Britain | Bagehot

Britain's feral press: a plan

Offer investigative journalists new protections, hang celebrity snoops out to dry

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EVERY gang of rogues knows that, when it comes to agreeing an alibi, quality matters more than quantity. To a comical degree, that lesson is being ignored by the British press, as newspapers seek to justify reporting sex scandals involving the rich and famous, which became public knowledge after court injunctions were wrecked by campaigners on the internet and in Parliament.

The spring air has filled with excuses, as the press explains just why the public needs to know about alleged extramarital flings by Sir Fred Goodwin, an unpopular ex-bank chief, or Ryan Giggs, a popular footballer. Many of the alibis are weak. Taken as a whole, they are hopelessly contradictory.

Sir Fred's sex life is funny, suggests the Sun, with the front-page banner headline: “Fred the Bed”. It is a grave matter, intones the Daily Mail: perhaps his libido distracted him as he led the Royal Bank of Scotland to disaster, costing the taxpayer billions. If his injunction had held, nobody would have known to ask this “disturbing question”. What hogwash: follow that logic and nobody should fly without full details of their pilot's marriage.

In a single issue on May 24th, the Daily Mail simultaneously suggested that Mr Giggs deserved exposure because his lucrative “brand” was underpinned by a “clean-cut, family-man image”, because he was a notorious “Lothario” dogged by rumours of serial infidelity, and because his name had been leaked on Twitter, unfairly disadvantaging “traditional newspapers” subject to gagging orders that cannot be enforced on foreign internet sites.

Married celebrities who cheat on their wives are selling the public a lie, newspapers declare: that is why we must expose them. Come off it. If tabloids really believe the exposure of sexual hypocrisy is their moral mission, how come they also report on the sex lives of unabashed bed-hoppers?

Newspapers denounce privacy injunctions as an elitist tool open only to the wealthy. It's a fair point—and would be neatly addressed by granting ordinary citizens legal aid to sue newspapers. Legal aid for privacy and libel suits is provided in France (home to some of the world's toughest press laws): is that really what British editors want?

Some grander dailies have attacked privacy injunctions as a judicial assault on parliamentary sovereignty. When Parliament approved the Human Rights Act in 1998, says the Daily Telegraph, MPs intended that freedom of expression should trump privacy rights “especially—but not only—in matters of public interest.” This last phrase is the final giveaway. Strip away all the cant, and the campaign against injunctions is a power struggle. Sections of the British press are seeking not just to promote free speech over privacy, but to challenge the need to mount a public-interest defence at all. Some are already snarling with triumph: “Anyone thinking of taking out a gagging order now knows what to expect,” as the Sun put it this week. But beneath the bully's swagger, there is also fear.

In a candid 2008 speech on press freedom, Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, admitted what was really at stake: commercial survival. If mass-market papers are not allowed to write about scandal as well as dry public policy, he said: “I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations, with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.” Newspapers have other reasons for fear. Fresh arrests were recently made by police investigating the alleged interception of voicemail messages on the mobile phones of the famous or newsworthy by gumshoes working for News of the World reporters. More arrests seem likely, and the widening of the phone-hacking scandal to other papers.

In a last-ditch defence, British hacks point to French counterparts who concealed what le tout Paris knew about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist politician and former head of the International Monetary Fund, and his creepy ways with women. That's the effect of French-style privacy laws, British journalists say, and they are half-right: French law chills investigative journalism and gives politicians the whip hand. But the worst French censorship is self-imposed, as journalists preserve access to the gilded, incestuous circles of the Paris elite.

In any case, the British government is not about to propose a privacy law, ministers say. With the current system of injunctions crumbling, a committee is being set up to review press regulation. “The government is in a blue funk, I don't think it has any idea what to do,” says someone involved in the review.

The famous are people, too

If France is a bad model, what about Sweden? There, a strong public-interest defence—stronger than currently exists in Britain—shields those writing about public figures such as politicians, senior officials or corporate chiefs. But the definition of “public figure” is tightly drawn, to exclude the merely famous. For instance, an adulterous footballer would not be fair game, says Ola Sigvardsson, Sweden's press ombudsman. Privacy is policed by self-regulation, backed by the threat of public humiliation: errant newspapers must publish press-council rulings across most of a page. This works, because readers “hate seeing such notices”.

Could this work in Britain? The Swedes are pretty grown-up about sex, the British not. Swedish journalists are also rather respectable. British journalists know they—we—are below the salt, that reporters pursue a trade not a profession and can never be part of the Establishment. The British press at its worst is intrusive, sanctimonious and spiteful. Yet roguery can be a power for good: when the public interest demands, British hacks burn bridges and attack with rare vigour. Let rogues remain rogues, then. Offer the press a deal. A stronger shield in clashes with the powerful. But intrusion allowed only when it is in the public interest—no other alibis allowed.


Economist.com/blogs/bagehot

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Britain's feral press: a plan"

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