‘It’s in the public’s interest.’
For a number of years this has been the media’s ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card. No story, it seems, no matter how personal, sordid or utterly irrelevant to my existence is immune to this powerful argument. ‘Three-in-a-bed shame of overpaid footballer’s pet rottweiler’ – no problem: the public has a right to know.
This is not true, of course. As the repeated battles over the Blair brood or Naomi Campbell’s controversial High Court victory over The Mirror in March 2002 have shown there is such a thing as privacy. The press can go too far. Public interest does not simply mean that in which the public is interested.
Nevertheless, the frequency and abandon with which the public interest defence is used remains worrying, as Rowan Williams suggested in a recent lecture on the state of the media.[i] ‘A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk,’ the archbishop told an invited audience at Lambeth Palace. And whilst ‘the ‘public interest defence’ [might] at first blush [seem] unanswerable’, it does, on closer inspection, have significant problems.
Those problems stem from the fact that the concept of ‘public interest’ is invariably tied to that of the ‘common good’. ‘Revelation in the public interest ought to be the same as working for the common good,’ Williams noted.
Unfortunately, the ‘common good’ is a rather slippery beast, one that has performed an impressive conjurer’s trick over recent decades, disappearing and then reappearing in a different form without the audience noticing. Once the silent argument that underpinned concepts such as ‘honour’ and ‘duty’, which helped suppress personal liberty and keep Britain great, the common good has been hounded from polite, progressive conversation. The reaction to the reaction to the play Behtzi last year serves to illustrate how.
Behtzi, meaning Dishonour, depicted sex abuse and murder inside a Sikh temple. It was staged at the Birmingham Rep in December 2004 but offended a number within the local Sikh community, who protested angrily and sometimes violently in such a way as to force it to close.
In the subsequent ‘debate’, which lasted longer than the production itself, people lined up to condemn the protests and champion the right to free artistic expression. Stuart Rogers, executive director of the Birmingham Rep, spoke for many when he said, ‘It remains a matter of great concern to us that illegal acts of violence can cause the cancellation of a lawful artistic work.’
Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham took a more balanced approach. Commenting on the affair he acknowledged the importance of artistic freedom but argued that ‘the right to freedom of expression has corresponding duties to the common good.’ Responding to his comments in the New Statesman some time later, Francis Beckett called them ‘very alarming’ and declared, slightly facetiously, ‘No, Your Grace, it does not, for who is to judge what is the common good?’
Rarely is our culture’s dominant, liberalism expressed more clearly. Because we can’t agree on what the common good is, it no longer has any call on our responsibilities. For all intents and purposes, there is no such thing as the common good.
And yet, at the same that the common good was disappearing, the modern axiom that life is to be lived ‘to the full/max/limits/etc’ has conjured it up again in an altogether different form. The common good now becomes that which enables us to enjoy life ‘to the full/max/etc’. At a superficial level this creates a (sizeable) public space for promiscuous footballers’ dogs or drug taking supermodels because both entertain, and there is no higher calling on us that to seek and enjoy pleasure through entertainment.
More seriously, concealing anything short of issues of national security (and even these are questionable after the Iraq war) from the public denies it the information that is vital to the maintenance of personal autonomy and the functioning of a free-market, democratic state. Those citizens that are denied information have their ability to choose, and thereby their opportunity to live fully self-determined lives, enfeebled.
The idea that our lives may be made more content or fulfilled by the withholding of information goes against the whole grain of our culture. Concealing information is, at best, arrogant and paternalistic. At worst, it is sinister and manipulative.
It is this attitude that has lead to the sanctification of ‘public interest’ and to the picture of a media battling against the forces of corruption and self-interest, often at considerable personal cost, in order to liberate a grateful public.
It is also, however, the attitude the breeds an aggressive and contemptuous media, which erodes trust in itself and every other body at which it points it photo-lens. ‘High levels of adversarial and suspicious probing,’ Williams said, ‘send the clear message that any kind of concealment is assumed to be guilty until proved innocent’, an assumption that damages both the media themselves and the society in which they operate.
What, then, is to be done? How might ‘public interest’ genuinely be served? One answer was offered, albeit implicitly, in August when the Department of Health announced that it had started employing media consultants to measure and publish statistics on the output and ‘bias’ of the press’s NHS coverage.
The NHS suffers from an appalling opinion deficit. Ask most people what they think of their GP or their most recent in- or out-patient experience, and they will tell you it has been fairly or very positive. Ask the same people (often in the same interview) what they think of the NHS as a whole and they will tell you that that waiting lists are long, hospitals are filthy, and that the institution is all but on its last legs.
Where does this cognitive dissonance come from? Why are people so sure that their positive experiences (and, for that matter, those of most of their friends and relatives) are the exception to the negative rule? The obvious – but impossible to prove – answer is that the media’s NHS coverage is disproportionately negative, focusing on the minority of disasters at the expense of the more widespread, but less thrilling stories of improvement, so creating a miasma of despair and panic that obscures more positive, personal experiences.
It is a complaint that will be familiar to many institutions in modern Britain (not least the churches). In hiring media consultants the NHS has decided to do something about it. The strategy is for their consultants to rate every article about the NHS according to how positive, negative or neutral it is. In doing so, they can evaluate not only the overall tone of NHS coverage but also assess the individual journalists and newspapers that write and publish them. All of a sudden, journalists will find themselves at the uncomfortable end of the photo-lens, facing accusations rooted not in personal prejudice and animosity but in carefully gathered statistics.
This is welcome. Any effort to remind people that most of what they know about the world has been filtered through (at least) one other brain before it reaches them is refreshing. The reason given by the Department of Health for this whole exercise – ‘to have this established on a scientific basis’ – is less encouraging, however.
The West has long been captive to the myth of objectivity. This is the idea, as explored by Alister McGrath’s in his magisterial three-volume Scientific Theology, that ‘it is possible to locate and occupy a non-ideological vantage-point, from which reality may be surveyed and interpreted.’[ii] ‘Scientific’ is the adjective we usually, lazily, use to describe this position, idly ignoring the fact that every description or analysis – let alone ones about levels of journalistic bias – demands some form of judgement.
This does not mean, as some post-moderns would have us believe, that there is no such thing as reality. Rather it stresses that that human knowledge is always provisional and that it always demands some form of personal commitment. In this respect at least, the human race is one, big faith group.
Failure to recognise this will only weaken the Department of Health’s otherwise admirable attempt to report on the reporters. Who is to say that their measure of journalistic bias is free of bias? Who is to say the buck of truth will stop when you put another line of watchdogs in place? Who, after all, will be watching them?
What then are we to do? How can we be saved from the sins of the media, if not even science can save us now? Can public interest ever truly be served?
Paradoxically, it is the fly in the ‘scientific’ ointment – the recognition that every statement is also a judgement – that might help us. The Department of Health’s project is useful not so much for ‘proving’ the bias in the media’s NHS coverage but for dragging the very question of bias into the spotlight. The sooner we realise that human knowledge is provisional and demands some form of personal commitment and, more pointedly, the sooner this fact is built into the systems which shape our society and is openly acknowledged by journalists themselves, the sooner we will have a ‘serious, morally-credible media’. As every reluctant, confused and bewildered maths student at school is told, it will matter less that you get the answer wrong if you have shown your workings in the process. A misleading news story is an evil but less of an evil than an honestly misleading one.
This idea corresponds with one of the suggestions outlined in Rowan William’s lecture. Quoting something that Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, wrote for Newsweek, Williams said, ‘media admissions of fallibility or provisionality could have the paradoxical effect of strengthening trust… Admit that what is written or broadcast is a highly provisional construct, produced (often) by non-experts under pressure, and this realism might offset the deep cynicism that is generated by a marked habit of reluctance to apologise or explain.’
In other words, we need to recognise that all news is news from somewhere, more often than not from a time-pressurised, commercially-driven, rating-chasing, ideologically biased somewhere. That will disillusion those who live in ideological cloud-cuckoo land, deaf to the collapse of the Enlightenment project, and blind to the all-too-persistent flaws in human nature. But to those for whom the 20th century happened, it would be a welcome breath of honesty, humility and reality.
‘We need to deflate some of the rhetoric about the media as guardians and nurturers of democracy,’ as Rowan Williams said, and in its place establish ‘a form of self-regulation that admits provisionality and provides means of assessment.’ ‘We need journalistic work that equips its own critics,’ or, put differently, reporting that allows readers – and not just Whitehall-paid consultants – to report on the reporters.
This article previously appeared in Third Way.
[i] The Media: Public Interest and Common Good. The full text of this is available at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050615.htm
[ii] Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, Volume 1: Nature (London: T&T Clark, 2001)
