So what is the Prime Minister frightened of?

We have heard much in recent weeks of the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’. The Rubicon is a small river in North-Eastern Italy. This idiom refers to the army of Julius Caesar crossing of the river in 49BC as an act of insurrection that ended in civil war. It means you are passing a point of no return. The Rubicon is also the place where Caesar is said to have uttered the famous phrase “alea iacta est”- the die is cast. In other words, the sacrosanct position of a free press in a free society is irreparably undermined, there is no going back. Consequently, we are told, it is simply something that should never happen in a democratic society.

It is a weak and lazy argument that misconstrues the notion of freedom and distorts the role of the press in a democracy.

Nobody would dispute the freedom of the press to hold power to account. But this does not put the press themselves beyond accountability. Freedom without accountability is simply the freedom of the powerful over the powerless. Freedom to run roughshod over people’s lives causing harm and distress for the sake of increased newspaper sales, often without any pretence that such infractions of the journalist code of conduct were necessary because it was in the public interest.

Furthermore, freedom has always been enshrined in Law. The press is protected by the right of freedom of expression, under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. But Article 10 is not absolute, it is conditional and qualified by article 10.ii:

“The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions of penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”

Article 10 is also subject to Article 8 of the Convention which covers the right to privacy. So actually the Rubicon has already been crossed but it appears that nobody has actually noticed. So much so, that abuses of press power have continued and as Leveson says “the price of press freedom [is] paid by those who suffer, unfairly and egregiously, at the hands of the press and have no sufficient mechanism for obtaining redress” (Leveson, 2012, para 10, p.5).

We shouldn’t be crossing the Rubicon, now one of the most polluted rivers in the region, by foot, trudging through murky waters, feet muddied. We should be building a bridge that will carry us there and back again – enabling the free flow of communication that offers a balance of power. Freedom of the press balanced by freedom of the public to assess and challenge the nature of that communication – freedom shared not power abused. Democratic practice requires protective and enabling legislative form – that’s why we have it in all other areas of public life.

The Press have been given many opportunities to sort out their own back yard. They have consistently failed. It is the Press who have passed the point of no return and lost their way.

The Prime Minister promised to implement the recommendations of the inquiry he initiated with such political expedience as long as they weren’t “bonkers”. The report has been widely acknowledged as rational and proportionate. Cameron himself has said he accepts the principles of the report but goes on to reject the recommended solution. At a cost of £5m to the public purse it would appear that an inquiry has taken place the outcome of which the Prime Minister had no intention of ever implementing if it didn’t meet with his own ideological beliefs. A view he has clung to despite the wishes of a vast majority of the general public, a large number of MPs, and of course, the victims of press abuse. The die is most certainly cast – the Prime Minister is beholden to the Press.

Leveson is right – it is essential that there is legislation to underpin an independent self-regulatory system. What is there to be frightened of: actually having a regulatory body that is independent and can do its job? Ensuring that such a body is effective? Validating the code of standards agreed by the industry? Establishing an arbitration system that works?

Or not having the support of the Press in the next general election?

Sign the Hacked Off petition

News is in crisis, but believing that it is a crisis stemming from the lies, deceitfulness and illegality of hacking is misplaced. Understanding the roots of the crisis requires a critical interrogation of the terms on which newspapers in the UK operate.

In the last decade news media have seen many changes. There has been a tremendous growth in the number of news outlets available including the advent of, and rapid increase in, free papers, the emergence of 24 hour television news and the popularisation of online and mobile platforms. Newspaper circulation and readership levels are at an all-time low.

News is produced and distributed at a faster rate than ever before and often takes place on several platforms at once. This has provided the newspaper industry with some real challenges. In a corporate news world it is now difficult to maintain profit margins and shareholder returns unless you employ fewer journalists. But fewer journalists with more space to fill means doing more work in less time often leading to a greater use of unattributed rewrites of press agency or public relations material: the cut and paste practice that Nick Davies famously called ‘churnalism’.

If you combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons it is not difficult to see how the values of professional journalism are quickly cast aside in order to indulge in sensationalism, trade in gratuitous spectacles and deal in dubious emotionalism.

The culture of the corporate, tabloid newsroom embodies this practice to such an extent that Rebekah Brooks wouldn’t even have needed to give the green light to phone hacking – it’s just part and parcel of what is expected. The net result is denigration of the professional life and integrity of news journalists, leading to a detrimental impact on the quality of news journalism and a consequent damage to our democracy.

This latest scandal is shocking not because of the awfulness that the practice of phone hacking is and the lack of humanity it has revealed but because it has exposed the heart of a system that is deeply flawed. Giving more powers to the Press Complaints Commission
would be a sticking plaster on a much deeper wound that will continue to fester until once more the smell becomes unbearable and another scandal erupts.

In a climate where journalists’ jobs are ever more insecure it takes a very brave journalist to blow the whistle or even ‘self-regulate’.

Self-regulation has become the sacred mantra associated with the freedom of the press – the only means to ensure governments can’t interfere in, dictate the terms and thwart the practice of journalism. But this denies the influence and power of a corporate culture that wreaks its own havoc and sets its own agenda often more blatantly than any democratic government would ever dare. If you are relatively powerless (say a journalist in relation to an editor) then self-regulation can be meaningless if the person in power does not share your views.

The question we really need to ask is: what do we want news for and how can it be delivered in the future? This is what Jeremy Hunt should be concerned with in his deliberations over the future of BSkyB, and what the forthcoming Communications Act in 2013 should be designed to address. How the production of news is changing, how it is funded, how it is received and how it can prosper must be put at the centre of this debate.

So go ahead and have a public inquiry into phone hacking, but let’s do the job properly and also have a Media Commission that asks the real questions:

1. What is in the public interest in relation to the provision of news for democracy to thrive?

2. How can we provide the environment that is required to enable journalists to do the job most of them want to do and to do it with integrity?

3. With the prospect of a new Communications Act on the horizon, can we regulate for the relationship between news and democracy while retaining independent journalism and freedom of the press, and if so, how?

The news is no ordinary product. It is indelibly linked to the practice of democracy. When the product of news is broken the practice of democracy suffers. The relationship between news and democracy works best when journalists are given the freedom (and resources) to do the job most journalists want to do – to scrutinize, to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power, to facilitate and maintain deliberation.

But freedom in this context does not simply mean freedom from censorship and interference from government so frequently associated with the term ‘freedom of the press’; it also means freedom from the constraints and limitations of a thoroughly corporate culture. In neoliberal democracies the power of the market is just as significant as the power of government. In the UK, there is certainly no rush to regulate for a healthy relationship between news media and democracy, yet there is plenty of urgency about the need to deregulate media for the benefit of the market.

The phone hacking saga shows that a marketised and corporatised media cannot be relied upon to deliver the conditions for deliberative democracy to flourish. Markets do not have democratic intent at their core. When markets fail or come under threat or simply become too bullish, ethical journalistic practice is swept aside in pursuit of competitive gain and financial stability.

Yes, we need a public inquiry – but what we really need is a whole new framework for news in the public interest.

Natalie Fenton is is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, London

But an extensive UK study undertaken at the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre provides empirical evidence that challenges utopian visions of the internet as a brave new world with everyone connected to everyone else, a non-hierarchical network of voices with equal, open and global access.

Our analysis reveals that this latest ‘new’ world of ‘new’ media has not greatly expanded the news that we read or hear, nor changed mainstream news values and traditional news formats; nor has it connected a legion of bloggers to a mass audience. Rather, as the economic model for traditional news production stumbles in the digital age, professional journalism has become the first casualty; the second, if we’re not careful, will be the health of our democracy.

The production and circulation of independent, quality news is a hallmark of democratic societies, with a complex history of commercial practices, regulatory controls and technological innovation. The demise of the existing business model of the local and regional press and of broadcast news in the regions, together with the struggle for survival of many national newspapers, demands a critical consideration of what we want news for and how it can be delivered in the digital age.

Our research draws on more than 170 interviews with a range of professionals from a cross section of mainstream news media, as well as news sources and new producers online, including bloggers and people operating in the realm of alternative news. We also undertook three newsroom ethnographies and a content analysis of online news across mainstream news media, online alternative media, social networking sites and YouTube. We looked at the role of structural factors such as commerce, finance and regulation, along with the cultural complexities of journalism, journalistic subjectivities and working practices.

We found an industry and a practice in trouble. Here are some of the main conclusions.

Newspaper circulation and readership levels are at an all-time low. There has been a tremendous growth in the number of news outlets available, including the advent of, and rapid increase in, free papers, the emergence of 24-hour news and the popularisation of online and mobile platforms. The long-term decline in advertising revenue has gone alongside cuts in personnel.

With regard to local and international news production, the lack of economies of scale means that it is increasingly commercially unviable. The Newspaper Society notes that 101 local newspapers closed between January and August 2009. In those that are surviving there are fewer people, doing more and more work. Journalism has found itself in the eye of the perfect storm – a background of marketisation, deregulation and globalisation, along with the need to keep up with technological innovation, has resulted in a negative impact on journalism for the public good and in the public interest.

The working context of news media has increased pressures in the newsroom to fill more space, through the expansion of online platforms, and work at greater speed, to fill the requirements of 24-hour news and the immediacy of online communication. All that with fewer journalists in permanent positions and more job insecurity.

Creative cannibalisation

In this environment there is evidence of journalists being thrust into news production more akin to creative cannibalisation than the craft of journalism. As they need to fill more space and to work at greater speed, while also having improved access to stories and sources online, they talk less to their sources and are captured in desk-bound, cut-and-paste, ‘administrative journalism’.

Ready-made fodder from tried and tested sources takes precedence over the sheer difficulty of dealing with the overload of user-generated content and online information. This leads to an homogenisation of content, as ever-increasing commercial pressures add to the temptation to rely on these cheaper forms of newsgathering.

Given the speed of work, and the sheer amount of traffic and noise that journalists are exposed to every day, it gets harder for ordinary citizens and non-elite sources to make direct contact with reporters in mainstream media. In order for journalists to pick out the important information from the ‘blizzard’ online they are forced to create systems of ‘filtration’ based on known hierarchies and established news values. So mainstream news online has not expanded to include a diversity of voices, or shifted focus according to information filtered through social media.

And even though there is now a plethora of media outlets, and citizens and civil society can publish media content more easily than ever, there still is a dominance of a limited number of players that control news, information content and public debate. In other words, mainstream news matters, maybe more than it ever has done – most people, most of the time, get most of their news from it.

The organisation of web search tends to send more users to the most popular sites in a winners-take-all pattern. It seems ever more likely that the web will be dominated by the larger, more established news providers in a manner that, yet again, limits possibilities for increased pluralism.

At some newspapers, the combination of staff reductions and speeded-up production schedules means that only the most established senior journalists, with the highest level of personal autonomy, have the luxury of leaving the office to talk to people, phoning a number of different people to verify information, or probing for alternative views or contradictions. And it is not just the young journalists whose working practices have been transformed.

‘They [journalists] don’t even try to talk to you, they just watch breaking news upstairs,’ says one Labour MP. ‘I pass them every day when I come in. I see them watching telly and banging away.

‘When I first came here … it would be rare for that lobby not to include some journalists, and sometimes it could be as many as ten or a dozen or 20. Now the only people you see in the lobby are the fellas in the fancy breeches looking after the place.’

Market constraints

What we’re left with is a contradiction between the potential of new technologies and the stifling constraints of the free market. The material conditions of contemporary journalism – particularly unprotected commercial practice – do not offer the space to practice independent journalism in the public interest. On the contrary, job insecurity and commercial priorities place increasing limitations on journalists’ ability to do what most of them want – to question, analyse and scrutinise.

News media that can be relied upon to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power and facilitate and maintain deliberation is critical to a functioning democracy.

In a world of information overload, protecting and enhancing media that can aim for this ethical horizon has become more important. Without it, we are left scrambling through the blogosphere, drowning in opinion, with no known serious fact-checking, no requirement to put stories in context, and no real way of holding the writer-gatherers to account.

In a neoliberal, free-market economy, news has no right to exist if it cannot pay its way. But news is not an ‘ordinary’ commodity – it has a special status by dint of its relationship to democratic life. The UK government has acknowledged this, but its response, as outlined in its Digital Britain report, falls far short of offering an alternative to neoliberal approaches. Rather, the market remains at the core of policy.

The internet, enabled to fulfil its true potential, could be a real force for democratic pluralism. Protection of the internet and journalism from commercial suffocation could create a vastly expanded and critically engaged public space operating in the public interest. But the structures that would enable this ethical practice to survive and thrive need to be re-imagined and re-stated.

Natalie Fenton’s book, New Media, Old News: journalism and democracy in the digital age, is published by Sage