Peter Preston (London Observer): Media freedoms face an ice age

[Jack Rabbit]

From the London Observer (Sunday supplement of the Guardian Unlimited)
Dated Sunday February 1

Media freedoms face an ice age
Once the BBC is cowed, the right to dig for facts - and occasionally, inevitably, get them wrong - will be at risk
By Peter Preston

The editor of the Guardian, as it happened, had the last word first. A full fortnight ago, brooding on the likely lessons of Hutton, Alan Rusbridger posted a memo to staff on the paper's notice board. 'It seems obvious enough,' he wrote, 'but inside many journalists - this goes for desk editors as much as reporters - there is a little demon prompting us to make the story as strong and interesting as possible, if not more so. We drop a few excitable adjectives around the place. We over-egg. We may even sex it up.'
And of course he was dolefully right. 'Straight, accurate stories,' in Rusbridger's coinage, are best (if not always best read). See how Andrew Gilligan's memorial lecture, ad-libbed to a small, somnolent audience at 6.07 on the morning of 29 May 2003, has brought Broadcasting House crashing down. See how one extra addled egg has cut short the careers of Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, and the lecturer himself. See how some of our best journalists twist now before a gale of Government wrath which should make us all shiver, broadcasters and print performers alike. (Gilligan, remember, learnt his trade in print, and arrived at the end of a radio link on a free transfer to the Today programme from the Sunday Telegraph).
But remember that accuracy is more than a simple collection of facts. It is also a judgment about what those facts mean and how they should be interpreted: a question of proportion, of context and balance. At which point, Brian Hutton, Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair - too much pettifoggery, too much hysteria, too much gloating - have charges to answer themselves . . . .
Hutton is pretty convincing on Downing Street's bumbling honesty over the naming of Kelly, the relative blamelessness of Geoff Hoon, the irrelevance of what the Prime Minister said in the Far East.
But he is absolutely unconvincing when he seeks to champion the cause of free journalism. He seems to come from a different age and a different culture. If he is allowed, egged on by government triumphalism, to define the boundaries of proper investigation, then media freedoms - already shadowed by an unending war against terrorism - face an ice age.

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[baby_bear]

1. Thanks, Jack Rabbit

It took a bit to get through that piece, (to discern the colloquialisms as much as anything), but it's really very intriguing vis-a-vis the Brits' lack of anything resembling our first amendment rights, and the general integrity of their news media. It seems ironic, as I read through the piece, that our own media, with its huge protections, is a much bigger suck-up to the current administration than is the British press, despite their lack of such protections.

The comparison is not favorable to the U.S. television media, and largely not favorable to the U.S. print media as well.

Not a very elegant explanation, but those were my thoughts.

s_m