Media regulation is partly about protecting individuals and groups from powerful organisations and the wealthy, but it is also about protecting democracy.

 

Are pile-ons by the media on individuals acceptable? It depends on the individual. If it’s a politician then probably yes, in that the politician has or is asking to have massive power and so a lot of scrutiny should come with that. Some argue the same for a celebrity, but in that case it is worth asking why someone who happens to be well known for pursuing their particular talents has to give up their privacy as a result.

Celebrities by definition are individuals the public are interested in, but there is an important distinction between what people are interested in and what is called the public interest. People love gossip, but that does not mean that the individual the gossip is about loses their human rights. Human rights exist in part to protect individuals from the wishes of the masses.

Consider now someone who is not a politician or celebrity, but who has a minor public presence. Imagine an academic, for example, that writes a blog and the occasional article for public consumption, and who has sometimes advised political parties. In other words someone like myself. Suppose they write something in their blog that is controversial in some quarters, or embarrassing to some politician, or suppose what they write is misquoted by a Prime Minister and they complain. As a result of these activities, certain newspapers that are allied to those politicians decide to see if they can discredit the academic in some way. There follows a series of articles about the academic in which events or facts in their past are used selectively with the aim of discrediting them in the reader’s eye. Is that OK, and if it is not, why?

You could say that by doing anything public, particularly doing something of political interest, means that the academic is fair game for the media. But that very phrase ‘fair game’ is revealing. There is a power asymmetry here. Media outlets are very powerful organisations, because their audience is far greater than any academic’s blog and what they write has far greater influence. The academic doesn’t get a right of reply to what the newspapers say. There are legal options in certain cases, but these are limited and very expensive. So it is quite possible for the press to unjustifiably ruin this academic’s reputation, and there is currently no recourse readily available to the individual that has been wrongly represented by the press that will have the same impact as the original articles attacking them.

I think most people would agree that such an outcome is very unfair, and if it happened an injustice had been done. The academic has been targeted and misrepresented just because they had opinions or expertise that was politically awkward for certain media outlets. This outcome is perfectly possible today because large sections of our media have power without any accountability. They are not regulated in any meaningful way.

Now suppose that in the course of the newspaper’s digging they uncover that the academic had done something that an academic should not do. As a result, the academic loses their job. The newspaper can legitimately claim that they have exposed some wrongdoing, even if their motives for doing so are dubious. The academic and others can blame the newspaper in this case, but I doubt that would generate much public sympathy.

But what if the newspaper decides to continue their attacks on the individual after they lose their job, perhaps because it generates clicks, because it’s August or because the newspaper wants to deter other academics from attacking their politics or politicians. None of these are good reasons for hounding someone who has just lost their job. This is unfair and cruel. We are back to power without accountability. [1]

Why should newspapers, almost uniquely in the UK, be organisations that are unaccountable for what they do? A glib answer is to uphold press freedom. But those who use that term should always be asked ‘freedom to do what’. Freedom to hound a vulnerable individual because that is what readers are interested in? A better answer is that any accountability would put constraints on newspapers’ actions that would be against the public interest. In particular, any framework of accountability would need to be set up by the government, and that would threaten the freedom of the press to hold the government to account.

As an all encompassing defence this is nonsense. Suppose, for example, there was a press regulator independent of the government who could, when a newspaper publishes more than one article attacking the reputation of an individual who is not a politician, demand that this individual be given the right of reply (directly or indirectly) in the pages of that newspaper. In what way does that inhibit the newspaper from holding the government to account? In what way does it inhibit the newspaper in any way? apart perhaps from ensuring their journalism is not obviously flawed

What I have said about the imbalance of power between the media and an individual also applies to groups of individuals. It is routine for the right wing press to focus on crimes committed by immigrants or non-white criminals, because this gives the impression that foreigners or non-whites are more likely to commit crimes than they actually are. One anonymous person who follows me on X has taken to regularly sending me posts about individual crimes committed by immigrants. And for many that tactic works, of course, which may be why the press does it.

In these circumstances a regulator could insist that representatives of the groups the newspaper is trying to denigrate have some form of voice within the pages of that newspaper. These representatives could simply present the statistical evidence rather than the selected individual cases, and any caveats associated with that data. Once again, this would not deter the newspaper from holding the government to account. [2]

Protecting individuals and groups of individuals from being unjustly maligned by the UK press and media more generally does nothing to restrict the freedom of press where it matters. But what does restrict the ability of the media to hold politicians and others to account is when the media is controlled by wealthy individuals with clear political interests. In that situation the press can fail to hold the government, certain politicians or those with power to account.

In the US today we have, at best, a right wing populist government that acts very much like a plutocracy, where particular very wealthy individuals can be given or exert great power. Trump’s second term has not just created a plutocracy, but has brought with it a spate of purchases by the very wealthy of US media outlets. As there is nothing to suggest that US media has suddenly become more profitable, this rather suggests that media ownership is often about getting power and influence rather than just making money. [3] A common model for right wing populism involves state control of the media not through direct ownership or censorship, but through media ownership by wealthy individuals linked to or aligned with the government.

Exactly the same pattern could be repeated in the UK, as the role of wealthy individuals in politics here continues to grow rapidly. This is why in the UK and elsewhere good media regulation has become an essential part of having an effective democracy. Without it, we risk having a democracy in name only, where the reality is that money can buy a wealthy individual the equivalent of a great many thousands of votes, as well as the means to intimidate or harm anyone who gets in their way or in their friend’s way, or just to make a political point. [4]

Sir Brian Leveson began his inquiry by asking ‘who guards the guardians’, with the idea that the press were a key part of the UK’s guardians of democracy. In the US under what many would currently call the fascist administration of Donald Trump, you would have to ask how good a job the media there has done at guarding democracy. Parts of the US media have actively facilitated that fascist takeover, along with the election denying, blatant corruption on a massive scale, state violence, unprovoked military aggression and vote suppression that has gone along with it. Perhaps this is what can happen when no one guards the guardians, as currently happens with the UK press.

[1] Of course the case that you know I’m alluding to here was far, far worse than a maligned academic blogger. The motive for much of the huge volume of articles attacking Arday after he resigned was not to expose or deter academic plagiarism, but to use him as a proxy for an attack on EDI. In other words he was attacked because he was black. We know this partly because there have been plenty of plagiarism cases in the past that have not generated anything like this level of coverage, and also because of what many of those articles actually said.

Was this done because newspaper journalists, editors and owners are racist, or just because it furthered a particular political agenda that they supported? I have no idea, although I can think of another example that is consistent with racism. Perhaps the more relevant point to make is that at present there is nothing stopping a wealthy racist from buying a newspaper and then deliberately targeting non-white individuals. Nothing in our current system of press non-regulation would stop that happening.

[2] The attacks on Arday were also inevitably attacks on black academics in general, with the insinuation that they got their posts because of EDI rather than on merit. In my own experience as an academic on appointment boards I have never known EDI to be used to select a candidate who was not the best on purely meritocratic grounds, which is as it is intended to be. In addition the incentive to improve a department’s research profile is infinitely stronger than anything in EDI.

The quality of most of the journalism in this instance, in terms of having any understanding of how academia works, seems to be pretty poor. In the case of Cambridge about 0.4% of professors at Cambridge are black, which is a simple statistic that exposes how ludicrous these attacks on EDI in newspapers are. To say there is “some circumstantial evidence” that EDI was critical in this appointment seems to amount to (1) EDI exists (2) Cambridge University made a lot of Arday’s appointment after the decision was made (surprise, surprise given the above) and (3) universities were very woke in 2023! In other words no evidence at all.

[3] What has happened in the US is just another indication that newspapers are not purely profit maximising organisations, but that they are also a way of giving the owner considerable political power.

[4] This media also has the ability to drown out good ideas by constantly resurrecting zombie ideas.