Falklands : Falklands: Society of Editors' Transcripts Part 3
Submitted by Falkland Islands News Network (Juanita Brock) 25.11.2011 (Article Archived on 09.12.2011)
We have another distinguished name to add to the Society of Editors Lecture. You will have noted that the relationship between the BBC and the Daily Mail, are remarkably good at least within the society since your next president, who has been working very closely with me is Francesca Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering at the BBC.
INTRODUCTION TO LORD PATTEN OF BARNES’ LECTURE
By Robin Esser, Outgoing Chairman of the Society of Editors
Sunday, 13 November 2011
Transcript by J. Brock (FINN)
We have another distinguished name to add to the Society of Editors Lecture. You will have noted that the relationship between the BBC and the Daily Mail, are remarkably good at least within the society since your next president, who has been working very closely with me is Francesca Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering at the BBC.
Our lecturer has a long and meritorious career in public service, as you will have seen in his CV in the Conference Delegate Magazine.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have huge pleasure in introducing Lord Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust.
SOCIETY OF EDITORS LECTURE BY LORD PATTEN OF BARNES
Sunday, 13 November 2011
Transcript by J. Brock (FINN)
Robin, Thank you very much indeed and thank you for keeping that brief. One gets slightly bored with hearing one’s obituary and thank you very much indeed for reminding me of the ever cordial relations between the BBC and the Daily Mail.
I really am grateful to you for asking me to speak at your conference. Judging by the sort of attention that the BBC gets from some of your members, I chair the high-rolling Pravda of Hampstead. It’s a bit like asking Beelzebub to address the angelic hosts. Anyway, I will do my best to behave within the bounds of public decorum.
I note the drama implied by the title of your conference – “Magna Carta II: a Modern Media Charter” - no understatement there. I wonder whether the history of the media has really come to this love/hate confrontation at Runnymede. You shouldn’t all forget that Pope Innocent III – you all remember Pope Innocent III (1160(or 61) 1216) – called the original Magna Carta, with just a hint of tabloid style: shameful, debasing, illegal and unjust. Actually, he did it in Latin but that’s a rough translation. So much for yesterday’s Barons, who most certainly raised with John Lackland (1166 -1216 – King of England 1199 – 1216) the issue of freedom of speech.
So why is it on the agenda of serious journalists today as the Leveson inquiry opens its doors? No one should exaggerate. This is not a post Gutenberg moment where the introduction of printing lead to the avalanche of censorship by the press. Nor do we face the suppression of freedom that lead to John Milton (1608-1674) writing his polemic Areopagitica. When we cite the fundamental values of speaking truth to power, we should take care not to exaggerate our own heroism.
What we are discussing is not the power that in Soviet times lead to Vasily, Grossman’s plea in the words of a character in his wonderful novel “Life in Fate;” It says in the book, “can you imagine what it’s like to have freedom of the press? Can you imagine a newspaper that provides information? You are allowed out on to the street without your nanny.” The passage in that book on freedom of speech and what it means about as good and eloquent a description of the concept as anything I have read anywhere. Nor is this the power that has just jailed two officials in China for giving economic statistics to the foreign media; and locked up Shao You-Bao for 11 years; though the slippery slope exists even in free democratic societies. This was the point made by George Orwell when, during the Second World War, he defended the lifting of the ban on the “Daily Worker” much though he hated its views. “Tolerance and decency,” he wrote, “are deeply rooted in England but they are not indestructible.” It’s in his forward to “Animal Farm.”
I am not sure how much of Fleet Street at the time was on his side and on the side of the “Daily Worker.” But he chose to be guided by what Milton called “The known rules of ancient liberty.” We should be similarly guided today.
What exactly is today’s challenge? In a speech just before leaving No. 10 in 2007, Mr Blair described a media in a world fragmented and transformed by technology, with hundreds of TV stations now available in Britain; and with newspapers fighting for a share of a shrinking market against competition from the internet with its growing advertising revenue and the social media. Moreover, Mr Blair noted that the twenty-four hours a day news schedule imposes new disciplines and makes new demands. His conclusion was that this and not human wickedness had encouraged the press to lower their standards and behave like feral beasts.
Mr Blair’s analysis was rather lost in the denunciation of a conclusion, which for many newspapers raised the un-seemingly prospect of someone who had manifestly lived by the sword objecting when the blade turned in his direction. Whether or not this was deemed fair was a judgement inevitably affected by one’s personal experience of dealing with Mr Blair’s administration.
The world described by the former Prime Minister was clearly darkened by the alleged systemic criminality exposed in one newspaper’s behaviour last summer. And more attention focused on this because the breaking of the story, which had been diligently pursued for some time, coincided with the attempt by News Corporation to purchase the whole of B SKY B. The alleged hacking and police pay-offs were indefensible. But we know that hacking and related activities have taken place for years. Ministers and the Royal family have been among the targets.
Presumably, when a Minister’s mobile phone call was intercepted by paramilitaries in Northern Ireland over 20 years ago, it was wrong for a Sunday Newspaper to publish on its front page the details of his intercepted phone conversation with his wife. But I don’t recall anyone saying so at the time. What has changed over the years is that the practice became wide-spread and involved not only public figures but many others, too including those coping with terrible, private grief. Did we think that politicians or celebrities were fair game – that because they were public figures they had no right to privacy? They would plainly attract less sympathy than others would receive but were their rights any different? Whatever the precise reasons for the change in attitude, we quickly remember that feral behaviour could be criminal, too. So the cry went up: “Something must be done. The media must behave better.”
The Government stepped in; an enquiry has been set up; it goes conscientiously about its work; and meanwhile Britain’s ancient liberties, including the right to freedom of speech, are asserted not only by the Editor of the Daily Mail, but by the Lord Chief Justice of England himself.
I find myself agreeing with Paul Dacre that a lot of the noise is unfair and unwelcome to a great number of journalists in this country, not least in the local and regional press, who are doing an honest job without any great reward. I need no convincing that the overwhelming majority of journalists do their job conscientiously and professionally and have been disgusted by the stories of mal-practice that have surfaced this year.
I mentioned local and regional papers. They’re important only because they hold those in power to account but also because they fight their readers’ corner in seeking to make their lives better and their communities safer. Recent examples that I am personally aware of include the Yorkshire Post’s “Give Us a Fair Deal” campaign, which has sought to raise awareness of the impact of the recession on the York and Humber region and the Enfield Independent’s “Don’t carry, Don’t Kill” campaign for tougher sentences for knife crime among under 18s. Clearly a gulf lies between this form of journalism and the sort of criminal behaviour that it is alleged was institutionalised in News of the World.
How then can we make sense of the broader public debate that extend across this gulf and beyond to other parts of the broadcast and on-line media? I want to make three arguments today. First that it is a bit of a distraction to focus too heavily on broadcasters including the BBC. Second that it would be wrong to try to import any model of regulation from the broadcast media to the press and third that newspapers themselves need to find ways to rebuild public trust in what they do.
While all mediums account for themselves to the current Leveson Inquiry, the main focus is on the newspaper industry but of course broadcasters must examine how they too have behaved in the course of their journalistic activities. At the BBC the Director General has reviewed the Corporation’s practices, with producers and editors; and has pursued an audit trail through past financial arrangements, the Trust is assured that the BBC’s investigative journalism has been in the public interest and there appears to be no evidence of phone hacking, computer hacking or the corruption of public officials by BBC journalists. The BBC Trust is working with the Executive to ensure that our editorial guidelines are as strong as possible to prevent abuse.
The main reason why broadcasting organisations are not the main targets of investigation by the Leveson inquiry is that they are already subject to statutory regulation, which does not, in my judgment, inhibit our freedom to act as journalists with integrity. We are regulated but not censored. For other broadcasters OFCOM is the regulator. For the BBC the framework of regulation comprises both OFCOM and the governance of the BBC through its Trust – the BBC’s sovereign strategic authority. Off-Com has, in my view, done an excellent job as a broadcasting regulator, operating with clarity and a light but effective touch. The fact that it does good work with broadcasters, whose medium is so intrusive, does not mean that it provides a model for regulation of the written press.
The principal roles of the Trust as the BBC’s sovereign authority are to defend the corporation’s independence and to ensure that it does not lose the trust of the licence payers who fund it out of their hard-pressed incomes. No one owes a living. The BBC has to work to retain this trust. And when it errs as it did, for example, completely absurdly in fixing the competition to name the Blue Peter cat, confidence in it sags. Life being what it is there will inevitably be further editorial errors in future. The important thing for the BBC is to respond in the right way, to acknowledge mistakes early, to apologise, and to take prompt action to address them and to remember that by maintaining the highest standards of journalism that the BBC will secure public trust in the long run.
The polling evidence: and I spent a good deal of my summer holiday pouring over it – the polling evidence shows that the people trust the BBC more than they do other news organisations, written or electronic, trust the BBC to tell the truth. Does that make us impartial in their eyes? Understandably the public find the whole notion of impartiality difficult to define. Perfect impartiality is difficult-perhaps impossible to attain. I think most people understand that and understand that the BBC is not perfect.
As for newspapers, I don’t think people buy newspapers because they think they are impartial. That is not what most newspapers set out to be. But the BBC is in a different position. Balance and accuracy are the qualities that licence fee payers seek in BBC output, telling things as they really are, not as this or that political party or interest group might wish them to be. Taking those yardsticks, they usually appear satisfied with the quality of BBC journalism.
Admittedly, that is not the invariable rule as far as governments are concerned. Indeed, the history of the BBC since the very beginning has been one of disputed with the government of the day – Churchill, Eden, Wilson, Thatcher, Blair - the rows have sometimes been incendiary. We have been attacked from both the left and from the right. How governments invariably define balance and accuracy. It’s not always the same as the view of a broadcaster, which should seek to serve the nation, not act as an agent of the state.
I find the charge of bias difficult to deal with unless there is context. Certainly looking at the whole range of our broadcasting output and the quality of individual editors and reporters – Stephanie Flanders, Nick Robinson, Jeremy Bowen and so on. I would refute the charge of political bias. That said, of course, we get things wrong from time to time. When we do we should examine the evidence; and when mistakes have been made, apologise and correct them straight away.
There is in my view a much more justified charge than that of political bias. And that is that we should try harder to reflect the full range and diversity of the life of the nations that make up the United Kingdom. This has been a heavily centralised country which applies to its cultural as well as its political and administrative life. It’s odd to find ourselves accused of failing to reflect the whole of our society and at the same time criticised for moving more of our programme making away from London and the south-east. A major reason for our own devolution of creativity and management is so that we can better understand, represent and draw strength from the life of all our different communities.
As a publicly funded broadcaster, whose output is so directly intrusive, there are some areas where we ought to be particularly careful in our journalism or even to be culpable to follow our newspapers or online journalism may properly lead. Despite the BBC’s tradition of investigative journalism, the BBC could not have paid for the information on MPs expenses as the Daily telegraph did. Nor could we have pursued the hacking story at News International as remorselessly as the Guardian Campaign did. When this hacking story broke some suggested that we were giving it excessive coverage at the BBC as if it were that we were leading the human cry. But when a spot check was done on the amount of time devoted to the story by different broadcasters, it showed that both ITN and Skye – to its considerable credit – were giving more time to the story in proportion to their total time on air than the BBC.
The hacking story inevitably coloured the debate about News Corporation’s bid for full ownership of B Skye B. Now that’s not something that I want to comment on as Chairman of the BBC Trust. What I do have an opinion on is the suggestion that the issue of pluralism is not how much of the media in Britain is owned by News Corporation, but how much is provided by the BBC. For some bloggers and commentators the main issue raised by the hacking scandal was not criminality by a few journalists and the location of the responsibility for their behaviour but, rather bizarrely, the alleged dominance of the media in Britain by a publicly funded broadcaster. This is a particularly odd assertion given that the BBC has represented a steadily diminishing part of the broadcasting economy from a monopoly position in 1950 to a situation today where commercial revenues across TV and radio are now at least double licence fee revenues.
Today, if people get most of their news from the BBC, it’s because they choose to do so, not because there is no alternative. The BBC itself estimates there are now well over 120 News Websites in the UK with more than 100,000 users, yet BBC news still reaches 80% of adults every week. And it has a greater reach than Skye News – which I think is an admirable 24 hour news service – even in Skye homes. Over 20% of total TV news minutes are from BBC news but those minutes attract over 70% of audience viewing the news. I might add as a postscript to this argument that if we so powerful in the BBC it is curious that the diaries of our political leaders have not been as full of meetings with our staff than they are with meetings with newspaper executives. When I looked at those figures I sometimes wondered when our political leaders ever had time to go to work.
What in my view should most preoccupy the BBC is not rebutting the charge that its journalism is too biased or that it’s too dominant but whether its journalism is as good as it should be. We will be, in future, a slimmed down organisation. I don’t believe that should affect the quality of our journalism. Indeed a wholly integrated news operation from local to global should aim to do even better. We should certainly be constantly challenging ourselves to raise the quality of what we do.
I may have, in due course, to explain the standards we apply to our journalism at the BBC to the Leveson inquiry. If so I hope I can make a convincing case that the sort of regulation that covers us is appropriate for broadcasters who would not work for newspapers.
There is a kind of symbiosis between the BBC and the press. We do different but complementary things. The BBC depends on the press for some of its news agenda and it gives some stories back to the press to pursue further. The style of the tabloids is not something we could or should try to match. But nor should we be snobbish or squeamish about it. The SUN under Kelvin McKenzie added, to use the word in the old fashioned sense, to the gaiety of the nation. I still have a copy of the SUN’s front page – “Up Yours, Delores!” -written, of course by our diplomatic correspondent. Trevor Cavana is plainly one of the outstanding political writers of his generation. I haven’t always agreed with the Daily Mail. Perhaps that’s an example of understatement but I greatly admire its brave campaign in the pursuit of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence and, which I trust won’t annoy him too much, I try not to miss (inaudible).
It may be that I am more relaxed about the tabloids than some of my former political colleagues because I have never been convinced that they set the political agenda decisively. I used to be the Chairman of thee Conservative Party. When in 1992 we heard “It was the SUN What Won It” I reflected on the fact that our polling throughout the election campaign had shown that most of the public and its readers thought that the SUN was a Labour newspaper.
Max Hastings is right to argue that political leaders demean themselves by the amount that they court the press. Looking back over the years it is clear that at least one very famous proprietor waited until it was pretty plain who would win the election and then put his weight behind the predicted victor. So I have no wish to turn our tabloids into trimmed down versions of the Church Times. I hope the Church Times isn’t present.
Robin Esser: He’s right there.
Lord Patten: A very fine newspaper!
The vigour of the tabloids is an important part of the liveliness of our democracy. Free speech and therefore that vitality would truly be damaged if a single group of people beholden to and perhaps even appointed by politicians were to have the power to decide what should and what should not be published. Statutory regulation of the press would in my view not only be wrongheaded it would pose a real danger to the public discourse that underpins our democracy. So the responsibility to ensure the high standards of professionalism rests with journalists, their editors and their proprietors.
My rather prosaic conclusion is that newspapers have to be given the chance to find their own solution although I note that already there’s talk of ombudsmen and back-stop powers to help make any new system work. But how can you give a system of self regulation a form of accountability that newspapers invariably scorn when others advocate it for their own industries and professions? How can you give a system of self regulation the credibility that the public seeks?
It’s particularly important because newspapers have played and continue to play an important role in our democratic life. They can continue to do so in particular if they can carve out a distinctive role and a position of trust in and amongst the din of the internet. They can help to close the democratic deficit that risks opening up in that new, online world of endless unmediated opinion and information.
But trust needs to be built. Back in 2002 in the Wreath Lectures, Onora O’Neill gave this warning on trust: “If we remain cavalier about press standards, a culture of suspicion will persist.” That is now more true than ever. The answer is not necessarily to look immediately for a legal or regulatory solution. It may be to think more widely about how trust works. Everyone inside and outside the media needs to be clear about why trust in the media matters and what responsibilities that trust entails.
In particular, we need first maximum clarity about what is agreed to be ethically acceptable. And second, transparency about how ethics are applied in a way that forms part of readers’ everyday experience of the journalism that they read.
To take a simple analogy, doctors have the Hippocratic Oath and we all understand, broadly speaking, what it means. The PCC code is not understood or trusted in the same way. If it’s to be replaced, are there some clear and simple principles that we could all look to as a guide for print journalists and for editors in their work? Can you, as the leaders in the industry, develop some form of watermark to distinguish proper, ethical journalism from the massive, intrusive and unregulated material that’s available elsewhere?
This will requite more humility about the challenges involved. It may require an increased sense of shame when things go wrong. It’s not at all straight forward. Tom Stockard, who almost invented paradox, notes that so far as newspaper behaviour is concerned, he thinks it’s time to draw a line. The trouble is he doesn’t trust anyone to draw it.
It also requires us to revisit what we mean by free speech and what its boundaries are - John Stuart Mill’s inspiring example from the 19th century. But it’s hardly more appropriate today to use his name in support of their arguments than it was for the American revolutionaries of the 18th century to pray in aid Magna Carta – your organisers’ theme of today.
It’s true that a free society needs a free press. But the press can harm as well as enhance the freedoms of the rest of us if editors abuse their power. Like free markets, freedom of speech can produce harmful affects if it is completely unlimited. As Edmund Burke wrote, “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed. And it’s not helpful if newspapers cite free speech as a blanket justification for every story, for every intrusion, for every piece of celebrity title tattle, no matter what the circumstances.
Let me leave you with telegramaticly with four ideas that are surely worth thinking about. First, free speech is not an end in itself but a means of developing a more effective, plural, accountable, democratic society. Second, free speech does not excuse any or all forms of behaviour. Rights of privacy are important from a human’s perspective and are not simply a legal inconvenience for journalists. Third, free speech is for individuals – not institutions, as Onora O’Neill argued. And forth and finally, trust can very often be a necessary condition for us to exercise our freedoms in a plural society. It’s sad that it took The News of the World to get us to debating these issues. But debate them now we must and will.
Thank you.
(100X Transcription Service)
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