Media Independence

Working with Freedom or Working for Free?

James Bennett, Niki Strange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138548459
• eBook ISBN: 9781317690337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Media independence is central to the organization, make-up, working practices and output of media systems across the globe. Often stemming from western notions of individual and political freedoms, independence has informed the development of media across a range of platforms: from the freedom of the press as the "fourth estate" and the rise of Hollywood's Independent studios and Independent television in Britain, through to the importance of "Indy" labels in music and gaming and the increasing importance of independence of voice in citizen journalism. Media independence for many, therefore, has come to mean working with freedom: from state control or interference, from monopoly, from market forces, as well as freedom to report, comment, create and document without fear of persecution. However, far from a stable concept that informs all media systems, the notion of media independence has long been contested, forming a crucial tension point in the regulation, shape, size and role of the media around the globe.

Contributors including David Hesmondhalgh, Gholam Khiabany, José van Dijck, Hector Postigo, Anthony Fung, Stuart Allan and Geoff King demonstrate how the notion of independence has remained paramount, but contested, in ideals of what the media is for, how it should be regulated, what it should produce and what working within it should be like. They address questions of economics, labor relations, production cultures, ideologies and social functions.

Section I
Indies, Independents and Independence

1
Guarding the Guardians

The Leveson Inquiry and the Future of Independent Journalism

Stephen Jukes and Stuart Allan

There have been too many times when, chasing the story, parts of the press have acted as if its own code, which it wrote, simply did not exist. This has caused real hardship and, on occasion, wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people….

—Introduction to the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press

A judicial farce and a dark day for freedom.

—Daily Mail

Introduction: Drinking in the Last Chance Saloon

With the flick of a pen on a royal charter, Queen Elizabeth II signed away 300 years of British press freedom. Or so, at least, maintained a good number of the nation’s newspapers the day after it happened in October 2013. The truth is probably somewhat less black and white but one thing is certain: the saga of press regulation will, to cite a newspaper cliché, run and run.

In Britain, impassioned appeals to freedom of the press have resounded throughout the centuries, but in recent years journalists have by common consent been “drinking in the last chance saloon.”¹ Revelations in 2011 that reporters on the tabloid Sunday newspaper News of the World had hacked into the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler sparked public revulsion and prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to set up a judicial public inquiry into the “Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press” chaired by Lord Justice Leveson. It was the seventh time in seventy years that a British government had launched a commission to investigate newspapers, but this time it was to be different. While previous inquiries were successfully fended off by newspaper owners seeking to defend their freedoms, the findings of the Leveson Inquiry, supported by a highly organized campaign calling for greater protection for the “victims” of press intrusion,² have led to the specter of regulation.

It is a telling feature of public life in most Western countries that newspapers are accorded a central role to uphold democratic governance—a concept widely held to be consistent with notions of an independent fourth estate—and yet, at the same time, no public interest obligations tend to be imposed upon them. The Leveson Inquiry’s highly critical findings, prompting the signing of a royal charter to create a watchdog to oversee a new regulator, come at a time when the British press is mired in what has been described as the most serious crisis for journalism in modern times (Hewlett 2011: 23). The newspapers’ freedom of expression and individuals’ right to privacy have always been pitted against each other, with great care taken by parliamentarians and the courts alike not to tip the balance decisively in one direction. But the Leveson Inquiry, and the subsequent (at times sensational) phone-hacking trial of News of the World journalists, saw simmering tensions come to a boil. The Times dismissed the royal charter as a “medieval instrument.” The Sun (another newspaper in the Rupert Murdoch stable) labeled the inquiry “discredited,” contending that the process had “more in common with tyranny than a nation that founded parliamentary government.” The Daily Mirror lamented “the death warrant for press freedom.” In contrast the Hacked Off campaigners—who, fronted by Hugh Grant, called for tighter regulation—termed the press culture “cowardly, bullying and shocking.”³

This chapter’s discussion begins by tracing the emergence and eventual rhetorical purchase of the fourth estate ideal in order to place current debates over press independence in historical context. Against this backdrop, we proceed to discuss the key findings of the Leveson Inquiry, on the face of it a pivotal moment that could redefine the guiding principles of journalistic integrity in the United Kingdom. The ensuing discussion delves beneath the surface of the rhetoric of journalistic independence to examine just how newspapers came to adopt practices that have led them to be reviled by large sections of the British population. The list is long: how technological change has combined with economics to bring journalistic values into conflict with commercial pressures; how new business models have left journalists doing little more than repurposing “content” into multimedia formats under intense time pressure; how opportunities to produce original, investigative news holding authority to account are undermined as the boundaries between news and entertainment blur; and critically, how efforts to bolster sagging circulations have tempted some newspapers to cross the fine line between the public’s right to know and an individual’s right to privacy, even if it means breaking the law. In offering an evaluation of these findings, this chapter explores the ethical issues at stake for the regulation of a free and independent press in the light of calls to rethink journalism’s public interest responsibilities. We will consider several of the perceived advantages as well as the possible dangers of implementing the Leveson Inquiry recommendations, paying particular attention to how the implications for competing ideals about newspaper independence were framed in rhetorical terms. In so doing, our aim is to question whether the soul searching unleashed by the hacking scandal will lead to lasting, progressive change or whether the independence long associated with the fourth estate role has effectively come to an end.

The Press as the Fourth Estate

Efforts to trace the history of journalism’s investment in its perceived status as a fourth estate continue to attract lively debate, not least to the extent they invite differing perspectives about why such a normative ideal mattered in the first place. At the outset, it is useful to provide a brief history with a view to identifying tensions of continuing relevance to current discourses of newspaper independence in the United Kingdom.⁴

When seeking to unravel the rhetorical complexities of normative ideals, words matter. The term “fourth estate” has disputed origins, but many locate it in the work of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and his lecture “The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson, Rousseau, Burns,” published on May 19, 1840. Declaring the art of writing “the most miraculous of all things man has devised,” Carlyle argued it had transformed “all modes of important work.” Positioning printing as a “simple, inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary” (1840: 160), Carlyle turned to consider the attendant implications for “the Government of men” in this regard. In impassioned prose, he contended that the status of Parliament as the preeminent place where the affairs of the nation may be deliberated and decided was proving increasingly open to question. “But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether?” he asked (ibid.: 164). Just as “the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books” were decisively altering the nation’s educational and religious institutions, it seemed apparent to him that they were similarly recasting the “great thing” of Parliament itself.

In what has since become the most noteworthy passage of the lecture, Carlyle invoked Edmund Burke’s conception of Parliament’s multiple estates, evidently highlighted by the Anglo-Irish statesman in a parliamentary debate concerned with press reporting of the House of Commons in 1787. In addition to the idea of “Three Estates in Parliament”—namely, it is presumed, the Lords Spiritual (bishops of the Church of England serving in the House of Lords), the Lords Temporal (secular members of the House of Lords) and the Commons—Burke is also credited by Carlyle with discerning a fourth: “in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” (ibid.: 164). The significance of such a realm, Carlyle proceeded to add, was of growing resonance decades later:

It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact—very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal every-day extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.

(ibid.: 164)

Those actively participating in the realm of the fourth estate engendered by writing (“Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew book”) were of supreme importance, in Carlyle’s estimation. Far from performing an ancillary role, the Man of Letters was at the heart of democratic governance.

It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there.

(ibid.)

The very nobility of the published thoughts expressed by the Man of Letters, it followed, would ensure the press was afforded its due recognition “with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment” for it is “to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatus Academicus and much else.”

Over the years, the conception of the fourth estate attributed to Carlyle’s response to Burke has claimed a firm footing, although alternative histories have challenged its evidential basis. Some credit English essayist William Hazlitt for coining the term in an article about pamphleteer William Cobbett, published in “Table Talk” in 1821, whilst others privilege Thomas Macaulay’s review of Henry Hallam’s Constitutional History of England, which appeared in The Edinburgh Review in 1828. “The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm,” he observed. “The publication of the debates, a practice which seemed to the most liberal statesman of the old school full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty,” he continued, “is now regarded by many persons as a safeguard, tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest together” (Macaulay 1828: 165). In the next sentence he turns to consider Burke’s views on parliamentary reform, inviting speculation amongst some historians that perhaps Carlyle made an error—“a slip of the pen”—by awarding credit to Burke after reading Macaulay.

Contrary views about its precise origins notwithstanding, by the mid-nineteenth century the term was familiar enough in public debate to be employed in a book title, namely F. Knight Hunt’s (1850) two-volume The Fourth Estate: Contributions towards a history of newspapers, and the liberty of the press. Its opening paragraph, which provides a flavor of its triumphant tenor, declared:

ALL men, now-a-days, who read at all, read Newspapers.… What wonder, then, that Newspapers have grown upon us until they have become a positive necessity of civilized existence—a portion, indeed, of modern civilization.

(Hunt 1850: 1)

This alignment of the newspaper with civilization—such that it “wields the power of a Fourth Estate” (ibid.: 8)—spoke to the perceived “value and fidelity” of the various services it offered members of the public, albeit visà-vis a sphere largely restricted to propertied, educated white males of the time (see also Fraser 1990; Habermas 1989). It is, however, a close reading of Hunt’s book published five years later in the Edinburgh Review that affords a more nuanced evaluation of the fourth estate as a concept in its own right. The author—believed to be the Review’s editor, Henry Reeve (1855), formerly of The Times—found in Hunt’s treatment a basis to elaborate his standpoint. “The Fourth Estate,” he surmised, despite being “[o]f far more modern date than the other estates of the realm,” had “overshadowed and surpassed them all” (1855: 470). More than the preeminent supplier of information on public topics, the newspaper press furnished interpretations—“notions and opinions”—regarding its relative merits: “It inquires, reflects, decides for us,” effectively performing “all the thinking of the nation” (ibid.: 477).

A further, vital function of the daily press, Reeve continued, was “the opening it affords for the exposition of individual grievances and wrongs.” To clarify, he compared the newspapers to the inaccessibility of the “courts of justice, which are tedious and costly; thousands can neither ‘wait the law’s delay’ nor resist ‘the oppressor’s wrong,’” declaring that the press functioned as a “tribunal which is always open, which is open gratuitously, which is open to every complainant” (ibid.: 480). In the newspaper, it followed, every member of the public possessed a protector of their interests, a “guardian” that “no power can silence, no money can corrupt, and no flattery can lull to sleep” (ibid.: 480). In so doing, it assumed a representative role, one envisaged by Reeves as being situated between the government and “the People.” “It supplies the latter with a safe channel for the expression of those feelings which might else find a vent in overt acts of discontent and insubordination,” he maintained. At the same time, “it keeps the former cognisant of popular sentiments and passions which it is most essential it should understand and be early made acquainted with” (ibid.: 480–481). The value of the fourth estate as a “safety valve” is thus underscored, not least its capacity to moderate “discontent by allowing it to vent, in expending the energies and exposing the weaknesses and fallacies of demagogues, and in thus preserving the peace and order of society through the joint securities of freedom and of justice” (ibid.: 481). In contrast with critics insisting the fourth estate amounted to little more than an instrument advanced by a governing class to articulate its interests, Reeves was convinced that journalism was the most effective means to expose social injustices in the name of the publics it represented.

Viewed from the vantage point of today, these laudable observations about the virtues of the fourth estate risk seeming anachronistic, if not outright disingenuous in the eyes of critics. Today, the ideal of the fourth estate often appears to serve as a form of shorthand to register the conviction that press freedom is best measured by newspapers’ independence from parliamentary influence. Advocates are steadfast in their belief that newspapers, even in the age of the Internet, remain uniquely charged with a noble mission of providing members of the public with a diverse marketplace of ideas to both inform and sustain their sense of the world around them. The performance of this democratic imperative, it follows, must be safeguarded from undue influence or impediments associated with power and privilege. In what amounts to a “system of checks and balances,” newspapers underwrite a consensual process of surveillance—watchdogs nipping at the heels of the elite—in order to ensure political interests are held responsive to the shifting dictates of public opinion. Politics, in this sense, privileges for scrutiny partisan disputes between political parties, however, recurrently leaving the class politics of ruling elites’ control over the press to one side.

In the next section, we shall begin to test the precepts that have given shape to these normative tenets of the fourth estate by focusing on the UK press’s recent behavior through the spotlight cast by Leveson. Of particular interest will be the issue of newspaper independence, recognizing from the outset that much depends on how it is defined—and who is doing the defining—in relation to the ethical questions at the heart of the In...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Utopia of Independent Media: Independence, Working with Freedom and Working for Free
• Section I Indies, Independents and Independence
• Section II Working with Freedom or Working for Free
• Section III Independence in a Cold Political Climate
• Contributors
• Index