Tag Archives: Lord Chief Justice’s speech on press regulation

On the threshold of ♯Leveson’s d-day, The Guardian shuts reader-citizens out of the debate

. 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Leveson hearings, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , ,


Citoyens should be king in a democracy, but are being denied free speech on press regulation — by the press.
Photograph by postgutenberg@gmail.com

In the autumn of last year, in the prelude to formal hearings for the Leveson Inquiry, Baron Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, said:

It is the birthright of the citizen that the press should be independent. It is therefore not a right of one section of the community, not just a sectional right. It is the right of the community as a whole. It is, if you like, our right, the right of every citizen.

Reporting on the curious omission by newspapers of any mention of that warning to the press, post-Gutenberg asked:

Why … is no one in the British media mentioning the prohibition by a leading newspaper of free discussion – by ordinary citizens – of the future of the press, on three separate occasions last week?

On the last Sunday before d-day — the 29th of November, when Lord Justice Leveson is due to deliver his report – The Guardian belatedly opened to comment by readers two vital contributions to the press regulation debate from Observer writers. Reader commenting had been barred for most of the day after these pieces were posted in the (ahem) Comment-is-free section of the web site shared by these newspapers but administered by The Guardian (which bought its rival several years ago).

That must have been quite a fight behind the scenes, before The Guardian relented and, by mid-morning on the 25th, let justice and common sense prevail.

Read the excerpts from these opinions The Guardian found so threatening, and be amazed. Better yet, follow our links, read the rest – especially the few reader comments permitted before commenting was once again closed, after less than half a day – and be astounded by the usual categorisation of The Guardian as a ‘liberal’ newspaper.

(i)

— from the Will Hutton column, ‘Why I, as a journalist and ex-editor, believe it is time to regulate the press’ [24 November 2012]:

The precious freedom of speech of an individual is different from the freedom of speech of a media corporation with its capacity to manipulate the opinions of millions, which is why it must take place within the law and within a framework of accountability. Freedom is not only menaced by the state; it is also menaced by private media barons and their servants, …

An avalanche of highly spun journalism to serve partisan interests has become habitual. The public realm has become degraded. The trade and craft of journalism has been abused; the journalists who work in newsrooms, where standards are routinely sidelined, need protecting.

(ii)

— from an editorial in The Observer, ‘Leveson report: do we need a new law to rein in the press?’ [24 November 2012]:

The press – as anachronistic as that term now sounds in a digital age – have not, on the whole, been a great advert for plurality in the last month. In that time, they have fixed Leveson in their cross hairs and unleashed a ferocious ordnance in his direction.

[…]

There are reasonable, cogent arguments to be made about regulation or the lack thereof. There is a proper debate that we need to have post-Leveson, one characterised less by tribalism and more by reason.

As we wondered, last November:

[The] question no one in the media apparently wants to face is, will the public grant professional journalists a continuation of special privileges in the digital age if they no longer adhere to the traditions of fairness, neutrality and dedication to the truth that won them those privileges in the 18th century? Earlier this month, this blog mentioned the media’s refusal to acknowledge – or indeed discuss at all – the public’s dismay about an increasingly partisan press.

There are other alarming silences …

Now you see them, now you don’t …

Should ordinary citizens be denied a say in the media’s future — as in, ‘For legal reasons, this article will not be open to comments’?

. 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action . , , , , , , , ,

Are cover-ups and the suppression of debate growing more frequent in the world's proudest democracies? Photograph by Amita Chatterjee

This is no ordinary elephant in the living room, the one the media are pretending not to see. She is pirouetting on stiletto heels in the shortest skirt ever sewn, displaying elephantine slabs of thigh. Still they behave as if she is invisible.

Recent events in England – which gave the rest of the world the model of a free press – are sending shivers up the spine of anyone who cares about democracy, from Calcutta to San Francisco and beyond. This is because of the eerie, silent void where you might expect round-the-clock media coverage of the media’s strategies for preserving their freedom and independence — on their terms.

Any attention paid to this struggle by the British press has focused on the tabloid phone hacking scandal, and just that part of a far wider judicial investigation of professional standards and practices, the Leveson Inquiry ordered by the prime minister.

Shameful and appalling as the hacking sagas are, they matter far less than the pachyderm in the parlour – on a par with the news earlier this month of Google being forced by the government of India, the world’s largest democracy, to cooperate with censoring web pages after ‘weeks of intense government pressure for 22 Internet giants to remove photographs, videos or text considered “anti-religious” or “anti-social”’.

That question no one in the media apparently wants to face is, will the public grant professional journalists a continuation of special privileges in the digital age if they no longer adhere to the traditions of fairness, neutrality and dedication to the truth that won them those privileges in the 18th century? Earlier this month, this blog mentioned the media’s refusal to acknowledge – or indeed discuss at all – the public’s dismay about an increasingly partisan press.

There are other alarming silences. Why, for instance, is no one in the British media mentioning the prohibition by a leading newspaper of free discussion – by ordinary citizens – of the future of the press, on three separate occasions last week?

In each case, a member of the Establishment – one high-ranking politician and two journalists – addressed the jubilation in the British press about Rupert Murdoch redux; many journalists only care about their belief that he is saving jobs in journalism. The media mogul who should have been fatally wounded by the hacking scandal is throwing his octogenarian energy into engineering a comeback with a new paper, the Sun on Sunday. None of these writers spared Murdoch the lash. Two of them delivered blistering warnings about the dangers of condoning this latest power-grab and about the perils, for British democracy, of concentrating media ownership in a few hands — especially, his.

Nothing in their excoriations suggested that they feared any legal retribution from Murdoch or his empire, News International. And yet each of these articles appeared on the portion of a newspaper site titled Comment is Free, advertised as a debating forum open to all, with an announcement that, ‘For legal reasons, this article will not be open to comments’.

In that case, why were the Murdoch bashings put on this part of the newspaper’s site at all?

Could the real message behind blocking readers’ reactions be that the newspaper’s editors believe that only they and their colleagues have a right to discuss the redesign of the ‘media landscape’ – even though most British citizens still rely on the press to give them the facts a democracy needs to make decisions that affect its collective wellbeing?

This blog has recorded the same newspaper’s censorship of readers’ posts about media reform in its Comment is Free section (see the entries on 7 November and 15 November). The paper gives no sign of having absorbed the salutary reminder by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, last year that

[i]t is the birthright of the citizen that the press should be independent. It is therefore not a right of one section of the community, not just a sectional right. It is the right of the community as a whole. It is, if you like, our right, the right of every citizen.

Here are opinions that the Guardian refused to allow its readers to discuss on its site – without any explanation that made sense (Kafka-esque, for real?):

Item 1: extracts from an article titled, ‘We must fashion a new media landscape,’ by Norman Fowler, a former chairman of the House of Lords communications committee.

… Murdoch remains the traditional proprietor. From his New York headquarters he will continue to have his say in the politics of the United Kingdom – and make no mistake, there will be politicians who will play along with this. […] So we are back to where some of us began. Last summer we were within days of the culture secretary waving through the Murdoch bid to take full control of BSkyB and claiming that phone hacking was an entirely separate and irrelevant issue. That fate has been avoided, but the challenge remains to devise a system where nobody – Murdoch or anybody else – has a disproportionate share of the British media. […W]hat is a disproportionate share of the media market? Four newspapers controlling almost 40% of national press circulation and total control of a major television company would have put Murdoch the wrong side of the line. […] Any new rules on share of voice cannot be directed exclusively at News International. The BBC must come within the net as too must the other media giants like Google.

[…]

• For legal reasons, this article will not be open to comments

Item 2: extracts from an article titled. ‘If the Sun on Sunday soars Rupert Murdoch will also rise again,’ by Polly Toynbee.

[P]ractitioners are hired to do their masters’ bidding, even when that can mean spreading disinformation and disregarding evidence. The seventh Sun will offer jobs to those willing to put their pens to abusing migrants, travellers, trade unionists, single mothers, women, the unemployed, public sector staff, young people, Europe, foreigners or anyone to the left of John Redwood. Even the disabled are now being harassed as scroungers to win public support for benefit cuts reducing the already poor to penury.

[…]

Clouds of opposition are gathering around the Leveson press inquiry. Its remit grows, destination unknown. The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, along with many others, are right to demand that it leads to new laws to reset limits on media ownership by any one organisation, which Margaret Thatcher abolished for Murdoch’s sake. If the Sun on Sunday soars, [Murdoch] will be back owning some 40% of press readership, plus Sky (to whom the BBC is wrongly obliged to pay £10m a year).

The Sun and its owner’s influence on British politics have been underestimated in the history of the last decades … […]

• For legal reasons, this article will not be open to comments @commentisfree

Item 3: extracts from an opinion piece titled, ‘Rupert Murdoch’s Sun on Sunday sets on his empire,’ by Michael Wolff.

Curiously, he used […] the arrests of senior Sun staffers on suspicion of bribing the British police – as the crisis that justified the new Sun. The immediate launch of the paper, just days after he arrived in London, would be a way to stabilize an impending civil war in Wapping, he insisted – even as his own investigators continued to turn over evidence to the police. It would be a way, too, to shift attention from the negative to the positive, from retreat to advance.

[…]

Of course, all the investigations continue, the law suits mount, the US Justice Department is at attention, and, next week, public television in the US is promising an explosive new documentary on the Murdoch scandals, which will, in a sense for the first time, bring the story in all its details to the US.

[…]

• For legal reasons, this article will not be open to comments

There is no doubt that the Guardian is furious with Lord Justice Leveson, who asked at the official commencement of his Inquiry, ‘Who guards the guardians?’ Last week, the news that British judges would be rating British lawyers for their performance in court gave the newspaper a chance to play tit-for-tat in an editorial that remarked, ‘Advocates might reasonably ask who is judging the judges’.

No one watching the Leveson hearings could fail to be struck by this judge’s open-mindedness, or by the deference and respect he shows witnesses. He comes across as genuine when he asks for their opinions of what should be done about the media’s failed self-regulation – and is frank about not knowing how to resolve the dilemma that follows from the all-but-universal dislike of proposals for statutory control.

He seems keenly aware of the media’s annoyance with interference with what they see as their business – and sympathetic. But from the odd remark he has let drop about the importance of allowing free discussion – for instance, that statements made on social networks such as Twitter must be counted as mere chat, and not held to the same standards as professional reporting – it seems unlikely that he would disagree with Albert Einstein about the undesirability of letting a wealthy or powerful few control the dissemination of facts and opinions for the many.

It feels not a little odd to be quoting the great physicist’s essay, ‘Why Socialism?’ for the second time this month. But there is a rather stunning parallel between present events and his noting, in 1949, that ‘Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo …’.

This was the most vital point he wanted to impress on his readers:

[U]nder existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Now, as I was saying, about that elephant …

Why is The Guardian censoring debate about press reform and ignoring the Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of citizen journalism?

. 4th Estate moves, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action . , , , ,

Britain’s Lord Chief Justice, Lord (earlier, Sir Igor) Judge, whose endorsement of citizen journalism in a speech on 19 October was not reported by the press

Readers who would first like to see the unimpeachably polite comments deleted by the Guardian’s moderators on 30 October – reproduced exactly as published on its site** before they were censored – can scroll down further on this page. The deletions fall into four classes:

● Comments directing readers to the post on this site titled, ‘Wanted: a brave newspaper for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders,’ and to a paper published by the Oxford Internet Institute,  ‘The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for Post-Gutenberg Publishing,’ downloadable at no charge, here on the Social Science Research Network site.

● Comments pointing to a post on this site showing how the ‘business model’ the press runs on today can radically distort the truth: ‘How competition for advertising in print media let Steve Jobs warp history and steal the credit for the computer revolution.’

● Comments highlighting an addition to this site titled, ‘Will the calls for press reform during Britain’s Hackgate lead to action — or business as usual?’  It starts by quoting the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, about the need to diversify media ownership.

● Comments linked to an article on this site showing how Switzerland makes super-democracy work well: ‘Extreme democracy is not an impossible dream if you copy Switzerland, not California.’ In its first paragraph, this blog entry mentions that the Swiss experience could be a good guide for an experiment in restructuring newspaper ownership.

The Leveson enquiry convened by David Cameron’s government to investigate the British phone hacking scandal and ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press’  will make recommendations about whether the 4th Estate should be trusted to regulate itself.

Can the public be expected to trust self-regulation when a leading newspaper is going out of its way to obstruct debate about media ownership, and the question of whether the media should be restructured to include non-traditional disseminators of information?

Could this restriction of free expression be related to the omission from press reports of any mention of a clear and ringing  endorsement of ‘citizen journalism’ – and the rest of the 5th Estate – by Britain’s top judge, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord (Igor) Judge, in a speech on press regulation in mid-October? So few newspapers reported the speech at all that I learnt about it from a Twitter feed.

The Guardian, like The Sun, only mentioned what he said about the importance of a free press in a brief news item, leaving readers to find their own way to his careful qualification of that remark in a transcript of the whole speech posted on its site. It failed to draw its readers’ attention to a point he emphasised at the start of his lecture. It was about the tendency of the press to wilfully misread a famous statement in 1762 by the reformer and political activist, John Wilkes, as restricting the right to uncensored expression to the privileged minority that the 4th Estate represents. Justice Judge began by quoting Wilkes, then explained what the agitator meant:

“The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country”. 

We embrace that statement. The significance of what John Wilkes said was not, as those connected with the media sometimes suggest, that the statement is upholding the liberty of the press. That is undoubtedly a direct consequence of what John Wilkes said, but in reality on close examination what he was saying was much more profound. He was asserting that the liberty of the press is the birthright of every citizen, that is, the community as a whole. It is birthright of the citizen that the press should be independent. It is therefore not a right of one section of the community, not just a sectional right. It is the right of the community as a whole. It is, if you like, our right, the right of every citizen.

I cannot believe that The Guardian thinks its moderators should be deleting proposals for a mere experiment in co-owning part of a newspaper site with reader-citizens. But I had no reply after I tweeted the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, an alert about the removal of a comment containing a link to my piece about the pernicious effects of advertising on the presentation of the truth. Earlier messages asking the newspaper’s moderation team for an explanation for the cuts also received no answer. This is puzzling. The editor has been giving speeches about ‘the mutualization’ of his newspaper, announcing that ‘our readers have become part of what we do. . . lending a hand with research and ideas, bringing us up short when we get things wrong.’ 

Cheryll Barron

** As we live in an age of digital forgery, I have saved not just the deleted comments by postgutenberg but the threads on which they were posted, and would willingly present them for authentication to any democratically licensed official body. Correspondence to: postgutenberg@gmail.com

THE CENSORED COMMENTS

Here is a sample of the comments by postgutenberg that were deleted by the Guardian on 30 October. Most of the censored contributions were left undisturbed for several days or weeks until I posted the first of these pointers to this site – after which there was a grand retrospective purge:

(1)

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson – review

Peter Conrad 

‘postgutenberg

30 October 2011 11:39PM

This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.’

What the censored comment said:

postgutenberg

30 October 2011 11:39PM

Read this and you can make up your own mind:

How competition for advertising in print media let Steve Jobs warp history and steal the credit for the computer revolution

https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/10/25/how-competition-for-advertising-in-print-media-let-steve-jobs-warp-history-and-steal-the-credit-for-the-computer-revolution/


(2)

A register of journalists’ interests would help readers to spot astroturfing

George Monbiot http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/29/voluntary-register-journalists-interests-astroturfing

‘postgutenberg‘s comment 29 September 2011 9:34PM

This comment has been removed by a moderator.’

What the censored comment said:

postgutenberg

29 September 2011 9:34PM

An interesting idea, but you can share the same tiny media cubicle, and never discover who your workmate knows, or what his or her true interests are. So if there were such a register, would people tell the truth?

Secrecy is so often the essence of power.

What would prevent fake transparency in declaring your interests?

Addressing Whealie‘s point, what if the Guardian were to try out an experiment in which commenters become part-owners of a section of the online newspaper and helped to decide on policies, including moderation?

More details here: Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders.

https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/09/05/wanted-a-brave-newspaper-for-an-experiment-in-which-readers-become-stakeholders/

(3)

Occupy Wall Street? These protests are not Tahrir Square but scenery

Simon Jenkins http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/occupy-wall-street-tahrir-scenery

‘postgutenberg‘s comment 20 October 2011 10:14PM

This comment has been removed by a moderator.’

What the censored comment said:

            postgutenberg

            20 October 2011 10:14PM

There are serious gaps in the transparency of modern democracy. Between elections, the traditional mediators between electors and those in power have withered. The “customary associations and little platoons” have dwindled.

Spot-on.

But surely the press is that great traditional mediator?

… the 4th Estate that is now supposed to be sharing power with the even more democratic 5th Estate? Yet to the restructuring of media that this calls for, Simon is furiously opposed … Scroll to the end and see the quotation of OpiumEater’s sharp post, here:

Will the calls for press reform during Britain’s Hackgate lead to action — or business as usual?

https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/09/19/will-the-calls-for-press-reform-during-hackgate-lead-to-action-or-business-as-usual/

Why?

And a writer who turned to fiction to show us exactly what needs to change – whose work could easily supply a list of precise demands for Occupy Everything – has been mis-classified as a vacuous Dan Brown-equivalent:

Stieg Larsson, 5th estate forerunner, marginalised as a media critic      

https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/09/05/stieg-larsson-5th-estate-forerunner-marginalised-media-critic/

postgutenberg [this correction of the censored comment was left in place]

20 October 2011 10:19PM

Sorry, that was supposed to say, why is Simon opposed to restructuring the media for the 5th Estate? — far more democratic than the 4th Estate because of the greater inclusiveness of the internet as a medium.

(4)

Capitalism has learned to create host organisms

Zygmunt Bauman

‘postgutenberg‘s comment 18 October 2011 11:14AM

This comment has been removed by a moderator.’

What the censored comment said:

postgutenberg

18 October 2011 11:14AM

Good analysis and fresh thinking — even if it is pessimistic.

That new art – made possible by the shift from the “society of producers” to the “society of consumers”, and from the meeting of capital and labour to the meeting of commodity and client as the principal source of “added value” – profit and accumulation consists mostly of the progressive commodification of life functions, market mediation in successive needs’ satisfaction and substituting desire for need in the role of the fly-wheel of the profit-aimed economy.

But couldn’t we use the internet to reverse that shift? It has given us so many tools to become producers ourselves – and to set up our own websites to sell what we make, anything from the materialist bits ‘n’ bobs that pass through E-Bay to paintings, texts, — even shares in creative enterprises of every kind, through so-called ‘crowd-sourcing’.

And what if the media were to lead the way — showing how to co-opt capitalism’s limitless energy and inventiveness through co-ownership? … effectively, a cross between socialism and capitalism?

Most of the new co-operative ventures tried in the 1970s failed, usually because decision-making was slow and cumbersome. But with the blazing speeds at which detailed information can be communicated and votes tallied with today’s media, new co-operative ventures wouldn’t be burdened with the same difficulties as the old ones.

Yes, there would be new problems – there are always problems – but why not experiment and see what happens?

Wanted: a brave newspaper for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders

https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/09/05/wanted-a-brave-newspaper-for-an-experiment-in-which-readers-become-stakeholders/

(5)

Europe’s defunct idealism is like Munich all over again

Simon Jenkins

‘postgutenberg‘s comment 19 October 2011 2:07AM

This comment has been removed by a moderator.’

What the censored comment said:

postgutenberg

19 October 2011 2:07AM

A rare treat — constructive new thinking, actually being implemented:………………..found a few minutes ago in a NYT column by Joe Nocera:

We Can All Become Job Creators

By JOE NOCERA

Howard Schultz. God bless him.

Here we are two months later, and Schultz [founder-president of Starbucks] is back with Big Idea No. 2. It is every bit as idealistic as his first big idea, but far more practical. Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1. This time, Schultz is not tilting at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/nocera-we-can-all-become-job-creators.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=printwindmills.

Wanted: a brave newspaper for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders

https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/09/05/wanted-a-brave-newspaper-for-an-experiment-in-which-readers-become-stakeholders/