Is the tide turning in favour of press freedom at last?

Following the Society of Editors conference this week, Raymond Snoddy reports on a change in government rhetoric over press freedoms.

Question: Who said the following this week?

“Britain’s newspapers remain the best in the world. A vital bulwark against wrongdoing. A voice for the voiceless. The very foundation upon which democracy stands. And when I am asked if their work should be hindered and restricted by meddling bureaucrats and politicians who wouldn’t know a spike from a stone sub, my answer is simple.

“Not today. Not Tomorrow. Not ever.”

Cue applause.

And the same speaker naturally heaped praise on the press for everything from the Stephen Lawrence and Lance Armstrong coverage to the MPs’ expenses scandal and exposure of the years of public inaction on sexual abuse of the young in Rotherham.

Roll the ticker-tape celebrations.

The speaker, of course, was Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and such a peon of undiluted praise for the enduring joys of freedom of the press – apart from a handful of miscreants – has rarely come out of the mouth of a senior serving politician who can be bitten tomorrow by that very freedom.

Of course the scale of the rhetoric may have been influenced by the nature of his audience – the Society of Editors annual conference in Southampton.

And a cynic might note that with a general election little more than six months away few politicians want to enter a period of unarmed combat with editors from the local, regional and national press plus broadcasting.

But for all that, Javid’s speech seemed to represent, at least at the symbolic level, a welcome start in the rolling back of a growing litany of limits on press freedom, some more intentional than others.

Much of the conference before the Culture Secretary’s closing speech was devoted to denouncing the inequities of the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) – a product of the House of Commons, and the Right to Be Forgotten concocted in the European Human Rights Court.

RIPA gives the police the right to obtain telephone records on the say-so of a superintendent rather than, say, a judge. It was supposedly designed to tackle organised crime and terrorism but, it is alleged, is being routinely used by police to get access to journalistic sources and reveal the identity of whistleblowers.

The Right to Be Forgotten ruling, which allows the removal of names from databases such as Google when the information is judged to be out-dated, disproportionate or unfair.

Google, for example, is now receiving a demand for deletion every 90 seconds from those who would prefer their pasts to remain secret and a whole department has had to be set up to deal with it. If Goggle refuses to delete it could have to defend itself in court.

Criminals, for instance, are seeking to have their previous offences removed even when they have subsequently committed similar crimes.

The Culture Secretary is very sound on both issues. The right to keep sources anonymous is the very bedrock of investigative journalism and RIPA should never be used to spy on reporters and whistle-blowers going about “their lawful, vital business.”

Bravo.

And the “right to be forgotten” is simply censorship by the back door.

Here Javid has the additional emotional traction that the “right to be forgotten” is the work of “Luxembourg’s unelected judges” – European judges trying to restrict British media freedom. It feeds into the current Conservative anti-Europe narrative that could take the UK out of the EU by accident.

For journalists and the media there was even what sounded dangerously like an undertaking, that a new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities would include “specific protection for journalists and a free press.”

Hurrah.

Except, as Javid acknowledged, the press exists not to pander to the powerful, but to hold them to account.

So let’s try to hold the Culture Secretary to account for a moment. It was impossible to do so on the day because he declined to take any questions and was out the door at speed after taking the applause.

It must have been a very important meeting that prevented the taking of a couple of questions.

A strange form of accountability.

Number one question would have been a no-brainer for the assembled editors.

Presumably, your new-found attachment to press freedom means that you will desist from trying to impose a Royal Charter on the press when not a single newspaper anywhere wants such a thing? Shouldn’t your determination to avoid “imposing any form of state-controlled regulation of the press” include the Royal Charter approach?

It would also have been nice to know when the Government decided that RIPA was being misused. After all, it became law in 2000 and warnings about potential misuse were issued at the time. The present Coalition Government has had more than four years to take action on the issue.

It was not overwhelming reassurance to hear that Home Secretary, Theresa May, was “doing what she can to stop this happening.”

It would have been useful to ask the Culture Secretary what precisely she was doing.

“And I’ll be watching closely to ensure the Act is not misused in future,” will scarcely strike fear in police superintendents everywhere.

The “right to be forgotten” is a regrettable development but perhaps a weak premise on which to “scrap Labour’s Human Rights Act.”

As Google said at the SoE conference, around 58 per cent of such requests are rejected and the actual material is not deleted from the database, merely the name of those involved.

If Sajid Javid was involved in a political scandal and his name removed from the Google search engine putting in MP + scandal + Bromsgrove (his constituency) would almost certainly do the trick.

Just as the Culture Secretary will be watching the Home Secretary, so we will all be watching him – if the Conservatives win the next election – to see if a new Government would offer protection for journalists and the press in new legislation, and what strings would be attached. The word “responsibilities” could cover a multitude of sins.

After more than 300 years maybe the best principle is a press that is simply subject to existing law without special privileges – anything else could just mean more pay-days for lawyers.