THE GUARDIAN

Press irresponsibility now matches that of trade unions in the 1960s

The Guardian

It sounds like an open-and-shut case, and in my view that's just what it is. Yet Morgan is laughing all the way to a shiny new career in television and his demand for a £1m payoff seems to have touched no general nerve of outrage. Not for the first time, an egregious piece of journalism - a front-page story that should never have appeared with so little checking - has caused no dents in the British press's self-image. By rights, Morgan ought to make us journalists look into our souls. Instead, we mostly just shrug our shoulders and move on, unwilling or incapable of putting our house in order.

The Mirror's faked tale was not some one-off event. It was merely the latest manifestation of a widespread and in some ways peculiarly British disease. This holds that, within increasingly elastic limits, a journalist is entitled to say pretty much what he or she likes, whether or not it is precisely true, without being subject to any outside sanctions or professional penalties for doing so.

Please don't get this wrong. Journalism has inherent limitations, and many journalists are only too well aware of them. They recognise, as the American political reporter David Broder puts it, that a newspaper is always "a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the last 24 hours". But a lot of us believe that the flaws and, above all, the aggressive self-righteousness are getting out of hand. Last time I wrote critically about the British press in this column, just after the Hutton report, I was flooded with private emails from other journalists who shared these concerns.

Anyone who doubts that things need to change should look at the Mail on Sunday two days ago. "Blair told: go now" was the massive headline across the front page, accompanied by the subhead: "Party bosses in open revolt as leadership race begins". Only by reading the accompanying story could one discover the reporting on which such a big claim was based. "A Mail on Sunday survey" had approached 25 Labour officials in marginal seats; of these 25 the number who said that Blair should go was - wait for it - five.

And what motives, other than reflexive resentment of the law and the desire to make mischief, lay behind the attempt last Friday by a group of the Sun, the News of the World and the Mirror to challenge the order banning them from revealing details of Maxine Carr's identity and possible whereabouts? The order aimed, rightly, to put a firewall between modern journalism and its intended victim. Without it, the press would undoubtedly have attempted to solicit attacks on Carr.

Yet this is the logic and momentum of modern journalism. People at the top of nearly all institutions in this country, reports Anthony Sampson in his new book Who Runs This Place?, see the growth of media power as the biggest change in modern Britain. "They mention the media more often with fear or dislike rather than with respect, and with a contempt for their short-term horizons, their superficiality and destructiveness," Sampson finds. The result is the siege condition under which an approximation of public life is conducted in Britain in the year 2004. The media's temptation to flaunt its power is old - "Kiss 'em one day and kick 'em the next," Beaverbrook once put it - but it has now become such an addiction that many reporters seem barely to know they are crossing the line. Is this down to a lack of professional standards? Yes, in part. But it also reflects lack of accountability.

Forty years ago, there was another irresponsible power in the land, one that also considered itself outside the rules that others made and obeyed. Then, it was the trade unions that resisted every attempt to bring them within the terms of a shared civil society. For decades the unions explicitly denied that an unjust society had a right to place conditions upon the way they did their job. Their most powerful leaders - rightly dubbed barons - often behaved as though they had no responsibility for the condition of the country beyond the gratification of their own self-interest.

It took many decades for the trade unions to be brought within the boundaries of civil society and the law. It had to be done, but it was not done well. We still deny trade unions their true importance and we lack, as a society and as trade unionists, a shared concept of good trade unionism that would allow workers' organisations to play their rightful role in the workplace and in industry. But at least trade unions no longer make the claim, solemnly endorsed as recently as the Donovan royal commission of 1968, that these things are best left to the unions themselves to sort out.

Yet that is the situation that still applies to the press today. The parallels with the unions of the 1960s are striking: a parallel belief that the law has no place in their affairs; a parallel conviction that self regulation is all that is required; a parallel belief that government action in this field is malevolent; a parallel contempt for public opinion; and a parallel cadre of barons who do not accept that anyone else has rights to set against their own. As Onora O'Neill put it in her 2002 Reith lectures: "The press has acquired unaccountable power that others cannot match."

It doesn't have to be this way. As a society we once tried to decide what kind of unions we want. Now we could - and should - ask the same questions about the kind of media we want. Throughout his important new history, The Creation of the Media, the American sociologist Paul Starr hammers away at the theme that societies have regular opportunities to set the framework of the kinds of media they require, and to set them in accordance with the needs of civil society for good media, as well as in the material interests of the media owners for big profits.

We are at such a moment here in Britain. Or we could be if we tried harder to discuss how our press could be better than it is, and how we might improve it without shackling it. What do we really mean by freedom of the press? That anyone can say anything about anyone, however untrue? Or that a society needs trustworthy and reliable information in order to make its decisions? Surely we deserve something better than what we've got. This is a minefield, of course, but it's also a task absolutely worth undertaking. For a start, the government should set up a royal commission on the press. The crisis of democracy is a crisis in journalism, warned Walter Lippmann in the 1920s. Today it is the other way round.

martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004