The Media: be careful what you wish for. Or complain about

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist. 
But, seeing what the man will do 
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Journalism attracts a lot of criticism for its seamier side. 

Just as ferocious as this verse by Humbert Wolfe from the 1920s is the powerful 1931 denunciation by then Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, of the press barons who were, in his view, seeking:

…power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages

Clearly, the British press has had a lousy press for a long time.

For a contrary view, the journalist Guthrie in Tom Stoppard’sNight and Day tells us:

I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.

The Press: even the best can be irritating or infuriating
but would we really be better off it without it?

Information is light. Indeed it is. If you want a counter-example, just take Saudi Arabia. There too there was annoyance with a journalist, Jamal Kashoggi. So he was assassinated inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Five Saudis have been sentenced to death and three to long prison sentences for the crime, all of them junior figures.

The suspicion is that they are scapegoats for a crime ordered far higher up in Saudi government, quite possibly by the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman himself. But with strict censorship in place in Saudi, there’s no way those suspicions can be tested there by public debate in the media, any more than they can by the government-controlled courts.

In Britain, there have been two significant events concerning the media this week. First, the government excluded certain outlets from a press briefing, a move which at least was met with resistance by other journalists, who walked out. The British journalist can, it seems, also behave in a principled way.

The second significant event was the announcement that the government is looking at changes to the licence fee system that finances the BBC. Whatever those changes are, and however plausibly they may be justified, it’s clear they will lead to a reduction in funding.

Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has made it clear that:

As the world around us changes, our laws must change too. It will require the BBC to be innovative and to move with the times.

When the government starts telling the BBC that it needs to move with the times, it’s hard not to suspect that what it’s asking for is a move towards considerably less scrutiny of what government is doing.

That suspicion would be less strong if the government hadn’t already done so much to reduce scrutiny in the past. In the autumn, with the debate over Brexit raging in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson decided that Parliament should be prorogued. Suspending it in that way would indeed have greatly reduced the inconvenient oversight of government that Parliament was insisting on. Fortunately, the move was eventually judged to be illegal in the courts.

Today, with a more than comfortable majority in the House of Commons, Johnson no longer has to worry about parliamentary scrutiny. So now he’s rounding on the Press and the BBC.

Anyone interested in preserving an open society based on democratic values, should be opposing his moves. But there we have a problem of our own creation. The Left has been vociferous in its denunciation of the BBC and of the Press generally, contemptuously written off as the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). That only plays into Johnson’s hands.

There’s no doubt that the BBC could be improved in many ways. That’s even truer of the Press: things certainly haven’t progressed much since Humbert Wolfe penned his lines and Stanley Baldwin denounced the Press Barons.

But “they say things I disagree with” isn’t a good enough basis for attacking the media. Especially when the effect isn’t really to drive them towards reform, but merely to reinforce attempts to muzzle them completely. When a right-wing government with autocratic inclinations is preparing a hole for the media, it would be a good idea for the Left not to help dig it any deeper.

Just remember: “Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”

Things are a lot worse in the dark.