Ross Frenett
: Woolwich Attack: Should We Expect a Violent Response?
Andy Burnham
: Jeremy Hunt Is Playing a Dangerous Game
Theo Randall
: Recipe for the Weekend: Minestrone Primavera
Zoe Armstrong
: Five Ways to Fake a Break and Avoid Parenting Burnout
Anne Speckhard
: Examining the Woolwich Murder of a British Soldier
Britain has enjoyed Press Freedom for 317 years. It was finally wrestled from the grasp of the State, after centuries of campaigning, in 1695. Many have - literally - died to protect it ever since.
So why do so many people want to give it away now?
First, what is press freedom?
Well, it ISN'T the right to hack phones, to blag medical records, to wrongly wreck good peoples' reputations, to trample all over the privacy of the innocent.
The UK already has laws against that - libel laws, privacy laws, criminal laws (over 30 journalists, me included, have been arrested in the last 18 months).
Press freedom is, though, the right - nay, the duty - to publicly demand answers to rude, awkward, demanding, inconvenient questions that those in power really don't want aired. That's why an unsavoury alliance of celebrities, politicians and lawyers are desperately trying to con you into giving it up.
They call for legally-controlled 'statutory regulation' of the media, while claiming that somehow the press can still remain 'independent'.
It is, simply, a lie. The words 'state-control' and 'free press' simply can't live in same sentence.
And make no mistake, 'statutory regulation' means STATE regulation.
If it happens, politicians will get the press they want, rather than the press they deserve. One which, aided by greedy "ambulance-chasing" lawyers, they can control.
In Greece police acting under state regulation arrested a journalist for publishing a list of tax avoiders that inconveniently include the names of several government ministers. In France, successive presidents have used state regulation to cow the press into not reporting the fact that they were able to corruptly use taxpayers money to pay for mistresses and secret children. Here we had the MPs expenses scandal - and currently the speaker of the House of Commons is desperately trying to prevent newspapers exposing even MORE greedy MPs (including one campaigning to gag our newspapers!) who are allegedly running a rent scam potentially netting them thousands.
Yet these are the people who should be given the legal levers of control over a free press?! People like, say, love-cheat John Prescott? Plebgate's Andrew Mitchell? How about telephone-throwing Gordon Brown?!
It's not just a matter of of concern for us here in the UK either. Recently Prof Tim Luckhurst of Kent University - a former BBC foreign affairs producer and journalist for the Guardian and Independent newspapers - launched an impressive pamphlet in defence of press freedom by recounting a conversation the other week with an editor from Zimbabwe.
That brave journalist told him how dictators throughout Africa and worldwide would love to use the example of the 'mother of parliaments' bringing in state regulation to justify their own gagging of the media.
Prof Luckhurst quotes Sir Winston Churchill at the start of his pamphlet thus: "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny..."
Because make no mistake, statutory regulation means state regulation and is the thin end of the wedge. Ignore the apologists who protest the changes they seek are inconsequential. Who brings in, draws up, and enacts the statutes they seek? Politicians, of course.
And once in place, those self-same politicians will be free in years to come to amend, adjust, tweak, ratify, clarify, fix, CENSOR those press laws to silence all those questions and inquiries they don't want to answer.
A free press does make mistakes, gets things - including its behaviour - wrong. That can hurt - but the alternative is worse. To paraphrase, democracy is the worst kind of government... until you consider all the others. It is the same with a free press and self-regulation.
Let them steal it at your peril.
The above is a longer version of an authored TV film by Neil Wallis broadcast on the Daily Politics programme on BBC2 on Thursday 8 November 2012.
Follow Neil Wallis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/neilwallis1
Neil Wallis on press regulation and Leveson Inquiry
Daily Telegraph attacks NUJ position on press regulation
A free press is all very well, but free for whom?
I, for one, have always admired and appreciated your resolute campaigns to give a public voice to Cindy from Croydon and many, many others. Had it not been for your good self and sensitive photographer colleagues, those poor, disadvantaged young ladies would have languished in the obscurity into which, for the most part, they have since returned. My study walls are decorated with so many. Bravo Neil!
As for your contribution to courageous Press Campaigns - think Thalidomide, MPs Expenses, WMDs, Profumo (before your time dear boy), Turnip Head, Gottcha, It Was the Sun What Won It and, of course, accessing the mobile phone records of an abducted and murdered teenage girl.
A Press that is free to sing the praises of the Conservative Party is, it goes without saying, an absolute precondition to the preservation of all that we hold dear to the freedom of this Sceptred Isle (and all the other bits and pieces of the UK).
What a joy it is to know that you and I and dear old Kelvin (MacKenzie) are singing from the same hymn sheet under the baton of a soon-to-be proper Archbishop! Rejoice!
ps The forthcoming PCC vote - Vote Conservative. This is no longer a party political issue, it is an issue of low turnout versus spoiled ballot papers!
Having just spent 5 months on an island with no newspapers and now realise the huge amount of damage our news and media organisations do to our society and civil cohesion. People are obsessed with trivia, the serious news has been trivialized and instead of people getting on with their lives and focusing on their family and local community, people are obsessed with the lives of people they don't know and will never know. Murders, rapes and child abuse have relatively low instances compared to how many people live in the UK. Yet the general population are whipped up into a frenzy so newspapers can sell copy. People are changing their behaviour because of exagerated issues being forced down their throats by profit seeking media outlets.
The media industry is destroying our society because their only ethic is to make money. Their scope needs to be seriously cut back so people can get back to living their lives with their families and communities without being made to worry about things happening in places they don't live in.
Banning newspapers would in a single swipe remove one of the biggest corrupters in modern society.
Pull the other one.
Try doing your job properly.
And in all three cases above the police was colluding with the press to aid or protect the press.
Galling is that your argument is built on the exploitation of real or assumed character flaws and traits which are spun to tell make and emotional appeal.
Temper with the fourth estate and dictatorships across the world will rejoice, implying that anyone who is not on the side of 'freedom' must be in favour of tyranny.
Not reason, but a false dichotomy to protect the privilege that has been so blatantly abused.
In a discussion on that level, do not forget that the press has always been run by power-hungry oligarchs and criminals, like Maxwell and Black, or more recently Alexander Lebedev, owner of Standard and Independent, a violent former KGB boss.
This poorly worded hack job is insulting to anyone who can read, but especially to the victims of that culture of criminality and ruthlessness, which we have seen day after day giving evidence at Leveson.
You say "Without us you are nothing". But just like greedy MPs and Bankers the press has overplayed its card and there is now no way back to the 'good old days'.
This from the man who wrote this gibberish: "Galling is that your argument is built on the exploitation of real or assumed character flaws and traits which are spun to tell make and emotional appeal. Temper with the fourth estate and dictatorships across the world will rejoice."
Also, Gordon Brown's son's medical records were not illegally obtained. Check your facts. Even the Guardian got this one right in the end.
I did write 'gibberish' in that paricular sentence because I was trying to edit down my comment as I am only allowed 300 words which I did not realise. I can only apologise, but I hope you got my drift, it should be quite clear from the context.
Also: I am not claiming to be a 'writer', even less to have been an editor or 'media commentator'. If you work in media and can't write for toffee and even a 6th form debating society would laugh at your posts that is surely a different problem.
As for the illegality of the Brown's medical records being published, I checked and you are right.
The Sun took it upon themselves to publish the circumstances of Brown's son against the wishes of the parents after being contacted by a member of the public. There was also evidence that Brown was targeted for 10 years by News International, "with attempts to obtain his legal, financial, tax, and police records, listen to his voicemail" and a "private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him." http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/11/phone-hacking-news-international-gordon-brown
If that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of righteousness you are welcome, but it doesn't lessen my argument, which you don't contest I am happy to see.
The press has no desire, appetite or motive to restrain itself from criminal activity nor from immoral activity. And therefore we are left with a choice - we can go along with politician regulating the press and yes - to some extent controlling it for their own unscrupulous purposes.
Or we can go along with the Press's humbug arguments about freedom, independence and the rest of it. Why humbug? Because the Press themselves - journalists like Neil Wallis - have trampled all over those freedoms by abusing them shamelessly, self-servingly, corruptly.
So here wwe are - the press is about to be state regulated. Whose fault is that? It is the fault of corrupt journalists.
The only way journalists can regain some integrity is to earn it. Dig down into your own filth. Expose your friends and colleagues. Clean out your own stables ruthlessly - or someone esle will do it for you.
But stop your bloody whining about press freedom - you abused it and brought this down on your own heads, and therefore on ours.
1549 Requests of the Devonshyre and Cornyshe Rebelles.
First English newspaper
1621 Corante
How exactly do you get centuries of campaigning inbetween 1549 and 1695? If you need to lie to make your point, then your point isn't one that should be listened to. I don't care if the press is unregulated, self-regulated or government regulated. I want the journalists who lie to and about us, tap our phones and endanger criminal cases to be prosecuted. When the person trying to sell us on self regulation lies in his very first paragraph though you have to wonder if maybe the politicians have a point.