The Press Freedom Myth by Jonathan Heawood

Author:Jonathan Heawood [Jonathan Heawood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785905452
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

The revenge of the journalists

Five years later, and the press are singing a very different tune. Having argued for decades that any form of regulation is anathema to media freedom, they have begun to call for a tough new form of regulation. Not for themselves, but for the social media companies that are having a devastating impact on their audiences – and their finances.

In the years since the Leveson Inquiry, newspapers sometimes mentioned the rise of the social media industry as a sign that Leveson was out of touch with the modern world. However, they did not offer any proposals of their own to deal with the digital media revolution. I once mentioned this to a senior journalist, who laughed that trying to regulate the internet would be as vain as asking Canute to turn back the tide.

And then, in 2017, newspapers woke up to the existential threat posed by social media. As it happens, this was around the time that Facebook began to outstrip newspapers as a source of news, and the share of the UK advertising market controlled by internet companies soared above 50 per cent.69 Suddenly, the new media giants were threatening the one thing that newspaper owners value more than press freedom itself: their business model. The Telegraph called for statutory regulation.70 The Independent said that any new social media regulator should ‘answer directly to the government’.71 The Daily Mail urged the government to ‘stand up to these utterly unscrupulous multinational leviathans’.72 And The Guardian declared that Facebook was ‘long overdue a regulatory reckoning’.73

Statutory regulation? A regulator answering directly to the government? Unscrupulous multinational leviathans?! What sinister zealots are these, who dare to suggest that politicians should play any part in regulating the media? As it happens, they are the same newspaper companies that spent the better part of a decade fighting tooth and nail against independent regulation of their own behaviour. One or two of them might even be described as multinational leviathans, though they would blush to hear it.

The media commentator Emily Bell has dubbed this phenomenon ‘the revenge of the journalists’.74 At the same time as continuing to campaign against the post-Leveson framework – sometimes even in the same breath – newspapers have been calling for tougher regulation of the social media platforms that are rocking their world. They are saying that new media companies must not be free to provide a platform for fake news – or the truth will suffer. Social media companies must not be free from democratic oversight – or they will distort democracy. Social media companies must not be free to provide a platform for whatever content they like – or people will be harmed. Their position may be inconsistent, but their demands have been effective, and lawmakers have leaped into action to propose a new regulator for social media.

How can newspapers be so strongly in favour of regulation of social media and yet so vehemently opposed to regulation of the press? Do they seriously think that freedom

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