There is an obsession with the British media about the British media. For weeks the BBC has been going on and on about itself. Just as the flood of inquiries and navel gazing starts to subside we get the newspapers starting up, obsessing about their role and importance in the titanic struggle between good and evil.
Now let’s get this in proportion. However you look at it, today’s papers are still tomorrow’s chip wrappers, unless of course you are a weekly newspaper and then it takes a bit longer to reach the chip emporium.
We all knew that a section of the ‘popular’ press exists to cater for a bit of sensationalism. It’s not journalism or anything that passes for journalism, but it whiles away a few hours on a Sunday morning between breakfast and lunch.
There is a mountain of bleating about ‘press freedom’ and the frequent invocation of that old rogue John Wilkes who published his paper ‘The North Briton’ and was charged with seditious libel in 1763 for criticising the King’s speech.
Wilkes was an MP with many contradictory views but at least managed to get legislation through to protect the freedom of the press from general warrants and to allow papers to publish political reports of parliamentary debates. Wilkes was a publisher who was imprisoned along with the blokes who published his paper.
However today newspapers can print nasty scurrilous and evil lies about people and what happens?
Murdoch sacks a few journalists, and closes a paper while expressing remorse, only to open another equally nasty and scurrilous newspaper a few weeks later.
The real issue that Leverson never tackled is not about journalists ethics, or even breaking the law, it’s about who owns the media.
As long as there are people like the Murdoch dynasty then we do not have a free press. They have enormous and irresponsible power to which politicians suck up to with nauseating frequency.
Giving a few inky finger minions a kicking will not change the balance, as long as behemoths like News International control the media, then we get what we deserve.
We get a mediocre product, and News International continues to grow its profits.
Leveson can recommend all the self regulation he likes, he can urge Parliament to introduce legislation to fine papers, but the hard truth is that Murdoch and the other press barons will not give a monkey’s.
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