Lessons from the News of the World scandal

It would be the ultimate irony if the phone-hacking scandal in the United Kingdom that led to the sinking of the News of the World dragged press freedom down with it.

The signs are not encouraging. It has been forecast that the scandal will probably see the demise of the UK press self-regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which even before now has been seen to be weak and ineffective. In its place, ominously, there is talk not of self-regulation, but simply of “independent regulation”. This has spread to South Africa. In a bizarre twist Business Day has argued against self-regulation and Professor Jane Duncan, a colleague here at Rhodes, for self-regulation.

Yet the bursting of the nasty boil that was the News of the World‘s methods of obtaining information is a triumph of self-regulation. This self-regulation was effected through the investigative work of The Guardian newspaper of the UK in pursuing the story of the criminal methods of News of the World journalists.

Somehow, other news outlets have neglected this aspect or downplayed it in the ensuing coverage of the scandal.

Self-regulation is more than a Press Council (and incidentally, our Press Ombud has a much stronger reputation than the PCC). It is the rigorous self-examination of elements of the profession of journalism by journalists themselves, not press owners, not civil society and not government. Self-regulation is only one part of media accountability, but it is an important part. Without The Guardian‘s efforts, particularly the reporting of Nick Davies, the News of the World would have been able to continue to traduce the profession through its unethical methods.

John Kampfner, chief executive of Index on Censorship, writing in the Financial Times, supports the idea of more investigative journalism, of the kind that led to the unmasking of the unsavoury approaches.

“No country has a perfect media, and goodness knows Britain’s is flawed. But a health democracy should err on the side of journalists finding out too much rather than too little. By definition it is a rough trade. If an investigative reporter knows of, say, an arms company up to no good, should he in future be prevented from using subversive or undercover methods to seek out the truth? The criterion must be a heightened understanding of the public good, tested to distraction by editors and managers.”

Secondly, the scandal itself is about the failure of regulation, specifically the police, rather than the ineffectiveness of self-regulation. It has been alleged that the police were part of the problem, having been bribed to provide information to journalists. This is a problem of crime, as well as of ethics, as is the hacking into the phone messages of a murdered teenage girl.

So in the UK, by all means set up a new self-regulatory body, more independent from the press owners, but closer to the profession itself. The UK government would be wrong, however, to institute statutory regulation when the fault was of government being too close to major news media organisations.

In a Guardian media podcast, editor Alan Rusbridger was asked about the need for statutory regulation of the press. Rusbridger argued that it would be difficult to introduce statutory regulation because it would entail state control or licensing of journalists, and that would be hard to introduce in an age of new media such as the Huffington Post.

What this points to is the uneasy nexus between mass media and freedom of expression. The urge to regulate the press always bumps up against the necessity of allowing many points of view and a free flow of information.

You may hate the excesses of a free press, but the alternative, an un-free Press, is more odious still.