23 May 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Broadcaster Andrew Marr today told the Leveson Inquiry it needs to address the “gap” between “state control of press on the one hand and a free-for-all on the other”.
“It’s a difficult gap,” Marr said, adding it was a “new place to build something.”
Marr, who for years maintained a superinjunction barring the press from reporting allegations he had fathered a child during an extra-marital affair also brought the judge back to the unclear terrain of regulating the online world, noting that many of the most influential political commentators today were bloggers.
“The old distinction between a political player and a would-be professional journalist is breaking down,” Marr said.
“At one point does andrewmarr.com become big enough to become part of a regulatory system?” he asked.
Marr also cautioned against recording all contact between members of the press and politicians, noting there was an “absolute distinction” between proprietors and editors meeting politicians and the “day-to-day job of story-getting political journalists” having contact with them.
Earlier in the day, a former secretary for national heritage has challenged Lord Justice Leveson’s suggestion of press regulation with a statutory backstop this morning, arguing that existing legislation needed to be better enforced.
“If we already have a set of legal standards that aren’t being met, we should ask ourselves why that is,” Conservative MP Stephen Dorrell, who oversaw the Major government’s response to the second Calcutt report in 1993, told the Inquiry this morning.
“The reason we’re sat here is that the existing laws that nobody disputes haven’t been observed and enforced,” Dorrell said.
Dorrell, who was secretary of state for national heritage during the Major government from 1994-5 — a position that subsequently became the culture secretary post — also stressed there was an issue of management culture that had largely been lost in the ongoing debate into press standards.
“The breaking of the law is the symptom of what’s wrong in the culture of an organisation that tolerates criminality,” he added. “No regulation will deliver an outcome if the core problem remains [of tolerating criminality].”
He stressed a need to “address the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms”.
Dorrell also emphasised his view that the responsibilities of a reformed Press Complaints Commission should not be decided by an external force. “The PCC is an organisation with the responsibility to promote and define standards within the press,” he said, adding later: “The issues around standards need to be internalised within the press, not taken away from them.”
Yet he said he was not appearing at the Inquiry to “defend the record” of the PCC, stressing the need for the press to hold itself to account. “The PCC cannot be a champion of every individual organ of the press,” he said. “It can be a champion of press freedom but it has to be willing to be critical of its own when the standards it espouses aren’t met.”
He added later: “The question is what happens in circumstances like [Chris] Jefferies where a judgment is made and a major injustice is done. In those circumstances, you either give people a right to remedy or recovery in civil law or you throw it back to the editor and proprietor and require them to think about what the consequences are that should flow in those circumstances.”
“It’s a completely fair question to put to the press industry: What should have happened?”
Leveson took the opportunity to flirt further with his notion of press regulation with statutory backing of some kind. “There is something systemic here. I struggle to see how it could be done by getting editors and proprietors together,” he said.
“The trick is to get a mechanism that works for everyone, that represents a free press and free expression but does cope not merely with the very rich who can indulge in proceedings but everyone.”
“I struggle to see how that’s possible on a model that doesn’t have something, somewhere.”
He was quick to add, however, that he was “simply talking about structures”.
“I am not suggesting the state should have any view at all about content,” Leveson said.
The Inquiry continues this afternoon.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
23 May 2012 | Uncategorized
The power of the internet to effect change was amply demonstrated yesterday after the Metropolitan Opera in New York reversed a decision that would have affected the freedom of the magazine Opera News to write about the opera house impartially with the following statement:
In view of the outpouring of reaction from opera fans about the recent decision to discontinue Met performance reviews in Opera News, the Met has decided to reverse this new editorial policy. From their postings on the internet, it is abundantly clear that opera fans would miss reading reviews about the Met in Opera News. Ultimately, the Met is here to serve the opera-loving public and has changed its decision because of the passionate response of the fans.
The Met and the Met Opera Guild, the publisher of Opera News, have been in discussions about the role of the Guild and how its programs and activities can best fulfill its mission of supporting the Metropolitan Opera. These discussions have included the role of reviews in Opera News, and whether they served that mission. While the Met believed it did not make sense for a house organ that is published by the Guild and financed by the Met to continue to review Met productions, it has become clear that the reviews generate tremendous excitement and interest and will continue to have a place in Opera News.
According to the New York Times, “Opera News… one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.” Opera News is published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, though that has never stopped it from publishing negative criticisms of the Met in the past. The New York Times reported, “Gelb (the Met’s Managing Director) never liked the idea that an organisation created to support the Met had a publication passing judgement on its productions. Worse yet, a publication that ‘continuously rips into an institution that its parent is supposed to help.’”
Peter Gelb’s pressure led to a situation where F Paul Driscoll, the editor of America’s most widely read classical music publication, with a circulation of 100,000, no longer felt that his magazine was at liberty to speak openly about the Met’s productions.
This created a dangerous precedent in a country where free speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the US constitution, is at least intended to be sacrosanct.
Whether a critic is right or wrong, debate has always been the lifeblood of an arts world which would not exist if it did not have an audience (and critics) to feed it. And every member of that audience — some of whom may have their own blogs — will have a view of the fare on offer that may or may not square with that of the management or the creative team. An opera house that bans its critics would clearly prefer a situation where it dictates its terms unilaterally, immune from the dialogue which can be as productive as it can be dangerous but which alone will confirm and sometimes abet the success or failure of an artistic endeavour.
Edward Said, who was perhaps as knowledgable about opera as he was about the Middle East, was forever irked by the fact that his home house, the Met, was an operatic dinosaur chained by the mid-20th century European conventions it never had the courage or ambition to shake off.
Ironically, he would probably have approved of Peter Gelb, a man who has been trying to drag the house into the 21st Century, sometimes with its audiences kicking and screaming. Gelb should be applauded for this, but his tools of persuasion should be education and debate, not censorship. By taking the path he did, he was simply reinforcing the prejudices of those who already find modern operatic production just a little strange and are no doubt unsurprised to find that its supporters had to resort to such measures in order to promote it. Gelb’s behaviour was the product of insecurity, not strength, and would have been perceived as such.
Mark Glanville is a music journalist and singer
23 May 2012 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
A group of unidentified assailants attempted to hack off the arm of a journalist in Bangladesh on Saturday (19 May). ABM Fazlur Rahman, from daily Samakal was targeted in the brutal attack after reporting on an obscene dance performance at a university in Pabna. Rahman was contacted by an anonymous caller, asking him to visit Govt Edward College campus. Upon his arrival at the campus, he was set upon by four people with machetes. The journalist has received treatment at Pabna Medical College Hospital.
23 May 2012 | Azerbaijan News, Campaigns, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
This letter appeared in the Financial Times, 23/05/12
For all of us who support and defend freedom of expression and a free press, it is encouraging indeed to see that the ability of governments with bad or dubious human rights records to whitewash their image and promote their international profile through hosting big sports, arts and music events is on the decline. (more…)
