The threat to our press
We are facing very serious threats to our press freedoms. Firstly, the Freedom of Information Act - one of the few legislative bills to benefit the media - is in danger of being neutered by plans to deny FoI requests on grounds of cost. Secondly, access to the courts - and the very principle of open justice - is being seriously undermined by proposals to give coroners new powers to hold inquests in private and even to prohibit publication of the identification of the deceased.
Thirdly, there are the very serious financial implications for newspapers of the Conditional Fee Arrangement, the no win, no fee legislation. Introduced as a well-intentioned measure to help the poor have access to the courts, it is being ruthlessly exploited by unscrupulous lawyers who are ramping up their costs in media cases. Costs in CFA cases can be almost infinite with lawyers entitled to "success fees" of up to 100% on top of their actual bills. Can it really be right for a QC in a libel case to be paid £7,000 for a day in court whilst the same QC, prosecuting or defending a serious case at the Old Bailey, may receive less than £600 a day?
Today, newspapers, even wealthy ones like the Mail, think long and hard before contesting actions, even if they know they are in the right, for fear of the ruinous financial implications. For the local press, such actions are now out of the question. Instead, they stump up some cash, money they can't afford, to settle as quickly as possible, to avoid court actions - which, if they were to lose, could, in some cases, close them.
About 16 months ago, I, Les Hinton of News International and Murdoch MacLennan of the Telegraph, had dinner with Gordon Brown and raised these concerns. We also raised a truly frightening amendment to the Data Protection Act, winding its way through parliament, under which journalists faced being jailed for two years for illicitly obtaining personal information such as ex-directory telephone numbers or an individual's gas bills or medical records. This legislation would have made Britain the only country in the free world to jail journalists and could have had a considerable chilling effect on good journalism. The prime minister - I don't think it is breaking confidences to reveal - was hugely sympathetic to the industry's case. Whatever our individual newspapers' views are of the prime minister - and the Mail is pretty tough on him - we should, as an industry, acknowledge that, to date, he has been a great friend of press freedom.
Cost restrictions on freedom of information applications were dropped. The proposed restrictions on reporting of coroners and family courts were shelved, though we need to be vigilant over the move to ban reporters from inquests involving national security.
There is also to be action on the "scandalous" greed of CFA lawyers. The secretary of state for justice, Jack Straw, is set to unveil proposals to reform CFA, including capping lawyers' fees in the next few months. And what of Section 55 of the Data Protection Act with its proposed two-year jail sentences for journalists? The act was amended so that the jailing clause cannot now be implemented unless the secretary of state seeks approval from parliament to activate it. The industry has been warned. We must make sure our house in order. So far so good. But there is one remaining threat to press freedom that I suspect may prove far more dangerous to our industry than all the issues I have just discussed. Inexorably, and insidiously, the British press is having a privacy law imposed on it, which - apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds - is undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market.
This law is not coming from parliament - no, that would smack of democracy - but from the arrogant and amoral judgments - words I use very deliberately - of one man. Justice David Eady has, again and again, under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act, found against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places.
Two years ago, Eady ruled that a cuckolded husband couldn't sell his story to the press about another married man - a wealthy sporting celebrity - who had seduced his wife. The judge was worried about the effect of the revelations on the celebrity's wife. In an unashamed reversal of centuries of moral and social thinking, he placed the rights of the adulterer above society's age-old belief that adultery should be condemned.
Recently, the same judge in effect ruled that it is perfectly acceptable for the multimillionaire head of a multibillion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him. He found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a "sick Nazi orgy" as the News of the World claimed, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform.
Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Eady. To him such behaviour was merely "unconventional". Nor, in his mind, was there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way. But what is most worrying about Eady's decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now in effect neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being "amoral". But most worrying is that when it comes to suppressing media freedom, the good Eady is seemingly ubiquitous.
It was he who was going to preside in Tesco's libel case against the Guardian, which was, in the event, recently settled out of court and, in Lord Browne versus the Mail on Sunday, he ruled that BP's shareholders had the right to know that Browne had lied to the court - but did not have the right to know details of his conversations with his boyfriend, despite the paper's case that they had serious public-interest implications.
But surely the greatest scandal is that while London boasts scores of eminent judges, one man is given a virtual monopoly of all cases against the media, enabling him to bring in a privacy law by the back door. The freedom of the press is far too important to be left to the somewhat desiccated values of a single judge who clearly has an animus against the popular press and the right of people to freedom of expression. I, personally, would rather have never heard of Mosley and the squalid purgatory he inhabits. It is the others I care about: the crooks, the liars, the cheats, the rich and the corrupt sheltering behind a law of privacy being created by an unaccountable judge.
If Brown wanted to force a privacy law, he would have to set out a bill, arguing his case in both houses of parliament, withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes. Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen.
All this has huge implications for newspapers and, I would argue, for society. If mass-circulation newspapers, which, of course, also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don't have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.
Now some revile a moralising media. Others, such as myself, believe it is the duty of the media to take an ethical stand. Either way, it is a choice but Eady has taken away our freedom of expression to make that choice. Only last month, Britain's leading privacy QC, Hugh Tomlinson, declared, "Under the influence of the human rights case law from Strasbourg, we are moving slowly but inescapably towards the stricter privacy protection of French or Italian law."
Is it a coincidence that France now has to spend £1bn a year subsidising its few remaining pathetically small circulation newspapers, which for years have had to operate under its draconian privacy legislation? I am not a Jeremiah. I passionately believe that Britain has the best newspapers in the world and, indeed, our papers today are as good as they've ever been. But I'm afraid we are going to see some considerable contraction in the printed parts of our industry over the next few years. I would be surprised if at least two national dailies and two Sundays don't change hands or go to the wall in the not too distant future.
Those who can best connect with readers will flourish, whether on newsprint or on computer screen. Managements are going to have to learn to adjust their profit expectations. The politicians and regulators, too, are going to have to think the unthinkable. They are going to have to allow previously outlawed mergers.
Also, something must be done about my favourite bête noire: the ever growing ubiquity of the BBC. It is destroying media plurality in Britain and in its place imposing a liberal, leftish, mono culture that is destroying free and open debate in Britain. And last, but not least, we as an industry must, must, promote ourselves in a more positive way.
Too often, large parts of our industry only see the dog mess at the bottom of the lamp post and not the illumination and light at the top. Remember the dictum of Northcliffe: "The power of the press is great. The power to suppress is even greater."