to the worst prejudices about Muslims Freedom of expression, as it has developed in the democratic west is a value to be cherished, but not abused’.

Whilst one might wish that liberal newspapers put a higher premium on freedom of expression, one cannot in all fairness accuse the Guardian and Independent of inconsistency. The same, however, most certainly cannot be said of the conservative press, given its past (and current) representations of and attitudes to Muslims. Not, for example, of The Times, whose Leader on February 3rd pompously intoned: ‘To duplicate these cartoons several months after they were originally printed also has an element of exhibitionism to it. To present them in front of the public for debate is not a value-neutral exercise. The offence destined to be caused to moderate Muslims should not be discounted’. (This did not, however, deter the paper from having its cake and eating it by providing weblinks to sites displaying the cartoons). Nor of the Sun, which the same day published a credulity-busting Leader which argued that it was not re-publishing the cartoons for two reasons:

‘First, the cartoons are intended to insult Muslims, and the Sun can see no justification for causing deliberate offence to our much-valued Muslim readers. Second, the row over the cartoons is largely a manufactured one. They were printed first in a Danish dispute over free speech. The Sun believes passionately in free speech, but that does not mean we need to jump on someone else’s bandwagon to prove we will not be intimidated’.

Similarly, it is impossible to take seriously, given its past record on this and other matters, the pious protestations of the same day’s Telegraph Leader to the effect that the paper had chosen not to re-publish the cartoons since ‘we prefer not to cause gratuitous offence to some of our readers Our restraint is in keeping with British values of tolerance and respect for the feelings of others’.

However, the first prize for sheer gall and breathtaking hypocrisy has to go to the Mail, whose Leader on February 3rd attempted at a stroke to airbrush out its history of 110 years of bile-spewing and hate-mongering. Freedom of speech, it tells us, is a ‘treasured characteristic of a civilised society’, before making one disbelieve the evidence of one’s own eyes by adding:

‘But great freedoms involve great responsibilities. And an obligation of free speech is that you do not gratuitously insult those with whom you disagree. While the Mail would fight to the death to defend those papers that printed the offending cartoons, it disagrees with the fact that they have done so’.

As it is impossible, given the past record of the conservative press on all matters Islamic, to take any of these protestations remotely seriously, one can only conclude that papers normally only too happy to misrepresent Islam and to heap opprobrium on the heads of Muslims decided on this occasion to self-censor themselves for fear of reprisals. It’s one thing to spew out anti-Muslim sentiment to no-one but your like-minded readers, but quite another to do so in the full glare of the global media spotlight, and when you’re well aware of the treatment meted out to those papers which, for whatever reasons, did re-publish the cartoons. Such a stance would have required both consistency and courage, two qualities conspicuously lacking in Britain’s conservative press, which is a byword for hypocrisy and which is perfectly happy to attack the weak as long as there’s no chance of the weak retaliating. As Gary Younge quite correctly pointed out in the Guardian, February 4th:

‘The right to offend must come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent responsibility. If newspapers have the right to offend then surely their targets have the right to be offended. Moreover, if you are bold enough to knowingly offend a community, then you should be bold enough to withstand the consequences, so long as that community expresses displeasure within the law’.

The other aspect of the conservative press, which this affair all too clearly illuminated, was its utterly cavalier attitude to freedom of expression. For most press owners, press freedom means simply freedom to exercise a property right, in other words to own and to make money from newspapers. In the hyper-competitive British newspaper market, money is not made from what we might call ‘public service’ journalism but from sensationalism, salacious gossip, the cult of celebrity, and, above all, pandering to readers’ prejudices and reinforcing what they think they know already. In such a culture, press freedom no longer automatically means the ability to tackle difficult issues from quite possibly unpopular stances, still less to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and can indeed be airily dismissed as something of interest only to mischief-makers and foreigners – witness Simon Jenkins’ characteristically ex cathedra (and equally characteristically pompous and wrong-headed) pronouncement in The Sunday Times, February 5th that: ‘To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up’. The re-publication by certain European papers of the cartoons is dismissed as ‘the idiot antics of a few continental journalists’, whilst the mere suggestion by some of these papers that at least one or two of their British counterparts might consider following suit in the interests of press freedom is met with the lordly rejoinder that: ‘The demand [sic] by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja’.

The conservative press in Britain is never happier than when calling for the censorship of broadcasters and film-makers, and equally prone to self-censor stories which don’t fit its own peculiar news agenda. Rarely, however, is the latter process quite so overt and unashamed as it was here. Such a situation is almost beyond parody, almost, but not quite, thanks to an absolutely spot-on editorial in Private Eye. Entitled ‘A Free Press’, it deserves reproducing in full:

‘In this country we are fortunate to have a long tradition of press freedom jewel in the crown absolute right to publish cartoons cornerstone of liberty John Milton John Wilkes valiantly fought for hallmark of a truly civilised society bulwark of democracy naturally freedom not absolute John Locke need to respect others’ beliefs no licence to give gratuitous offence excitable chap, Johnny Muslim might get bomb through window got to be careful funny-looking bearded bloke in the car park perhaps this editorial’s a bit strong jolly good chaps, these Muslims we are right behind them in banning these cartoons those Danes should be strung up if you ask me ’

The ubiquitous Jenkins notwithstanding; the Danish cartoons affair does indeed raise certain issues concerning press freedom. On the one hand, that freedom is generally taken to be one of the chief hallmarks of a democratic society. On the other, as I suggested above, the notion of press freedom has come to some extent to be redefined in Britain, and now appears to include the ‘right’ of newspapers to say whatsoever they want about whomsoever they want – and in particular about ethnic communities, which, for years now, have been subjected by most of the press to a rising tide of misrepresentation, hostility and abuse which can only be described as institutionally racist. As Onora O’Neill has argued, the notion of press freedom based on a nineteenth century model in which a free press was seen as a bulwark against an overweening state and a champion of the powerless needs seriously re-thinking in order to take account of the fact that the modern media in general, and the press in particular, are now themselves some of the most powerful institutions in society. As O’Neill put it in the Guardian, February 13th:

‘Once we take account of the power of the media, we are not likely to think that they should enjoy unconditional freedom of expression. We do not think that corporations should have unrestricted rights to invent their balance sheets, or governments to damage or destroy the reputations of individuals or institutions, or to deceive their electorates. Yet contemporary liberal readings of the right to free speech often assume that we can safely accord the same freedom of expression to the powerless and the powerful’.

This question of power brings us right to the heart of the matter. For all newspapers’ daily espousal of neo-liberal economics, the British press can in no sense be described as a free market of ideas, and, sadly, we are a long way indeed from the ideal outlined by Ziauddin Sardar in the Independent on Sunday, February 5th, in which he argued that: ‘Freedom of expression is not about doing whatever we want to do because we can do it. It is about creating an open marketplace for ideals and debate where all, including the marginalised, can take part as equals’. My own view, however, is that this admirable ideal is best served by empowering the powerless rather than by muzzling the powerful, and that newspapers, rather than being censored, should be allowed to ‘publish and be damned’ – damned in the marketplace, damned in the courts both of law and public opinion, and encouraged to become more accurate and less abusive by a statutory right of reply. Why? Because history shows us that censorship is used just as frequently, if not more frequently, against the powerless and marginal as against the dominant and mighty. Because, post 9/11 and 7/7 the last thing that the coinage of civil liberties needs is yet more clipping. And because we need to remember what Salman Rushdie said in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair: ‘What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirise all orthodoxies, including religious orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human’.

Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?

eddie — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 15:17:22 +0000

So routinely hate-filled are the columns of much of the British press that the kind of headlines which appeared in the wake of the London bombings July 2005 – headlines such as ‘Bombers are all spongeing [sic] asylum seekers’ (Express July 27th 2005) and ‘Desperate to die for Islam, the pot smoking mugger with a lust for blondes’ (Mail July 27th 2005) – vile though they are, should really come as no surprise. Many of Britain’s newspapers have long been past masters of Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ – ‘an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp’, as the author described it – and, since the end of the Cold War, refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, Muslims, black and Asian people, and indeed foreigners in general, have increasingly come to take the place once occupied by the Left in press demonology.

But though the targets may have changed, the mode of attack has remained much the same. This was certainly the conclusion to which I came having researched and written part of Culture Wars: the Media and the British Left (Edinburgh University Press), which, fortuitously, appeared during last summer’s hate-fest. The book, which was co-written with James Curran and Ivor Gaber, examines in detail how the media in general, and the press in particular, have dealt with the Left in London – from the Ken Livingstone-era GLC, through the so-called ‘loony left’ boroughs such as Islington, Haringey and Brent in the late 1980s, to the Greater London Authority, and, more specifically, Mayor Livingstone’s introduction of the congestion charge.

Admittedly, the picture that emerged from our researches was not an entirely straightforward one. For example, James Curran shows how the GLC skilfully managed sections of the media, succeeding even in marshalling a degree of support from those journalists concerned at the implications for democracy of the Council’s threatened abolition, whilst Ivor Gaber demonstrates how BBC London (but not ITV’s London Tonight) resisted an otherwise pervasive anti-congestion charge press agenda which seemed to have been set largely by London’s monopoly evening paper, the Standard. But for the ‘loony left’ boroughs, which I investigated, the treatment was unremittingly hostile in the extreme, and illustrates all too clearly what happens when the political establishment – in which category I would unhesitatingly include most newspapers – decides that a particular group is entirely beyond the political pale, and thus a legitimate target for the ideological flamethrower.

One of the fundamental problems for these boroughs was that they had very little political ‘cover’ at Westminster. Naturally, their politics were anathema to the Tory government, but they were barely more popular with the Labour establishment, which, moreover, was absolutely terrified of being tarred with the ‘loony’ brush by the press. Leading Labour politicians (aided and abetted by the non-Tory Mirror) thus did everything they could to distance themselves from the beleaguered boroughs – while, of course, the press completely ignored them and preached daily that London’s Labour strongholds were a nightmare microcosm of a future Britain governed by Labour. Thus, for example, the Mail November 6th 1986 argued in an article headed ‘Brent lessons’ that: ‘The public are starting to realise that the lunacies of Brent today could be those of all Britain tomorrow – if Labour wins next time’. The boroughs thus found themselves politically isolated at Westminster, from which it was but a short step to rendering them politically ‘illegitimate’ and thus targets of what can only be described as a sustained and ferocious hate campaign, in which most of the press played an absolutely central role.

But what had these boroughs done to bring such vituperation on their heads? In point of fact, they had done little more than the GLC had in taking Labour policy in a modern and progressive left-wing direction, and, in particular, embracing the politics of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. But the councils not only lacked the GLC’s considerable media management skills (and, it has to be said, its political nous), they were also faced by a government utterly determined to drastically reduce the power of all local government and to take over many of its functions. Such a strategy obviously carries the risk of being criticised as authoritarian and overly centralist – unless, of course, local government can be shown to be corrupt, inefficient or in some other ways drastically in need of reform. And so, enter the ‘loony left’ boroughs as exemplars of everything that was allegedly wrong with local government. And enter the press as a key ally, indeed agent, of government strategy.

The overwhelming bias of most of the British press towards the Conservative Party for most of the twentieth century is a well-established fact. As the late Anthony Bevins, who in the course of his career worked as political correspondent for the Sun, Mail, Times and Independent, put it when we interviewed him for a BBC programme about the press and the ‘loony left’: ‘You don’t really have to differentiate between certain newspapers and the Conservative Party. Certain newspapers, from where I stand as an independent journalist, are the Tory party. They serve the functions of the Tory Party. They are what Richard Shepherd called in the House of Commons “the hallelujah chorus”, and he’s a Conservative M.P.’ During the period of the Thatcher governments most of the press became what Bruce Page in The Murdoch Archipelago (Simon and Schuster 2003) aptly describes as ‘grossly servile.’ Indeed, so extreme was its obsequiousness that Lord Gilmour, who was a member of Thatcher’s first cabinet, famously noted in his classic work on Thatcherism, Dancing with Dogma (Simon and Schuster 1992), that the press during the Thatcher era ‘could scarcely have been more fawning if it had been state controlled.’

Similarly, Lord Alport, the former Conservative M.P. and Director of the Conservative Political Centre stated in the Telegraph March 5th 1985 that the press had ‘for the most part gone to extraordinary lengths to support the government’s policies and flatter the Prime Minister.’ And not for nothing did two of Britain’s leading playwrights, Howard Brenton and David Hare, call their 1985 play about the British press Pravda.

This is not, of course, to argue that all journalists in this era were ardent Tories – far from it. But it has to be acknowledged that most of their employers were exactly that, and he who pays the piper To quote Bevins again: ‘It is daft to suggest that individuals can buck the system, ignore the pre-set “taste” of their newspapers, use their own news-sense in reporting the truth of any event, and survive. Dissident reporters who do not deliver the goods suffer professional death. They are ridden by news desks and backbench executives, they have their stories spiked on a systematic basis, they face the worst form of newspaper punishment – by-line deprivation It is much easier to pander to what the editors want.’ Especially, it might be added, when your newspaper has de-recognised your union, refuses to countenance a ‘conscience clause’ in your terms of employment, and may well have hired you on a short-term contract.

Of course, it might be argued that Culture Wars mostly charts yesterday’s battles, and that things are different now. But, sadly, they’re not. First of all, the Conservative press is as vicious and atavistic as ever. Papers such as the Telegraph, Mail and Express clearly regard even palest pink New Labour as dangerous extremists who have somehow managed to usurp the ‘rightful’ party of government – in itself a profoundly anti-democratic concept. Meanwhile, New Labour and the Murdoch press have struck up exactly the same self-interested, mutually back-scratching relationship that so disfigured and corrupted the Thatcher era. But, above all, the vast bulk of the British press remains as profoundly illiberal as it was in the days of the GLC and the ‘loony left.’ Such an ideology, and, additionally in the case of the Murdoch papers, such naked collusion with government, make the idea of the British press as a ‘fourth estate’ – an independent, liberal institution holding government to account on behalf of the people – a complete and utter nonsense.

Nowhere is this clearer than in most papers’ attitude to race and ethnicity, which are as Neanderthal now, as they were in the 1980s. Then the target was London Labour Councils, which tried to tackle the inequality, racism and lack of opportunity faced by the ethnic communities within their boroughs. Such initiatives provoked a veritable flood of anti-antiracist outpourings from the most of the press, the Mail of May 3rd 1984, for example, inveighing that: ‘Nowadays racial strife is less likely to be caused by ordinary folk than by the professionals of the race relations industry who in effect go round looking for ways to stir it up.’ But it was when people from these communities began to organise themselves politically, and to elect representatives from among their own number, that the heat of the press flamethrower was turned up to melting point.

Foremost amongst its victims was Bernie Grant, then leader of Haringey council, who had the temerity to speak out in defence of the residents of Broadwater Farm in the wake of the disturbances there. Significantly, he was also the prospective Labour candidate for Tottenham. Thus the Standard October 8th 1985, in a leader addressed to Neil Kinnock and entitled ‘Give Bernie the boot!’ argued that: ‘The only hope of a link between young blacks and the police would have been local community leaders. That this is out of the question in Tottenham is demonstrated by the astonishing attitude of the black leader of Haringey council.’

The Mirror October 11th also inveighed against ‘the ravings of Mr Bernie Grant’, and the same day’s Express declared that ‘Britain’s young blacks need this high priest of race hate like a hole in the head.’ Meanwhile The Times October 8th broadened the attack to take in other representatives of the black community: ‘There has recently been much talk of communities and community leaders. That often overstates the cohesiveness of the black population and the pinpointed authority of its leadership.’

What was going on here, and in a veritable flood of other articles and political speeches at the time was a concerted attempt to de-legitimise the democratic representatives of a London borough. The underlying message was clear: if people were wilful, stupid or ‘extreme’ enough to elect those deemed to be beyond the political pale by the Tory government and its client press, then they should not expect their representatives to be treated according to the ‘normal’ rules of political engagement. One is irresistibly reminded of Henry Kissinger’s infamous remark about Chile in June 1970 to the effect that: ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.’ Or as an Express headline put it in July 1986, as the government was rushing through a new Public Order Act as a response to the growing unrest in Britain’s urban areas: ‘Time for the iron fist!’

Having waded through acres of newsprint expressing such thoroughly divisive, inflammatory and enragé sentiments, I came to the conclusion that, in the 1980s, very little had changed since 1974 when Paul Hartman and Charles Husband argued in their classic work Racism and the Mass Media (Davis-Poynter) that: ‘Coloured people have on the whole not been portrayed as an integral part of British society. Instead the press has continued to project an image of Britain as a white society in which the coloured population is seen as some kind of aberration, a problem, or just an oddity, rather than “belonging” to the society.’

But today, the situation is, if anything, even worse, with sections of the Muslim community being represented by the press as virtually an occupying force, or, to use that classic Thatcherite phrase, the ‘enemy within’, the words ‘asylum seeker’ have been turned into a shorthand term of racist abuse, and most of the press has adopted a bizarre, paranoid siege mentality with regard to ‘foreigners’ in general. Meanwhile, any serious attempt to address these issues, all of which in the end boil down to questions of national identity, in a sane and rational fashion – such as the Runnymede Trust’s report The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) – can expect to be met with a hail of derision and misrepresentation in most newspapers. (For a detailed analysis of how the press, led by the Telegraph, traduced this report see my ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’ in Index on Censorship, Vol.30, No.3, 2001).

And yet, as Stuart Hall, one of the members of the Commission which produced the report, put it in the Observer October 15th 2000: ‘The question of Britishness is a time-bomb which is ticking away at the centre of this society and it is either faced and confronted or it will explode in our faces in ways which we do not wish.’ This is a task in which a liberal media, a Fourth Estate as generally understood in liberal democracies, might be expected to play a positive role. Unfortunately, in Britain, most of the press, which is more like a Fifth Column of the racist Right, appears to be doing its utmost to precipitate the explosion.