Given the many constraints on journalists, how can we talk of free media? Discuss with reference to relevant legislation and guidelines.

Sabika Razvi K0328832

Journalists work within a range of constraints and influences which inevitably affect how much information can be delivered to the public. Limitations such as legal constraints and regulatory codes of practice play a deciding factor in whether something is printed or not. Not only do journalists have to work with legal constraints there are also advertisers, cultural bias and sources also.

Harcup, (2004) defines constraints as “legislation that restricts how journalists in England and Wales may gather information, what information they may have access to, and what may be published”.

This is where the question of a free media comes into play, having a free media would ideally suggest that journalism is merely a form of communication to make public what is private. However with the constraints put on journalists what can be made public in reality is therefore very limited.

In total there are 50 to 60 laws restricting journalists’ activities (Harcup, 2004) in the UK; The Libel Act, Access to justice Act, Official Secrets Act, Obscene Publications Act, Local Government Act, Treason Felony Act, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, Press Complaints Commision (PCC) code of conduct, Police Act and the Freedom of information Act are to name only ten. From listing only a small amount of the constraints makes clear that freedom of speech in the media is somewhat a notion which can sometimes be seen through only rose tinted windows.

The Press Complaints Commissions (PCC) code of conduct is a form of self-regulation set up by the newspaper industry. The PCC does not hold any official or legal power to punish deterrents. However, working on the basis of ‘customer complaints’ it has had much of the success as a regulatory body holding legal rights in acting as a constraint on the activities of journalists.

Nevertheless, it is the harsh libel laws that hold true enforcement power that allows the implementation of Government control. It reminds editors and journalists who is boss and holds the authority to take any newspaper to court for defaming someone. Newspapers have had to pay out extensively large sums of money in cases of being sued for example for printing a statement which was defamatory in the sense that it exposed someone to hatred, ridicule or contempt, to being shunned or avoided (Harcup, 2004)

The libel courts make the option of ‘playing safe as more attractive’ to journalists over being dragged through the courts. The fear of having to pay hefty damage costs keep journalists at bay and offer the rich and powerful a privilege. In the sense that a story which essentially could be relevant to public knowledge would be kept under wraps because the person in question has more money or holds more power through government instigated rights.

The official Secrets Act which was brought about in 1911 on the whole gives journalists very weak access to official information (Keeble, 2001).

The New Labour Government and the cabinet have ensured that any member of the public does not get hold of any official information.

Secrecy makes it difficult to obtain facts about politics, new policies and in general anything the government would prefer to be kept buried. Policies which would in fact affect the whole of the population would in essence be kept secret because at the end of the day “the government knows best” (Keeble, 2001).

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The official Secrets Act which was brought about in 1911 on the whole gives journalists very weak access to official information (Keeble, 2001).

The New Labour Government and the cabinet have ensured that any member of the public does not get hold of any official information.

If through any means information is obtained, journalists face the danger of being arrested. Fear for ones own safety does not seem like something a UK journalist would need to bear in mind or worry about. However, according to the new Terrorism Act it is a very prevalent issue which does not just affect journalists abroad.

The police can search and question journalists’ under the Terrorism Act without any trouble. If a journalist is in suspicion of trying to cover up the actions or illegal goings-on of campaigning groups such as animal rights activists, environmentalist groups, Green Peace and poll tax demonstrators amongst numerous others (Keeble, 2001) they could face imprisonment.

“The Human Rights Act incorporated the European convention of Human Rights into British law” also (Keeble, 2005) in 1988 which fuelled the privacy row into frenzy. It not only had an affect on what could be said but it put high profile people in a very comfortable position where again they could take newspapers to court.

To some extent it could be said that freedom of speech or free media has been used widely with overindulgence. With so many higher powers dictating what can be said and effectively what is printed a journalist’s job is made even more difficult. With trying to be ethical, avoiding libel court cases and giving the public information which they are owed, to draw a line and in actual fact try and reach a compromise becomes nearly impossible.

New laws being passed that do not allow access to crucial information which is rightly public information sets the boundaries which cannot be crossed.

The Government decides a ‘catch-all’ clause which “prevents disclosure on any matter which might reveal ministerial disagreement over policy” (Keeble, 2001). On the whole there is nothing that can be done to try and change such a policy as new policies will be made and decided upon in further and greater secrecy, instead of at open meetings.

Free media has lost its essence over the decades as one after the next, new policies infringing media rights have been enforced. They have put journalists in extremely compromising positions wherein journalists have had to betray confidentiality and privacy of vulnerable parties involved.

Bill Goodwin (cited in Harcup, 2004) said if one journalist betrays a source, others will be less willing to some forward in the future.

Sources are essential to successful stories and leads to others. The NUJ code of conduct clearly states ‘a journalist shall protect confidential sources of information’. However, a journalist’s confidentiality of sources has come under attack also. The new Act – Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act came into enforcement in 2000 and has since intimidated journalists’ into leaking their sources names and identities.

The Act maintains that the ‘the state will be able to interpret email and telephone calls across private networks in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom’.

Bill Goodwin became victim to the Regulation of Investigatory Power Acts in. He was taken to court by a firm who wanted to know the identity of the source who had given him information about the downfall of the firm’s financial state. It took Goodwin seven years before he won the case at the European Court of Human rights. Goodwin’s case demonstrated the lengths people would go to try and get hold of information that affects them and in reality has their reputation at stake.

Ownership also affects journalistic writing, if the owner agrees with the latest public or government opinion it is that way which the papers opinion will sway. The most obvious example of ownership is Rupert Murdoch. He owns 175 newspapers on three continents and all 175 papers shared agreement towards the pro-war notion in the case of the Iraq war, leading up to and onwards.

The papers showed a constant and gradual trend towards holding the opinion that the president of the USA George Bush and Prime Minster of the UK Tony Blair were justified in taking both the US and UK to war.

With Murdoch in charge so to speak, journalists working at the newspapers under his ownership know which style they are required to adopt. They quickly learn what they have to write and exactly which lines they should not cross. As cited in Harcup, Murdoch employs editors who are on the ‘same wavelength’ as his own. With editors in line the writers are sure to follow.

With such powerful dominance, this influential constraint of ownership is an important one in the debate of free media. It is not just the government’s enforcement of constant policies, fear of imprisonment and libel court cases that a journalist needs to bear heavily in mind; the head owner of the newspaper and his opinions have to be kept in mind also.

Owners have their opinions which they expect without question to be projected through the paper. If a journalist writes a story keeping in mind someone else’s opinion and neglecting his/her own, surely the newspaper he/she is writing for cannot be classed as a forum for free media.

With a fear of unemployment added to the numerous other fears journalists will not cross specified boundaries and will therefore opt for ‘playing it safe’. As a result, inevitably the public will not get unbiased, objective information; they will instead be fead with the opinion of one owner.

To bring Murdoch back into the discussion, it would be fair to say that all three continents which read the 175 Murdoch owned papers would read pro-war opinion pages, columns, features and main page stories. Whether this would influence the readers own thoughts and opinions is another question. However, one does have to wonder how we can talk of the free media when across three continents newspapers are voicing the same opinion held by one man.

This type of ownership also exists in the US where the media is mediocre and is a corporate business. In addition the relationship between the media and the Republican government is a very close and influential one. A survey carried out in the US found “almost a third of local journalists admitted to softening the tone of a news story in line with their employer’s interests” (Pew Research centre 2000, cited in Harcup 2004).

Herman and Chomsky (1988) (cite din Harcup 2004) put forward a ‘propaganda model’ of how the US media operates. The model proposed five filters – these filters looked at the different influences/constraints that affect what goes to print. Herman and Chomsky identified wealth and concentrated ownership as the number one filter. They suggested that the ‘wealthy and powerful’ are able to decide i.e. filter what goes in and what goes out. It is also a way to “allow the government and the dominant private interests to get their messages across”. The model followed the order of Diagram 1:

Diagram 1:

Wealth and concentrated ownership of dominant media firms

Advertising

Reliance on information from the powerful

Punitive action (“flak”) against transgressors

Anti-communism

(Cited in Harcup, 2004)

Herman and Chomsky may have been correct in identifying the five main major influences/constraints in their propaganda model. However, Herman (2000) added that ‘the filters work mainly by independent action of many individuals and organisations’.

In the US there is an overflow of patriotism also which plays a key role in what and how journalists write. For example, Don Rather said that ‘the work of US journalists was compromised by patriotism in the months after the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001’ (Harcup 2004). This patriotism meant that journalists overlooked many factors, and as a consequence they did not put the politicians under any scrutiny as to why they were not informed of the intelligence information which their President had neglected to warn them about.

Philip Knightley wrote about the journalistic style employed as the US and UK forces prepared themselves to attack Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. He said “the way wars are reported in the western media follows a depressingly predictable pattern”.

The word “we” in headlines was use din the UK to build patriotism and unite the country in backing up the government, for example, “WE BOMB BAGHDAD” (Daily Telegraph, February 17 2001, cited in Harcup 2004). Patriotism runs across the waters from the US to the UK, the UK to the US back and fourth. Ignoring the constraints of patriotism would be inadvertently disregarding an important factor which in fact affects a lot of what is printed.

Constraints come in all forms from legal to social; libel law, ‘regulatory codes of conduct, time, sources, subjectivity, audience and style’ (Harcup, 2004).

Amongst these which hold the more powerful upper hand in determining a journalist’s work cannot be fully established. As, if it was to be said that journalists don’t care about time they are more concerned with legalities would be to imply that deadlines do not matter. Whereas, in actual fact deadlines and targets have to be met otherwise there would be no newspaper. Therefore, all constraints hold some power however they work together to aid journalists in avoiding the temptation of printing a story which to them could be a so-called ‘juicy story’.

The free media is a notion or idea that has to be handled delicately, in the sense that taking it out of context and saying everything is public knowledge and the media should be free to print whatever they want would be vacillating. This is not to suggest it is right that the media should be stopped in printing what in actual fact is public knowledge however, because according to higher powers it should be kept under wraps it is not printed.

The media as a whole have to work around the unlimited number of constraints both legal and social to achieve the best outcome possible. In some situations journalists have found loop holes to adopt a more subtle way to discreetly bend the rules in others they have not been quite so successful. The free media could as mentioned earlier be an idealistic view of how the media actually works in reality and what is in fact sent to print.