The Leveson Inquiry has been compelling television but may reveal little new about the morality of the press
Royal commissions take minutes and waste years, Harold Wilson is reported to have said. Public inquiries, on the other hand, take minutes, last years and cost millions. Such inquiries in Northern Ireland – however important the subjects they are investigating – are said to have cost up to £400m. You could have built a lot of children’s playgrounds and community centres in Belfast with £400m. Instead, much of the money went into the pockets of London-based lawyers.
The Leveson Inquiry cost us a mere £2m in its first six months. The inquiry’s staff bill was £682,000. The cost of lawyers was over £600,000. The ‘assessors’ – Sir David Bell, former chair of the Financial Times; Elinor Goodman, former political editor of Channel 4 News; George Jones, former political editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Sir Paul Scott-Lee, former chief constable of West Midlands police – received £67,000 between them. For that kind of moolah you expect a high-quality production. Leveson has not disappointed. It has been compelling television for the tiny minority of folk who are obsessed with politics. It is like a more expensive version of Borgen, without the subtitles.
The Leveson Inquiry is the perfect example of the kinds of things new prime ministers do, partly because they want to be seen to be doing something, and partly because they can. Only a few months into the job, David Cameron established the Leveson Inquiry against a rising tide of revelations about phonehacking and intrusion by Fleet Street. Lord Justice Leveson, who learned his Latin at Liverpool College, opened his inquiry with the famous words from Juvenal’s Satires: ‘who guards the guardians?’
The testimony of celebrity witnesses and A-list politicos has shone a light on the symbiotic relationship between the powerful, the famous and the people who make the news that we consume in our millions. It turns out that politicians and media executives eat, talk and socialise with each other. The impromptu appearance of David Lawley Wakelin, described as a ‘film-maker’, added some extra drama.
Once the live coverage has gone off-air, and a lengthy, worthy, detailed report is published (no matter which shelf it ends up on), Juvenal’s question will remain. You do not really need a judge-led inquiry to know that the British tabloid press behaves in ways which would make most decent people shudder. We already knew that some journalistic practice is despicable and sordid; that many Fleet Street journalists have a morality twisted by years of dabbling in human misery; that Rupert Murdoch is really Montgomery Burns.
It is five years since Tony Blair told us of the ‘feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits’; 20 years since David Mellor told us the popular press was ‘drinking in the last-chance saloon’; and 80 years since Stanley Baldwin, with lines scripted by his cousin Rudyard Kipling, said the press exercised ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ Leveson will not tell us much we do not know already.
What comes next? Will Cameron introduce new curbs on newspaper ownership? The Labour left has argued for ‘one man, one newspaper’ since the days of Beaverbrook. In 1983, the Labour party manifesto included pledges to prevent ‘acquisitions of further newspapers by large press chains’ and argued for ‘breaking up major concentrations of press ownership, by setting an upper limit for the number of major publications in the hands of a single proprietor’. It was a straight assault on Murdoch. It is hard to believe that Cameron will be the prime minister to pick such a fight with the people who buy ink by the barrel. Ed Miliband told Leveson that he would limit media ownership. Analysts immediately pointed out the loss-making Times, if decoupled from the profitable Sun, would go out of business. Again, it is hard to see Miliband, newly elected as prime minister, making war on News International his first priority when social services and the NHS will be on their knees.
The arguments about over-powerful media moguls are being settled, not by legislators, but by the market. Our media is disaggregating into niches. We are consuming it how and when we want. Newspaper sales are dropping; it is not entirely fanciful that in 20 years’ time the paid-for daily newspaper will have gone the way of the carrier pigeon, telegram or town crier.
For now, the answer lies in proper statutory regulation. Admonishment by the Press Complaints Commission holds all the terrors of being licked by kittens. The best we can hope for from Leveson is a tough regulator, drawn from professions other than the media. This should include regulation of blogs and websites with readerships over a few thousand and the power to enforce the terms of corrections and apologies. The harlot needs to be made honest; the feral beast needs muzzling; the last-chance saloon must be bulldozed. If the result of Leveson is a press which thinks twice before engaging in some depraved act of intrusion or trickery, then it will have been worth it after all.
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