Leveson and Speed

General 28 November 2011 | 0 Comments

I don’t know if you’re the same as me but I’ve been fairly obsessively following the Leveson inquiry into the practices and ethics (or relative lack thereof) of our ‘Gawd Bless Em’ national press. The testimonies offered by the likes of the McCanns has been well served elsewhere, but just as interesting as the enquiry itself is the reporting and spin that is coming from the media in their own coverage of the unfolding events. By and large it seems to me that the people on the stand are giving measured accounts of how their lives have been trampled on by the press, whereas the journalists and media commentators are responding with hysterical cries about how ‘the News Of The World was a bad apple but it’s closed now for god’s sake, so just leave us alone!’ or giving us the old ‘they give up their right to privacy the moment they choose to be in the public eye’ defence.

Leveson is not a inquiry about the illegal activities at one newspaper, it is looking at the wider ethical standards of an industry that has used its considerable leverage to ensure it is accountable only to itself. The printed press in this country has long held itself up as the arbiters of common moral decency in this country, while at the same time huge swathes of the press has been engaging in such morally questionable activities as to beggar belief.

I heard Steve Coogan being interviewed on the Today programme the other day along with a Guardian journalist, who was accusing Coogan and the other celebrities of overleveraging their position to make their own self interested points, and of reducing the potency of the arguments of the ‘normal’ people like the McCanns who are appearing at the enquiry. Coogan very calmly expressed his view that actually the majority of people are uncomfortable with the practices of the press, but the celebrities are the ones who are called onto programmes like Today and as a result they have a responsibility to speak up for those who are never likely to be called onto discussions in the printed press or the radio or television, or those people who are smeared every day but do not have the funds or the profile to fight back. I think the media needs to realise that when the rich celebrities are the ones making sense in the argument, they’ve probably lost the moral high ground.

I had wondered if the Leveson inquiry might bring about some kind of soul searching among the media, that they might actually sit up and think; ‘Blimey, maybe some of what we do is a bit strong,eh? Maybe intruding onto people’s grief, their private lives, their property, maybe some of that is a bit out of order for what is essentially cheap voyeurism with no conceivable public interest whatsoever. In the wake of this enquiry and all the stories about us, maybe on the next story we don’t intrude into private grief, or indulge in speculation, or hang around outside someone’s home hoping to see someone crying. Maybe we just let them get on with it, yeah?’