Who can forget what birthdays were like when we were little? Those weeks of
anticipation, that sense of a world about to change, the almost unbearable
excitement of the night before… And then, usually about bedtime on the
day itself, a dreadful feeling of anti-climax.

For those awaiting great things from Lord Justice Leveson on November
29 last year, the euphoria lasted only until David Cameron got to legislation:
“For the first time we would have crossed the Rubicon of writing elements of
press regulation into the law of the land… we should think very, very
carefully before crossing this line.” And with that, the birthday was over and
the world was turning as before, opening the way for negotiations between
the Conservatives and the same old lags that had been in the dock for most of
2012. Why had everyone got so excited? Today, if you ask people to recall the
big stories of last year, they tend not to remember Leveson.

But if people expected too much then, they’re misguided to think
nothing is happening now. Things went quiet; they didn’t go away. Can
Oliver Letwin’s notion of a royal charter work? In her explanation of how it
might, culture secretary Maria Miller has annoyed not only supporters but
also opponents of the status quo – the former because they believe she
proposes an outrageous assault on free speech, the latter because she’s not
giving them Leveson.

With so much now out in the open, it’s hard to see how press regulation
can be stitched up away from public gaze. Labour and the Liberal Democrats
are eager to see some action, though if Lord Puttnam’s late night tinkering
with the Defamation Bill is the way things are going – his intervention was
seen as a statement of intent by a Labour party determined to give Leveson
some statutory muscle – things will not end well.

As discussions proceed, let us ask a useful question: what are we trying to
solve? The evidence to Leveson revealed some very bad behaviour, much of
which is already subject to statutory control. There’s criminal law on phone
and computer hacking, theft, misconduct in public office, contempt of court
– these without turning too many pages of McNae’s Essential Law for
Journalists. These laws have teeth, as a large number of journalists and police
officers are beginning to understand, for if police were initially reluctant to
feel the collars of journalists and fellow officers, they’ve more than made up
for it since. And we haven’t even raised civil law on libel, privacy, breach of
confidence…

There’s a danger that something has to be done because something has to
be done, that newspapers behaved so badly that retribution is required.
There is no merit in a change in the law designed merely to make a point.
What do any of the current proposals do to make the newspaper industry
better? The truth is that the most honourable reporters may cause pain in
investigating news and the most reasonable requests for information can
hurt.

Is the public desperate for change? For all the surveys, it’s hard to tell. At
a recent newspaper conference, a regional editor presented the results of an
impromptu survey in which he had asked readers the circumstances in which
it was permissible for journalists to knock on the door of a bereaved family.
By and large, respondents thought it wasn’t. Only when the editor presented
the most innocuous scenario – a saintly and elderly clergyman who had died
in his sleep – did those surveyed feel that an approach for information for an
obituary was justified. How did all those readers believe column inches were
filled? In the editor’s words, uttered before we found the food industry was
serving us horse: “Readers like sausages too, but they don’t want to know
what goes into them.”

Now there is confusion about what is and isn’t permissible. The pop
papers have avoided pictures of a pregnant Duchess of Cambridge, though
she has appeared on a public beach where she can have little expectation of
privacy. The Sun, less sensitive about the dead South African model Reeva
Steencamp, showed her in her bikini all over the front page on the day her
boyfriend Oscar Pistorius appeared in court accused of her murder. Mail
online, condemning a South African newspaper for printing a graphic
speculating on the circumstances of Ms Steencamp’s death, reprinted the
graphic for the benefit of its own readers. Would regulations have anything
to say here? Or are so many of those things that people find offensive about
newspapers – and which sit outside the current laws – largely to do with
taste?

— KF