Over at the New Statesman, I recently did a post suggesting the correct meaning of “freedom of the press”.
That post was prompted by the realisation that the phrase (c 1662) pre-dated the popular newspaper industry (1800s), which we associate in this country with “Fleet Street”.
(The post was also culled from part of a supplementary witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry.)
Instead of “the Press”, I urged that we thought more in terms of the access to a press.
In the days before broadcasting and electronic communications, and before newspapers, the main way one could express an idea beyond your immediate circle of neighbours and correspondents was by means of mass production of printed material. (The only real alternative was as a touring orator or teacher.)
Therefore freedom of the press meant that, in essence, anyone could seek to make a public impact.
And as such, freedom of the press cannot really be regulated, as anyone can purchase or hire a press.
In that exposition I was seeking to compare the old pamphleteers with modern bloggers and tweeters.
So, if freedom of the press is taken in this wider sense, with the diminishing number of full time professional journalists working on established titles as a subset, what – if any – are the implications?
(Other than the perhaps trivial point that Fleet Street cannot exclusively invoke the phrase to protect their own practices.)
Does it make any real difference?
Any further thoughts?
7 Responses to Further thoughts on the “freedom of the press”?
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It’s not necessarily trivial that Fleet Street can’t exclusively invoke journalistic privilege. The problem with journalistic privilege is that if it isn’t exclusive, it’s hard to see how it can exist.
Take the Met’s dawn raid yesterday on the home of a (by most accounts honest and innocuous) journalist, which provoked Nick Cohen’s column on the erosion of civil liberties. It’s pretty easy to make the point that it can’t be good for society when police treat journalists like this. If it was an amateur blogger who’d stumbled across a misplaced phone or leaked information, the case might not seem so clear-cut. If it was a member of the public with no particular history of journalistic activity, less so still.
Journalists are expected to act professionally and with good judgement, and in return society is (or, pre-Leveson, was) prepared to overlook some bending of the rules when the public interest demands it. Untrained individuals can’t be expected to act professionally, so the same deal won’t work. Do we need a new deal based on broader standards of behaviour?
Or consider “press cards”. There’s no statutory press card system in the UK, but the police and other bodies make a practice of respecting cards issued by various trade bodies and unions to journalists and photographers. On occasions when such cards aren’t respected by such bodies, the professionals who hold them are aggrieved. But doesn’t everyone have the right to witness, report on and photograph events of public significance? A member of the public attempting to video, say, a police offer engaged in unlawful activity has the same right and duty to do so as a professional journalist. On the other hand, how do we distinguish people engaged in “journalism” (whether or not they’re “journalists”) from random gawkers?
My feeling is that the general right to observe and report needs protecting, and that as for deciding who is a “journalist” and who isn’t, his would be a bizarre moment in British history to move towards a state-run press registration or licensing system. But it also seems to me that a healthy society will continue to need to show a special degree of respect and latitude to those it considers to be engaged in proper (whether or not professional) journalism. How can this be arranged?
You miss an important point when you assert that, pre-internet, “freedom of the press meant that, in essence, anyone could seek to make a public impact.” That mythical “anyone” is limited by lots of factors. “Freedom of the press belongs only to those who own the presses” went the old slogan. Apparently it’s from the New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling, who wrote: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Limitations can be of money: having enough cash to pay the copyshop for 1000 mimeographed pamphlets to hand out on street corners. Or of state brutality: the memoir of growing up in 1970s Romania, “Burying the Typewriter”, comes to mind. Or even in the liberal West, of intimidation of local print shop owners to toe the party line (e.g. civil rights movement in the southern US). Or limitations of age: teenagers find an injustice at school, but the town’s only printing place is owned by a member of the parent-teacher association, or the spouse of a teacher, eager to smooth feathers.
Much of this changed with photocopiers in public places, but still, you try making hundreds or even dozens of copies of a multiple-paged document at the library, with everyone else watching you.
Given the broad proliferation and availability of ‘presses’, from Twitter to Facebook to WordPress, it raises the question “what is the difference between freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press”. Speech isn’t regulated; it’s subject to the constraints of the law. What makes “Fleet Street” different?
I think that the allusion to the technology of ‘the press’ in early modern Europe is right. There are strong parallels. (Put me in mind of an epic study by Elizabeth Eisenstein: “The Printing Press As an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe.”)
Eisenstein focused upon the printing press as a catalyst within Reformation Europe.
Judged today, it is as though technology, then as now, instigates an Ideal whereby: issues of knowledge/salvation might be wrested away from the overbearing mediations of an Institution (State/Church) and put into the domain of the private individual. (The Ideal invoked by Assange: a culture of absolute disclosure).
This is how I interpret ‘freedom of the press’: an Ideal (actuated by technology) that liberates a potential, or perhaps a dream, of Unmediated Knowledge becoming available to all.
Whereas today the MSM appears like a verbatim Latin Mass, the Internet is hammering letters on doors!!
This isn’t to say that the Internet finally succeeds where printing succumbed; because this ’Freedom’ remains, in my opinion, an Ideal.
Presses were always mediated by any number of factors…accessibility, literacy rates and so forth. And the Internet, likewise, is subject to it’s own mediating constraints.
Nevertheless, the Internet does remind us of a great Ideal; and in so far as such things can be realised, I think that we’re almost obliged to explore and safeguard the possibilities that might lie ahead.
Specific regulation aimed at the Internet, at this moment, might resound like a Papal Decree!!
I would offer the idea that it is not so much a re-definition of ‘freedom of the press’ it would seem to be far more to do with how to actually define in a modern, vibrant, pluralistic society the term oft used as a shield by tabloid rags when defending their shallow sensationalized drivel…”In the public interest’
Surely ‘The freedom of the press’ to publish should be bounded by the caveat ‘In the public interest’
Otherwise they print anything they want and take the hit in compensation somewhere down the road by victims of their diligence, hand;led usually by another team of hierarchy and all denying liability, if the victim can afford to pursue the issue!…oh wait!…that is the situation now methinks!
Well it was until the NOW got busted for their duplicity anyway’s!
Thing is the borderline between …Who Charlie was canoodling with and the hacking of the mobile phone mail of a missing schoolgirl?..
Where is the line that separates in the public good from the freedom of the press to snoop in places not particularly of interest to anyone except police officers?
It could be vaguely argued that Charlie, being next in line to the throne of England. had issues with fidelity therefore…what?…not Kingly enough…since when has fidelity been a job requirement for royalty?
But Milly’s phone…I fail to see the remotest reason…certainly a snoop to far and one that ultimately brought down their house of perfidious nonsense.
Seems to be that just because they knew they could do it…did not dictate under what circumstances they should do it…if at all!
They did it because they could seems to be the rule of thumb!
The ethical and moral imperatives became opaque in a knowledge of the how!…
Maybe “Freedom of the press” should be updated to “Freedom of the print(er)”.
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