Ad Week: Lessons in Leveson with Lord David Puttnam

In the same week a ‘historic’ deal was met by the three main political parties for a new press regulation, Lord David Puttnam has spoken about press freedom, democracy and the future of the press.

During an interview for Ad Week Europe, which is taking place in central London all this week, the British film producer and Labour peer spoke to ITV’s political editor Tom Bradby about what lessons have been learned post-Leveson.

Lord Puttnam was quick to say that he is passionate about press freedoms, particularly in a time in which he felt democracy was fragile. However, when asked where journalism lost its way in light of the phone hacking scandal, Puttnam said: “There is a problem more sinister than the issues surrounding the Leveson inquiry and that’s that even the greatest judiciary can’t stand up against collusion when it’s between the police and the press.

“It prevents democracy. It’s a collusion between press, politicians and police, where the game is fixed before it even reaches the courts.”

Puttnam also said that phone hacking has been going on for decades – since the 80s – and that he has friends that were victims.

“The press should have a duty of care towards readers,” he said. “If they don’t, that is deeply anti-social and anti-societal.”

Puttnam is not confident that this type of collusion will come to an end, even with a new form of press regulation, but he thinks that there will be reasonable protection against it.

He claimed that hacking was widespread for all but three fair players in the press and that the Financial Times has been “innocent,” that the Guardian has “played a good game,” and that Chris Blackhurst, the current editor of the Independent, has proved why the paper is, indeed, independent.

There was some blame placed on the accountability of newspaper owners and Puttnam said that only people that pay UK taxes should be able to buy UK newspaper businesses.

He said that as a country we need to “establish parameters” when providing news to the public; foreign owners have no affiliation to the country they are influencing and they do not experience the impact of the actions that manipulated narratives can have – asking how would the audience feel about the Daily Telegraph being bought by Putin?

He also poked fun at Rupert Murdoch, quoting first Dennis Potter, who famously said: “If I could name my cancer, I would call it Rupert,” before describing the media mogul as “a bit schizophrenic.”

“He loves the press but he’s not capable of aggregating what’s best for society.”