Not in Britain, if we are to believe the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. In the report Privacy and Media Intrusion (16 June 2003) the committee finds that “...standards of press behaviour...have improved in the last decade”, but still wants a big stick with which to threaten the press (i.e. something stronger than the Press Complaints Commission) and “firmly recommend [the Government] to bring forward legislative proposals to clarify the protection that individuals can expect from unwarranted intrusion by...the press.”

“Nothing is more apt to surprise a foreigner, than the extreme liberty, which we enjoy in this country, of communicating whatever we please to the public, and of openly censuring every measure, entered into by the king or his ministers.” So wrote David Hume in 1741 in his essay Of the Liberty of the Press. His question was how this state of affairs had come about. My question is a different one, a question to which the Select Committee might have addressed itself. I think the British press still stands out in its freedom, pluralism and aggressiveness – but is it a good press?

France offers an excellent laboratory of comparison. The French press is different. With about the same population, total newspaper circulation is only half of that in Britain. There is nothing resembling British tabloid journalism, nor Sunday newspapers worth mention. The regulatory regime is stricter, based on the kinds of statutory provisions the Select Committee now recommends for Britain. In western Europe only France, Ireland and Portugal do not have an independent self-regulatory press council. The French press itself is hierarchical with a single dominating newspaper holding the undisputed top position: Le Monde. It is without question a newspaper of exceptional quality in the broadness and depth of its coverage of national and international affairs. But is it a good newspaper? And by extension, if judged by the quality of its standard bearer, is the French press a good press?

In June 2000, Le Monde carried one of its most dramatic ever front pages on which, across the top, Paris was branded “capital of electoral fraud”. The story laid out in detail a system of electoral fraud in the French capital, in particular in the famed 5th district on the left bank, the power base of political leaders such as President Jacques Chirac (once mayor of Paris) and the then mayor, Jacques Tiberi.

PARIS, CAPITAL OF ELECTORAL FRAUD
Judicial enquiries show that, over a long time, universal suffrage has been perverted in Paris.
Fictitious voters, false addresses, material benefits for ballots: a system organised by the RPR.
A school case: the 5th arrondissement, the turf of the Paris mayors.
— Front page headlines, Le Monde 9 June 2000.

But although legislative framework and competition no doubt play a role, I do not think this is an explanation that takes us very far. The political corruption in Paris was so well known that it would not take much investigation to prove it – as, after all, freelance activists were able to do, no doubt with less investigative resources than Le Monde had its editors chosen to put their star reporters on the case. Behind the legislative framework is a culture, and although “culture” is a vague and plastic term, it makes sense to say that what stood between Le Monde, with its perception of itself as a newspaper of superior quality, and the telling of a simple truth, was culture more than laws.

He was living a lie

Why did the French press not reveal to the French people who their president really was? The answer, strangely enough, lies in the matter of the mistress and the daughter. Not even French press laws stood in the way of making this public. That was entirely a matter of culture – of something being regarded as “private”. Whether or not it is relevant for the public to know of the love life of a president (I think it is, certainly when it is institutionalised in a second family) is beside the point to our argument. Any normal curious reader would want to know, the president wanted it kept quiet, editors knew but did not publish. The press had trapped itself into a conspiracy of silence with the President and with others in the élite who were in the know. The press, the President and other insiders shared a secret that they were keeping from a public they deemed not mature enough to know. Through such consort and disregard for the public, the press kills itself off as the controller of power. This is élitism on display. No censorship is needed because a culture is in place in which order is maintained.

We are now by stealth coming back to the question of the good press. In the French case I have described Le Monde as a newspaper of exceptional quality, and I think no sensible reader could judge it differently. But I am not persuaded that it is a good paper or that the press of which it is a part is a good press. What, then, is a good press? In an open and democratic society, the press has a job to do and is as good as it does that job. That may sound obvious and elementary, but is far from it. I listen carefully to what is being said when people complain about the press, and what I usually hear are complaints about standards, not about performance. Baroness O’Neill’s complaint, for example, is about, as she sees it, the low standard of reporting.

Standards are, of course, relevant, but they are not what the press is about. They are the means by which it does its job, but not the job. That job is to enlighten the public and to educate and entertain it. It is to inform the political process. It is to serve as an arena of deliberation. It is to hold to answer those who exercise power. Let us for simplicity say that the job has two elements, to inform the public and to scrutinise power. If the job were only to inform, we could judge the press on a single standard. Does it tell us what we need to know and does it do so truthfully? But if the job is a mixed one, we do not have that luxury. We need to consider several criteria at the same time, criteria that may well be in conflict with each other. Is the press disposed and able to take on power in such a way that those who hold it know that they are being held to answer? And does it also inform us adequately?

Were the press to accept a duty only of information, it would let us down on the essential democratic job of scrutinising power. If it were not prepared to investigate uses and abuses of power, there would be things we need to know which we were not being told, and it would let us down on both accounts. In order to be able to display power at work, it may need to sacrifice some accuracy of information, at least during the process of investigation. There is something paralysingly puritanical and bloodless in the opinion that standards are holy and paramount. That is to ask for a pretty press with no bite.

The British press is not always a pretty sight, but it does its job. That is not thanks to one or two quality papers, although they are there, but to its structure: the combination of quality broadsheets and aggressive tabloids, of nationals and locals. It comes from competition, from the absence of privacy legislation, from cautious self-regulation, and from a tradition and culture of critical independence. Many in Britain deplore the aggressiveness of the tabloids, but they should not fret. The threat to the quality of the British print press does not come primarily from the nastiness of the tabloids, but if anything from a decline in the broadsheets. There, the best standards are in the obituary pages, which are outstanding, and in sports and arts reporting. Political reporting is for the most part poor, being obsessed with Westminster and covering the broader political process badly, and dominated by an excessive deadweight of columnists and commentators, many of whom are former editors beyond their sell-by date who do not report goings-on but express opinions, usually of little use to anyone.

A new identity

More stories of the same kind could be told, stories which reflect very badly indeed on the press. But they are, for all their nastiness, still stories of standards and not of performance. The stories I have told from the French press are very different: the press there is a pretty sight but does not do its job. Good standards of bad performance.

Taking the British and French stories together, I think there are three lessons here. First, in the French case it would seem that legal framework and culture put standards before performance. That experience would suggest that standards can be too strongly regulated in law or protected in culture, and if so, that performance may suffer. Second, in the British case the question is whether arguments of performance are given such weight that editors are able to disregard standards. The British press would certainly not merit a clean bill of health on standards, but since the establishment of its own regime of self-regulation with the Press Complaints Commission in 1991, the trend has been towards better standards, in particular on privacy – witness the PCC’s submission to the Select Committee. This experience would suggest that careful selfregulation of standards can be effective without a cost in lower performance.

The choice is ours

The truth about the British press – and this includes the electronic media as well as the print press – is that it is simply brilliant. Compared to anywhere else in Europe and beyond, it is informative, lively, varied and pluralistic, entertaining and often funny, politically vibrant – and it is independent, critical, irreverent and, thank God, intrusive. It does its job. We have a press culture which accepts and cherishes a certain degree of healthy ruthlessness. Regulate out that spirit and much gets lost. No one who has been outside of Britain and seen the tedious and inept press most democracies are burdened with would, in their right mind, want that instead of what we have.

True, in doing its job it sometimes overdoes it, and the British press does have a nasty streak. That it is dealing with – successfully. To their credit, our legislators have held back from tying the press up in a straightjacket of privacy laws. Better to allow the occasional visible failure in standards than to engineer systematic and hidden failures in performance. But the pressure is on.

It is a popular myth that the public holds the press in disregard and that journalism is the least trusted profession, along with used-car dealers and estate agents. In fact, journalists enjoy a remarkable degree of trust. In the most recent poll on the subject (in February/March 2003, by YouGov), radio and television news reporters were at the very top of the league table of trust, along with family doctors and school teachers. Journalists on broadsheets and local papers were high up the scale, alongside judges. Only journalists on red-top tabloids were down at the bottom with the estate agents. All of which suggests a healthy state of affairs in the relationship between press and public.

Those of us who like to comment on public affairs usually like also to ask what should be done and feel obliged to offer our earnest suggestions for action. As far as the British press is concerned, it is gratifying to be able to recommend that nothing that is not already being done needs doing. Rather we should enjoy our blessed state and, with David Hume, unashamedly rejoice that this, at least, we do better than most others.