Gagging the press

Sunday October 9, 2011

Licensing journalists wouldn’t work. But, worse, the fact that people are considering it shows a worrying lack of principle at the heart of public policy, says Patrick Hayes

Given the chilling announcement at the Labour Party Conference, I’m actually rather thankful I can still write these words and still expect them to be published. It seems if Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, had his way, the only way in which any of us could publish is if we were on a register of journalists who are deemed ‘responsible’ enough to have our words read.

Imagine it, if you were ‘struck off’ as Lewis so bluntly put it, your words might no longer be able to appear in a national newspaper. They may no longer be allowed to appear online, on a blog, on an iPad. Perhaps, due to your irresponsible nature, you won’t even be permitted to express yourself on camera, or at public debates.

Now Lewis quickly backtracked, following a barrage of criticism from all sides, and Labour leader Ed Miliband was forced to make an announcement that licenses were not on the cards should they get into power. And everyone who came out of the woodwork in favour of such a system began bending over backwards to attempt to convince the public that they weren’t advocating authoritarian measures. It was just simply reasonable, as Chris Blackhurst, the new editor of the Independent, explained on BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show last week. After all lots of professional bodies bar people from practicing, even the Jockey Club: ‘They actually bar jockeys from riding horses. Why can’t we bar journalists from writing articles?’

Instead of defending the draconian implications of what they seemed to be proposing, both the two leading advocates, Lewis and Blackhurst, were quick to stress instead that the idea hadn’t yet been developed. So when Blackhurst was asked who would issue licenses to journalists, his response was simply that he hadn’t ‘thought it through that far’.

All concerned emphasised the importance of the ‘independence’ of a license-issuing body from the state. This, of course, begs many questions. Would it just end up as a quasi state body like the Advertising Standards Authority, which appoints former government ministers and cronies to the board and getting state approval for its codes of conduct? What happens if a media organisation decided to ‘opt out’ of the licensing system, as Richard Desmond’s company Northern and Shell, owners of the Daily Express, Daily Star and OK!, did with the Press Complaints Commission? What if a paper decided to resist its computers and documents being seized, a punishment Blackhurst has proposed newspapers deemed irresponsible should face? Would there really be no recourse to the state to enforce the regulations at any point?

But even if by some process, every media outlet in the country could be whipped into obedience and agree to only employ licensed journalists without the state’s involvement, it would still mean that a small body of ‘experts’ would be making judgements upon whether journalists can or cannot have a license to be published. And, by extension, what the public is or is not allowed to read. While it may make sense for ‘experts’ to issue licenses in some cases, such as driving licenses or for heavy machinery, there are no ‘experts’ who are able to be objective about what morally Good and Bad journalism is. Instead such judgements would just reflect their own prejudices.

Furthermore, such an approach would be a step backwards in the positive shift of the democratisation of the media. Due to the internet, and cheap publishing costs, any of us are now able to publish our writing more freely than any point in history. And, through mediums such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s a fair bet that if what you have to say is remotely of interest, it will be spotted regardless of whether or not you have a massive advertising budget – or any budget at all. To introduce licenses could mean that such a freedom is removed.

Every journalist – indeed anybody whatsoever – should be free to ‘publish and be damned’. If, as was exposed during the Hackgate scandal, they engage in inexcusable, appalling journalistic practices, then the public will very likely damn them. But too often the current liberal and cultural elites are contemptuous of the public’s ability to decide what is responsible or not. Like pigs to a trough, they evidently believe the public will keep gorging on the filth that Murdoch and Desmond and the like feed them, unless they are forced onto a healthier diet.

In the age of the internet, such licenses are almost certainly impractical and doomed to failure. If newspapers could only employ licensed, ‘responsible’ journalists, castrated in terms of how they practice their profession, it’s a dead cert that this would hasten the decline of the newspaper trade and the rise of online journalism. Who, after all, would want to read sterile columns published by risk-averse news editors? And, even with China-style firewalls, it’s much harder to tame the ‘Wild West Web’, which the authorities are perpetually in fear of due to their lack of control over what is said.

Long may that remain the case. But the practical impossibility of such a policy should not detract from the need to make a principled case for the importance of unregulated freedom of the press and free speech for everyone. The fact that such concerns didn’t seem to even to feature as a blip on the radar of the people proposing licenses last week, suggests that a respect for such fundamental aspects of a free society is sorely lacking. While these advocates of licensed journalists may not be tyrannical Mugabes-in-the-making, the absence of principles from their managerial bubbles – coupled with their utter disrespect for the public to decide for itself what’s in its interests to hear – could have very grave consequences.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked and a producer of the Battle of Ideas festival , taking place at the Royal College of Art on October 29-30