Against press regulation

If you wanted evidence that Cameron is the “heir to Blair”, his demand for tougher press regulation, with its typically New Labour knee-jerk statism, provides it.
There are (at least) six reasons to be sceptical about whether tougher regulation will work:
1. Regulation is not a magic bullet. The financial services industry has been quite tightly regulated for years, but it is not famous for having served its customers well.
2. The NotW’s misdeeds are not just a failure of the PCC but - much more seriously - a failure of the police to uphold the law. Intercepting communications and bribing policemen are criminal offences. But the investigation into these was “pretty crap.” It is, surely, a vastly higher priority to ensure that the police do their job properly than to reform press regulation.
3. There is a trade-off between two (supposedly) desirable features of the press - that they print the truth and that they respect privacy. If you impose tougher sanctions on the papers for printing untruths, they will respond by making more effort to back up their stories, which will lead to more intrusion into private lives. Conversely, tough restrictions on the press’s ability to investigate stories will lead to more false ones being published. And a clampdown on both will just accelerate the demise of investigative journalism.
4. In practice, it is difficult to distinguish clearly between matters of legitimate public interest and salacious tittle-tattle. And it's even more difficult to do so when those who want to regulate the press - politicians and the powerful - have no interest in making such a distinction. Tougher regulation, then, won’t just mean fewer stories about Kerry Katona’s cha-cha, but also  even fewer attempts to “humiliate the powerful.”
5. The NotW’s motive in phone-hacking and bribing coppers was to give its customers what they want - which is often, as Orwell pointed out in 1946, a good murder. And it was pretty successful in this: its sales, remember, outnumbered those of the Observer by nine-to-one.  In this respect, regulating the press is very different from regulating financial services, medicines or food. In the latter cases, regulation tries to protect customers from products that don’t  satisfy their wishes. In the case of the press, regulation tries to stop customers getting what they want.
6. The issue here is not, as Ben Chu claims, the power of the press to “bully politicians who have the nerve to challenge their reactionary world view.” No amount of regulation short of drastic infringements of free speech will prevent this. In fact, regulation might actually increase such bullying. If papers can’t attract readers by running exclusive stories, they might try to do so by devoting more space to rentagob columnists. If anything, regulation might actually work in the interests of Richard Littlecock. And no right-thinking person, surely, wants that.

Comments

[Luis Enrique]

Cameron is the “heir to Blair”

isn't almost everyone (left-wingers too) calling for more regulation?

[Adam]

I don't see the need for more laws either. There are enough laws to deal with this already. If the journalists broke the law, let the cops deal with it and let everyone else get on with their lives.

[charlieman]

@Luis: "isn't almost everyone (left-wingers too) calling for more regulation?"

Gut reaction is to call for something to be done, which typically means a new law. As the layers of criminal activity and cover-up are exposed, sentiment will change. Defenders of free press and free blogging, and libel law reformers, will eventually agree that we have about the right level of regulation. What is lacking is investigation of the press.

[Keith]

It remains to be seen if Camerons expostulations come to anything. It must be very doubtful if a state press commission or regulator would be created by parliament and it is obvious that the Court of Human Rights might vacate such a plan eventually. The remedy for law breaking is to sue or prosecute the persons liable. Those remedies exist already in the English Law. But reforming the press should be an issue for the left. The influence of big money men like Murdoch is problematic for electoral democracy. They have a clear private agenda and too much power to advance it.

[Keith]

I might add that it is all very well saying you like free markets if we were still in a world of lots of tiny firms or family businesses bargaining with lots of other families or tiny small firms. Hence perfect competition. But the actual economy in all developed states tends to be dominated by huge firms exerting monopoly power and market influence. This is bad for the average person not only in the area of the media. Ignoring this problem does not make it go away.

[Grace]

Press should be respectful of the law and of other people's lives but it should not be controlled in a censorial way.

[Carl]

I'm a leftwinger not calling for more regulation. Worse still (!), I agreed with Jon Gaunt on Question Time when he pointed out that the problem here was not lack of law, but a flouting of the law. There are existing regulations with which to stump dirty practices, and we mustn't pledge more red tape for the media when a few rag tag hacks play bad. I'm as miffed as anyone else I should be on the Right of David Cameron on this issue, but such as life.

[RH]

in a recent programme in which Kevin Mcdonald and Tom Watson appeared as guest to debate the point the BBC presenter suggested that there are laws about defamation and posed the question why we need more regulation. This glib if not bogus suggestion assumed that laws governing defamation would deter misconduct by journalists involving hacking and intrusion into private affairs.

Your statement that the financial services industry has been tightly regulated is misplaced. Self regulation has been touted for many years as the panacea and in fact there is insufficient regulation of the industry by the government. of course insiders will make you believe that it is tightly regulated.

There need not be a trade off between truth and privacy. In the name of discovering the truth journalists cannot be given the licence to break the law. They should respect the boundaries laid down by the law.

A trial, criminal or civil, has as its purpose the discovery of truth but according the laws of evidence and procedure. You will be left with the law of the jungle if you ignore the law.