Hopes for a further government inquiry into press misconduct were dashed this week as a Labour attempt to bring it back to life was narrowly defeated in The Commons.
Throughout discourse on “Leveson 2”, the billionaire press has been quick to conflate any attempt to scrutinise their too-often low standards, their bullying, and hate-preaching as “an attack on free press”. As such, their bragging and relief in the wake of the vote were no surprise.
The Media Reform Coalition described the vote as “shameful, saying it equated “freedom of the press with the freedom to avoid independent scrutiny and the freedom to target vulnerable individuals.”
Then, after not much of consequence ultimately happens, it is only the agitators and politics geeks that really notice. Everyone else has moved onto the next thing, and many of those politics geeks didn’t really have the appetite for change in the first place, as evidenced by outcomes.
The banking crisis and the lobbying scandal (that should have been but never quite was) illustrate this pattern just as well as the outrage about press standards that was triggered 7 years ago when we discover that one of Murdoch’s paper had spied on a murdered child.
No matter the sound and fury in these cases, genuine reform scarcely adds up to a row of beans. With so much of what we’ve seen in intervening years, it would be brave to argue that overall standards have improved.
Once more, the challenge is for independent media to produce responsible and balanced reportage when the propaganda platforms of the 1% and others working in their parameters inevitably end up doing the opposite.
Stephen Durrant
