My first experience with politics was via my MP, Tony Benn. I was not raised in anything remotely like a political household so, as with religion, I was able to make my own choices, which turned me into a soft left Labour supporting atheist. I saw a lot of Benn, who was way to the left of me, when he left his leafy pile in Holland Park, London to visit his Bristol East, formerly Bristol South East, constituency. At first, I tended to agree with a lot of what he said, although as I matured in my understanding of his hard left politics,I found it to be simplistic and unfeasible. The Labour Party he believed in – anti-EU, pro unilateral nuclear disarmament, leaving NATO, nationalising just about everything – was nothing like the one I supported, but one enduring theme of his many public meetings was his disdain about the so called ‘free press’ and how it wasn’t really free at all. On this I agreed with him and to this day I still do.
As you can see from this piece on Wikipedia, the definition of press freedom is quite complex, so I’ll simply steal the opening paragraph from the Wikipedia web page to give a simplistic Bennite-type definition:
‘Freedom of the press or freedom of the media is the fundamental principle that communication and expression through various media, including printed and electronic media, especially published materials, should be considered a right to be exercised freely. Such freedom implies the absence of interference from an overreaching state; its preservation may be sought through a constitution or other legal protection and security. It is in opposition to paid press, where communities, police organizations, and governments are paid for their copyrights.‘
All well and good, you might think. That’s the free press for you. But hang on. Free for whom, exactly? Reporters Without Borders says this:
‘The British media landscape continues to suffer from a lack of pluralism, with just three companies – News UK, Reach, and Daily Mail and General Trust – dominating the national market, concentrating power and influence in very few hands. Public service broadcaster the BBC continues to come under pressure, and there is growing debate about foreign ownership of UK papers.’
This is, quite simply a fact. News UK, basically former Australian now American nonagenarian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owns the Sun and Times newspapers and his known to exercise control over what his titles print and who they support. We know about the Mail and its tax-dodging, France-dwelling owner Lord Rothermere and Reach owns numerous local titles and of course the Express and Mirror. Even today, Murdoch appears to be interviewing candidates for the Conservative Party leader’s job. How free is the press when foreign billionaires are so heavily influential in choosing our leaders?
Some might argue that it is a subjective view that our national newspapers are apparently positioned to the right of politics. After all, only the Sun, Sun on Sunday, Mail, Mail on Sunday, Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Express and Sunday Express and, to a slightly lesser extent the Times and Sunday Times are on the right. Some folk – not by people like me – would suggest that most are on the hard right of politics but that’s balanced by the slightly left of centre Mirror and Sunday Mirror and the low circulation Guardian and Observer, the latter with a soft left editorial and, often, hard left columnists. Some balance.
That you will find no political balance in most of these newspapers is a given. They are right wing because the owners are right wing and they benefit from the governments they influence, in all sorts of ways including financially, by way of ‘favours’ and access. In other words, power. You will not find anyone writing with a left of centre point of view in, say , the Mail, which is stuffed with the likes of Andrew Neil, Boris Johnson, Nadine Dorries, Sarah Vine, Richard Littlejohn and Peter, the lesser talented, Hitchens. Lord Rothermere is free to choose which right-wing writers work for him. Anyone else, try The Guardian and Observer. Good luck with that.
And that is the issue for me: access. The bulk of the print and increasingly on line media is tightly controlled by a handful of very rich right wing billionaires who can effectively choose who says what. In other words, a free press that is only free to those who can afford it and own it.
There was a recent campaign to prevent an Abu Dhabi-backed bid to buy the right wing Spectator magazine. State-backed entities should not own UK news outlets, you see. It’s perfectly okay if foreign billionaires can own them and decide what is printed and which political party to support, but not for foreign governments. I would say that both are wrong but the latter is the worst option of all. As it happens, The Spectator was sold for £100m to Sir Paul Marshall, a hedge fund tycoon and major investor in the hard right propaganda fake news channel GB News. Even Andrew Neil has jumped ship as Spectator chairman following Marshall’s takeover. I doubt that he will be joining the Telegraph anytime soon since Marshall has his beady eye on that increasingly unhinged organ. The right wing noose tightens around the neck of our so called free press. It’s as if media ownership by private behemoths is perfectly okay, as long as it’s not governments.
This isn’t Russia or North Korea, yet. But, as I have already suggested, our current media model is not the best option for press freedom. It’s apparently the least worst. Foreign politicians can’t help choose our leaders, but foreign media barons can.
Readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Bonkers), will not be surprised that I don’t have a ready-made solution to the issue of press freedom or the lack of it. We already have IPSO, a light touch regulator which appears to be as much use as an ashtray on a motorcycle, and maybe we should consider giving it more powers to respect the freedom of others and to guarantee the right of reply to those wronged. But that runs the risk of degrading free speech still further, or should I say the limited free speech that applies in the media to a select few. Perhaps there is a far simpler solution? Just stop buying the papers.
I do not watch a great deal of GB News because it’s largely populist right wing hate speech channel and I exercise my freedom by using social media to pressure advertisers to advertise elsewhere by not buying services and products (sorry Jet 2). That’s the only power I have because this blog certainly isn’t powerful (not that I ever intended it to be powerful, obvs). And to point out, wherever I can, that much of the media doesn’t act in the interests of ordinary working people, as we have seen by way of supporting ugly right wing governments and the continuing disaster that is Brexit.
In a career where he got almost everything wrong – Benn was a Brexiter long before it became a thing – he was onto something with the so called free press. Britain remains in so many ways as being a free country but only for those who can afford it. Substantial media outlets owned and controlled by a small group of right wing billionaires is not freedom as we know it and we are, frankly, gullible fools if we say otherwise.
