There’s been a hell of a lot of discussion this week about Ricky Gervais and his use of the word “mong” on Twitter (mong being a shortened version of “mongoloid”, an archaic term for Down’s Syndrome).
I wont explain the whole thing, James Ward does it all here.
Gervais’s defence of his use of the word is that meanings change. Of course, this is true. But this is something that happens over time. Gervais can’t really force it. You can’t simply decide, by yourself, that a word that many people find offensive is not offensive and then get defensive when people point out you’ve been offensive. Which is what Gervais has done, variously blaming people who are jealous of his success (what, in the old days, we used to call “playa haters”) and the “humourless PC brigade” (I’ve always maintained that invoking the PC brigade is on a level with saying “I’m entitled to an opinion” as a tacit admission that one has lost the argument).
A problem with Gervais’s use of the word is he clearly does believe it is transgressive, and therefore funny. So his defence — that the usage doesn’t have transgressive aspects, as the meaning has changed, doesn’t add up.
And worst of all, it’s just not funny. Gervais has confused offensive (rarely in itself funny) with transgressive (a vital element of pretty much all humour).
None of this is to say that Gervais cannot use whatever the hell words he likes.
Here, as a lesson in transgressive, is Joan Rivers making Anne Frank jokes (fast forward to three minutes):
An initially banned horror film has been given an “18” rating, after a number of cuts. Human Centipede 2 was originally banned in the UK for posing a “real risk of harm,” in June, but after 32 cuts, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) granted it certification ahead of its DVD release. BBFC president Sir Quentin Thomas said that the sequel, in which a disturbed loner conducts bizarre human experiments, would still be difficult for viewers to watch, but said that the cuts “address all of the concerns raised when the board refused a classification.”
With this year’s slew of superinjunctions and the exposure of the phone hacking scandal, the fine lines between free speech, privacy, media regulation and public interest have never been so topical. On 20 September, lawyers Gideon Benaim and Hugh Tomlinson QC were joined by the Guardian’s David Leigh and Index editor Jo Glanville at the Law Society to pick apart this complex balance of principles and interests and evaluate the press’s role in upholding it.
It was first put to the panel whether the UK’s current privacy laws were working. Hugh Tomlinson QC argued they were, but he felt that rather than continuing to leave such decisions to judges, there needed to be legislation.
Leigh, meanwhile, was concerned about what he dubbed “the ballooning approach to privacy law” and its potentially restrictive effects on the journalism trade and free speech. Benaim, however, did not buy into what he termed “Doomsday” rhetoric — the assumption that investigative journalism and democracy were on the brink of tighter sanctions.
The subject of whether — and how — the press should be regulated in light of the recent phone hacking scandal that has marred Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation proved contentious. While Benaim was in favour of more controls, Leigh, Tomlinson and Glanville expressed concerns. “Regulation is attractive on the surface, but it cannot work because where journalism ends and blogging begins is not clear,” Tomlinson said.
He added, however, that he would like to see an “independent quasi-judicial regulatory body for the press” that mixes incentives and disincentives for reporters.
An audience member asked whether or not phone hacking would have occurred had regulations been in place and the reporters involved had received more rigorous journalistic training. For Leigh, this was a non-issue in News Corp’s case: “The tabloid culture of anything goes took over.” In this atmosphere, hacking unsurprisingly became acceptable.
Glanville agreed that controls may well have proved futile. “Even if regulations were in place, how would they have stopped hacking when even the police and the CPS ignored it?”
The panel added that the very reason phone hacking persisted was due to widespread concerns — and fear — over the power of Murdoch and his media empire. An issue raised, but left unanswered, was whether or not an independent regulator would have held back over such concerns.
Glanville closed the debate by noting how we are seeing a “massive cultural shift in how we treat our own privacy. This is mismatched with what is legally possible in terms of what is published.” In the short term, the upcoming Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions and the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking should provide a pause for thought and help refocus both British journalism and the public’s relationship with it.
Marta Cooper is an editorial assistant at Index on Censorship.
It will probably surprise many people — I wish I could say it surprised me — to know that the Press Complaints Commission still thinks it has a future. If recent weeks have taught us anything about the PCC, you might think, it is that the so-called regulator has failed to uphold press standards and a new approach is needed. The prime minister thinks so, Labour thinks so, the public thinks so and the Leveson inquiry has been asked to devise that new approach. The PCC is doomed, and you would struggle, these days, to find a supporter who did not have a strong interest in the status quo.
But go to the PCC website and you will find something like defiance. We do a great job helping people with complaints, they say. A lot of the criticism we endure is unfair. Hacking was a matter for the law and not for us. Yes, there is a need for reform, even fundamental reform, but in the end you must come back to something like the PCC or democracy will be endangered.
This is misleading and smacks of self-delusion. The PCC’s failures did not begin with hacking; hacking is just the last and heaviest straw. The PCC, when it had its chance, gave the News of the World a clean bill of health on hacking although the same evidence led MPs on the media select committee to conclude that the paper was gravely at fault and senior executives were displaying ‘collective amnesia’. The PCC also criticised the Guardian, which broke the key hacking story in 2009. The MPs and the Guardian have been proved right and the PCC wrong.
Why was the PCC wrong? Because it is a complaints agency and doesn’t know what to do when a big problem comes along. In the McCann case it did nothing while for a year newspapers indulged in an orgy of libels — they have since admitted to publishing hundreds of false articles, possibly more than a thousand, grossly misleading millions and millions of readers. Like hacking, this was apparently not the PCC’s business.
Nor is the failure of accountability in the tabloid press the PCC’s problem. Again and again we see these large libel payouts, the latest to Chris Jefferies, the retired Bristol teacher so disgracefully treated in the tabloids. Has the PCC ever followed up such cases to see why lessons are not learned? Have they ever asked about internal systems and accountability in these papers? Have they asked about discipline? There is no sign of it.
Such matters are too big for the PCC. Its concern is the micro — individual complaints, and (largely) only those which are made by the people personally affected. This has nothing obvious to do with standards, though the argument was often made that by chasing up such complaints the PCC would effect a general raising of standards in the press. It has been nearly 20 years since the PCC began work and we are entitled to ask: has there been a general raising of standards? No.
The complaints work is worthwhile and something like it will be needed in the future. Few people dispute that. It does not follow that to meet our present needs all we have to do is improve the complaints agency. Though the PCC seems to be the very last to recognize this, we need radical change. We need a regulator.
As for the need to balance regulation with freedom of expression, that is a challenge the Leveson Inquiry will address and which it is perfectly capable of addressing successfully. It will have many options before it, and you can read some ideas here. To suggest that the only way to achieve a balance is to stick with a structure that has failed is nonsense. Far from being chained to the PCC we are about to discard it, and very few people who care about press freedom and press standards will be sorry to see it go.
