Accountability and the Media: The Struggle for Balance
Ben Pimlott
Warden of Goldsmiths College, University of London
Is the media out of control? A free press is supposed to be one of the defining features of a free society. Yet has the British press - with its shouting tabloid headlines, its undercover methods, its rude commercialism and its aggressive abandonment of deference - become a limitation to democracy instead of a foundation of it? Has the time come for we, the people, to rein in this Frankenstein monster before it ceases to be a fourth estate altogether, and irreversibly dons imperial clothes?
Ladies and gentleman, I am not a mogul or a bureaucrat or a politician. What I say does not come from inside knowledge. I speak from a different standpoint - that of the consumer. Like sixty million others, I am on the receiving end of the media, not occasionally, but every day. I wake up to Radio 4, I drive children to school to the cadences of the Today Programme, I listen to Front Row in the evening, I fall asleep - or not as the case may be - in front of Newsnight. I read or flick through several newspapers, and up to five on Sundays. And that is by no means the limit. Like millions of others, I am shaped, packaged, formed, by the media to the extent that whatever the media agenda may be, it is to some extent mine as well, even when I choose to take a contrary view. As a consumer, I am dimly aware that a large part of what I am is dictated daily by other people and it concerns me. That is my approach.
Yet there is a difficulty. Media, accountability. Mr Chairman, as in an exam, when you are set a task, you start with the words. You have linked the two in the title of this lecture, and both look straightforward. Yet when you try to examine them, they are like quicksilver - which is to say they are changing all the time.
The word we are most familiar with is 'media'. We all know what it means. Yet in reality few terms are more lacking in precision. A medium is a means of communication. Water colour is a medium. More commonly, when people refer to the media, they refer - in the words of the OED - to 'the means of communication regarded collectively' - and especially newspapers, radio and television. At least, that was true a decade ago when the dictionary was written, and that is how most think of the media The term is used vaguely and often pejoratively, or threateningly, depending on the context. Sometimes we use it to mean the Sun and the Mirror and Sky News. We do not often use it to mean The London Review of Books.
But today the media are not just tabloids, radio and television. The world is a-buzz with conversations and exchanges to a degree that makes it impossible to point to a single phenomenon. Are motor cycle and sex magazines that line the shelves of W. H. Smiths part of the media? What about mobile phones, text messages, the internet, e-mail, junk mail, advertising on buses, books, movies, videos, DVDs, overhead projectors, fax machines, classes in schools, lectures in universities, conversations in bus queues and pubs? The list is growing, and those on it are themselves in a state of flux. All are ‘means of communication’, responsible for conveying information and shaping the climate of opinion. If by the much-derided ‘media’ we mean some of them but not all, we need to be clear about our cherry-picking and the reasons for doing so.
Everybody, however, has an understanding of ‘the media’ in their heads, even if it is not always the same one. Everybody would give an answer if you stopped them in the street. ‘Accountability’, by contrast, is not only a more fluid idea. It is an abstraction, and to many people, obscure.
'Accountability' is in the category of modern words which are the currency of an exclusive club. It is a word which people like us use all the time, but which most other people don’t. If you asked my ninety-year-old mother-in-law about accountability, she would not know what you were talking about. Only recently has 'accountability' crept into the lexicon of bureaucracy-speak, along with other Orwellian terms, such as the opaque and obfuscating word ‘transparent’.
Like transparency, accountability is something we are in favour of, when applied to other people. In the minds of many, ‘accountability’ is linked to democracy. Defenders of 'accountability' are unrepentant. OK, they say, 'accountability' is an elite term incomprehensible to the masses, but - they argue - it is part of the scaffolding you don’t always see, but which is needed to keep the structure up. The modern world is too complex to be left to voters and their elected representatives. A hierarchy of accountabilities has become the true guardian of liberty. Do away with ‘accountability’ and you get corruption.
Whatever the truth of this argument - and there is obviously some - there is no denying accountability's importance. Indeed we live in a culture of accountability, in which everybody is accountable to somebody else, and those who declare themselves not to be accountable, are condemned out of their own mouths. Social scientists have taken note of it. ‘Lots of people are in the accountability holding business;' observes the American sociologist Robert D. Behn dryly, pointing to a whole new caste of government officials in the United States whose sole task is to hold other government officials accountable. ‘Everyone wants people -other people - to be held accountable.’ It has become an addiction. According to Mark Moore and Margaret Gates of Harvard University, there is an ‘unquenchable thirst for accountability that cuts across the political spectrum’.
Indeed, you could say that there is an accountability apartheid, which may broadly be characterised as a division of the world into two kinds of people, the happy and the unhappy. ‘Either you are an accountability holder or you are an accountability holdee,' Maintains Professor Behn. 'It’s greater to be an accountability holder. It’s not much fun to be an accountability holdee’. One is reminded of Plutarch, the little boy, and the frog. The boy throws a stone at the frog, which is fun for the boy, but not for the frog. Accountability means, literally, being required to explain decisions, but in practice it means more. Would we say of leaders that they are ‘accountable’ if they merely had to give an account of themselves, without consequences? Accountability means punishment if you fail to do so satisfactorily. The penalty for being an accountability holdee who is found wanting is likely to be the public humiliation, in Professor Behn's words, 'of being grilled by a hostile legislator, of being sued by an aggressive lawyer, of being subpoenaed by an unctuous prosecutor, or of being defamed by an investigatory journalist’ – more or less the fate of the luckless Dr David Kelly.
However, the key question about accountability - the area about which there is most confusion - concerns the direction of accountability, and in particular: accountability to whom? Accountability lines can get tangled. The head of a school or university, for example, may be accountable to governors, government, funders, staff and pupils simultaneously. In the case of the press, you are looking at an even more complex structure, and set of uncertainties. Thus, it is possible to ask - is a newspaper editor to be judged ‘accountable’ if his/her decisions have to be explained to owners or readers or some official or independent judge of what is fit for print? Are ‘accountability’ criteria satisfied because sales rise - or not if they fall? Does a legal framework provide sufficient accountability? Is a newspaper to be seen as more accountable because it has a letters column, and does not shrink from its duty to publish critical comments? Is a magazine – in a kind of incestuous loop – to be regarded as accountable to its collective self, through mechanisms of self-regulation? Accountability is about power. There was once a time - it seems to be past - when newspapers were regarded by some of their employees as 'accountable' to trade unions.
Meanwhile there is an added twist, provided by journalistic watchdogs of democracy themselves. The media, editors assert, requires a high degree of operational freedom, because the media is itself the 'accountability holder' in our society par excellence. What indeed is the job of the media if not to hold everybody to account? Thus it is not the press and broadcasting who should be made accountable to owners, audiences, officials. It is the capitalists, members of the public and politicians who are in the dock, to be held accountable by the media in its essential role as examining magistrate. When a Daily Mirror reporter cheats his way into Buckingham Palace and the paper splashes the story across 15 pages, it is the Palace and police who have to answer, not the paper for its skulduggery.
Meanwhile, like the media itself, the idea of accountability is ever on the move. On some things, rules get slacker on others they tighten. Goal posts shift, and it is difficult to know where you are. Yesterday’s forgivable flexibility becomes today’s misdemeanour and tomorrow’s crime – giving the prisoner in the dock little time to adjust his or her behaviour to take account of the new climate. Things you used to be able to get away with you no longer can. In the United States, it is just as bad. One expert from the American Enterprise Institute writes darkly of the ‘ethics police’.
So much for a lengthy definition of terms. But the point is a key one. Everybody fears and celebrates the media. Everybody desires a media that holds the powerful to account, yet is itself accountable. Yet everybody carries round a high degree of confusion about what they fear, celebrate, or want to hold to account. Indeed, if both ‘media’ and ‘accountability’ are shrouded by a plethora of interpretations, it is not surprising that the public is bemused and, indeed, that stories about 'media accountability' get little media attention. Who wants to know? Nevertheless a major issue exists, lest the monster runs completely amok.
As with most dilemmas of democracy, there is a tension. Morality pulls in different directions. On the one hand, there is a right to expression - journalists saying what they need to say. On the other there is a right to fair treatment - individuals, in a media-obsessive world, not being hanged by the press in the public square without a trial. On the one hand, we need a free press, on the other we demand that freedom should be exercised responsibly. On the one hand we want the truth about dossiers getting sexed up, on the other we need to be concerned about public servants driven to suicide. Part of our concern, of course, is self-interest: every time we see a politician or civil servant lynched by the press, a tingle - part pleasure, part empathy, part terror - goes down our spine. ‘Sticks and stones may break your bones’, we were taught by our nursemaids, at a time when papers had small ads, not headlines, on the front page, ‘ words will never hurt you.’ The contemporary world inverts the adage. Yet at the same time, we are aware that there has to be a trade off, if ‘the public right to know’ is also to be preserved. ‘Over the years’, as the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission Professor Robert Pinker has remarked, ‘the lessons of experience have taught us that privacy is not an absolute right. It must be balanced against the claims of freedom of expression and the public interest’. It is a question, indeed, of where to put the fulcrum.
One man’s intolerable busy-bodying is another’s fearless probing. Yet there is no denying an underlying, universally held, public suspicion of the press. What is the most famous quote ever on the media? It is Stanley Baldwin’s bitter indictment of Rothermere and Beaverbrook - warning against ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot down the ages’.
What did Prime Minister Baldwin intend by his remark? Harlotry is obvious: newspapers publish reports and take money from clients without any follow-up relationship or obligation. But power? The media can inflate, distort, whip up – but does not have any levers of control. Indeed, there are plenty of examples - in other countries more than this - of a neglectful press acquiring so much public opprobrium that it ceases to command attention, and loses its ability even to do damage.
The media does not decide. It does not order. It is a weapon and a tool – offering fact, interpretation, the opportunity to debate. The media facilitates, stimulates, irritates, germinates. If it sets agendas, it also more often follows opinion than leads it. Its ‘campaigns’ echo. All of these necessary functions are important. They do not amount to power. But they can be destructive - sometimes necessarily so, at others culpably.
But if there is a tension between 'freedom to' and 'freedom from' in the scope we need to give the media, there is also another interlocking tension - between restraint, and imagination. Too much accountability – too much checking up, too many accountability holders, too much fear of punishment pulls down shutters, scares off good people, demoralises employees, puts a a premium on the conscientiously dull. So goes the argument. The late Professor Self of the LSE describes this kind of tension as ‘the classic dilemma of public administration’. In the words of another writer, ‘A person who is held strictly accountable and is punished for a poor idea or a failed experiment is not likely to have much incentive to create or broach new ideas or launch experiments in the future’.
On the one hand, on the other. That is the perennial issue with accountability. The most savage philosophical assault on what has been called the ‘audit culture’ was launched a year or so ago by Professor Onora O’Neill of Cambridge University in an outstanding series of Reith lectures. Such a culture, she suggested, had arisen because of an alleged 'crisis of public trust'.
Professor O'Neill began by questioning whether such a crisis existed. She pointed to the lack of convincing evidence that it did. What did exist, she declared - with Professor Behn - was a ‘quest for greater accountability’, a quest which ‘has penetrated all our lives, like great draughts of Heineken’ reaching hitherto impenetrable parts. ‘Central planning may have failed in the former Soviet Union’, she bitingly declared, issuing the worst insult of all, ‘but it is alive and well in Britain today…’ Professor O’Neill’s particular target was the treatment of British higher education, and here I must admit, as somebody frequently on the receiving end, she struck a few chords.
However, she extended her indictment much more widely. According to Professor O’Neill, ‘In many parts of the public sector, complaint procedures are so burdensome that avoiding complaints becomes a central institutional goal’. One of these parts was the media. The result, she maintained, was a break-neck dash 'towards defensive medicine, defensive teaching and defensive policing’.
Does the 'audit culture' succeed in restoring trust? Professor O'Neil pointed tellingly at the opinion polls - which showed no upward movement. Why should trust have been increased? Her answer was instinctive, rather than evidential. It might be, she argued, that the 'accountability revolution' had critically left the most important accountability holder out of the account - the British public. Accountability to regulators, government departments, funders, legal standards might indeed have grown, but ordinary people had been forgotten. In sum, the 'revolution' was not about increasing the power of the voters. It was about making professionals subject to greater central control.
How far can this argument be applied to the media, in its bloated entirety? If O'Neill's theory of the 'audit culture' and the 'audit explosion' can be generalised, then the picture is gloomy. For if ever there has been a field in which a defensive, centrally-controlled product is undesirable, it is surely the press and broadcasting. If the general accusation contains even a smidgeon of truth, then surely a counter-revolution is urgently needed – and yet, in the same breath, it has also to be acknowledged that an irresponsible media, a media solely pursuing profit, is much more dangerous to democracy and individual liberty than irresponsibility in almost any other sphere. Overweening doctors or teachers, even elitist civil servants or arrogant spin doctors, risk much less damage to the fabric of society than journalists behaving badly.
How do you keep people under control, without actually controlling them? You could argue that the problem is an unreal one. Journalists already enjoy an extraordinary degree of freedom, and do not generally abuse it. Dons and surgeons are controlled in how they perform their professions as tightly, these days, as French schoolchildren. Journalists, by contrast, have hitherto escaped the ravages of accountability. A columnist on the Financial Times does not have to spend time filling in forms. He or she is accountable only to the editor. The editor of the Sun is accountable only to Mr Murdoch, and Mr Murdoch is accountable to nobody. That is the name and price of freedom.
If this is only partial truth, it is nevertheless a significant one. For there is a striking difference between print and non-print, which we need to look at. The truth is that in Britain today, there is not one culture, but two. On the one hand print, on the other electronic. In the print media, by and large, there is open season. Good jostles with bad, honourable with exploitative – the journalism of clinical exposure with the journalism of smears and scares, the journalism of blaming with the journalism of naming and shaming. In newspapers, reporters sometimes offer evidence to give credence to a piece. But there is no requirement for them to do so, no rules against blatantly misleading headlines, no prohibitions against suppressio veri, no ban on publishing speculation with a strong hint that it is news. Nor is there any requirement, at the bottom end of the market, to print news at all. At the top end, there is undoubted quality, but also a mild cynicism that is part of the culture of the trade. A very distinguished journalist recently told me that the standard advice to young journalists preparing copy at The Economist, is ‘simplify, then exaggerate’. Sound counsel, no doubt, at the highbrow Economist. It is certainly applied with even greater vigour on the cutting room floor of the Mirror and the Sun.
As for us, the readers, we are left with uncertainty about what to believe, and what to reject.
Newspapers attack, undermine, destroy the lives of private individuals. As serious in a democracy, they frequently do the same to politicians. How many careers have been wrecked in the past few years by unrelenting newspaper campaigns? They also do it to whole parties. Often, the steer comes from owners. In the words of the media academic Nicholas Garnham, ‘ we are perilously close to a world in which media conglomerates act as if they' - that is, not individual reporters - ' have unrestricted rights of free expression’. The point is not new, but it was powerfully brought home a couple of weeks ago. An example of conglomerate arrogance, barely challenged in the rest of the media – composed of people with children and mortgages fearful of the impact on their future careers – was an interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which the global baron did not dismiss a question about whether his British tabloid would back Labour or the Tories at the next election, but declared with devastating honesty that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. Almost on the same day, his son – backed by the Murdoch shareholding – was endorsed as the boss of the biggest media company in the UK.
We take this all in our stride – even radicals who denounced the power of press barons in the 1980s and 1990s regard Rupert as an appropriately labelled teddy bear, whose increasingly battered visage has become such a familiar presence in the nursery that we feel sentimental about it when it finally goes.
Yet the harlotry of the press is not inevitable. There is hope. If there is one culture in print journalism, there is another - quite different - in non-print. It may seem odd, in the era of Gillighan and the Hutton inquiry, to hold the BBC up as a shining example. But there is a marked difference between the print media, from the Guardian to the Sport, and the still-dominant broadcasting corporation, which has set the standard for all radio and television and whose dominance – alas – is increasingly threatened, but whose values need not be.
The print media have never been accountable. Hence, you may say, editor Dawson of The Times and appeasement, and Murdoch and the journalism of bums, tits, football and the Royal Family.
The BBC, by contrast, always has been accountable, to Governors, to the public, above all to its own corporate religion – and, so far from becoming duller as a result, it has been and remains the gold standard by which journalists the world over judge themselves and other members of their profession.
Let us pause for a moment, and see how it happened, and here I put on my historian’s hat.
‘Balance’ is written into the formal Charter of the BBC, as also in the guidelines of the Independent Television Commission, as laid down in the 1954 Act, following the Corporation’s lead. It is, as a matter of fact, also in the 1996 Broadcasting Act. Balance in the sense of impartiality is a requirement of license holders in the jungle of new multi-channel digital TV - and all ultimately because of the BBC. Here is a distinction. ‘Imbalance’ is the predominant ethic of almost every newspaper or periodical in the land – much as it is in the broadcasting media of most foreign countries, and most notably the United States.
Let me underline this point.
When we open the Guardian, or the Daily Mail, we expect bias, one-sidedness, editorial positions, pet hobby horses – and we get them. By contrast, when we switch on the radio or television, at least for news and current affairs, we expect a balanced point of view and - pace the professional complainers of the political parties – by and large that is what we get as well.
Why is the spoken word governed by Queensberry rules, while the written word is not? One answer is chance. Another is monopoly. A third is the state. A fourth is history. History has been most important. Like other aspects of electronic news, the ethic of balance did not happen suddenly. It evolved.
‘Balance’ is the child of ‘public service’. The establishment of the BBC in 1926 as a public corporation with a Royal Charter which deemed it desirable ‘that the Service should be developed and exploited to the best advantage and in the national interest’ imposed duties of a public nature. How this was to be interpreted depended partly on John Reith, on politics, and mostly on timing.
At first, the BBC was as partisan as The Times, which indeed it resembled. Incorporated as a state-run service, the new organisation naturally adopted establishment values – showing an unsurprising eagerness to gain establishment respectability. This meant leaning in one direction. The inter-war period was the heyday of the British one-party system – unmatched till Thatcher. Conservative-based governments held office for 17 out of 21 years. Hence there was little incentive to express an alternative point of view. The general approach to ‘public service’ was the respectful expression of official attitudes. Liberals and liberal sentiments were given some expression – the fledgling Labour Party almost none.
At first. Labour - whose growth paralleled the Corporation’s own – shrugged off the BBC’s partisanship as an irrelevance. It was the General Strike, occurring in the year of the BBC’s Charter, that put the BBC on the map. Suddenly – in the absence of newspapers – listening to the wireless became universal. In Cabinet, Winston Churchill pressed for the commandeering of this new weapon of industrial war. Reith trod carefully – a Catholic bishop was allowed to declare that striking might sinful, but the Anglican Primate was stopped from appealing for negotiations. Tory ministers were given air-time, the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was not.
Resentment over treatment in the General Strike was reinforced five years later, during the 1931 election at which Labour suffered a massive defeat. Clement Attlee later described the contest as ‘the most unscrupulous of my recollection’ – partly because of the partisanship of the BBC. In the election, eight out of eleven pre-election broadcasts went to National government speakers, and only three to the Labour Party.
In the thirties the Corporation began - slowly, and for complex reasons - to make amends. Early in the decade, a series on the trade union movement was proposed – but without speakers who were trade unionists. ‘Contacts’ was a key word in Corporation circles. Most of the Bloomsbury Group counted as contacts, trade union and Labour leaders as yet did not. Resentment increased. Here then was power without responsibility, with a vengeance – exercised arbitrarily on the basis of what Reith himself chose to define as the ‘national good’. When unemployment reached its peak in 1932 and the Labour leader George Lansbury was kept off the ar, Lansbury declared: 'I object to this elevation of the BBC into a kind of God to choose who shall speak and who shall not speak’. Attlee put it more neatly the following year: ‘You are getting really into a Hitlerite position’
Yet the position began to change and continued to do so – affected by the restoration of the two-party system, by the onset of the Second World War, and by a newly discovered need not only to reach working-class listeners but to persuade them: this was the age of Orwell and J.B.Priestley as well as of Winston Churchill. Labour’s participation in the Wartime Coalition had a softening effect on the post-Reithian BBC. From the end of 1941, the Corporation regularly consulted the TUC and Labour Party on programming. A new, fast-developing populism based on the need to offer a better post-war world transcended party divides. By the time of the 1945 election, the ‘struggle for balance’ had by no means been won – but the concept of fairness had changed out of recognition, while the election of a Labour Government made it hard to return to the status quo ante bellum. Partly as a result of labour movement strength and pressure, partly because of the BBC’s campaigning momentum during the war, an assumption of balance of some kind had arrived, replacing the old paternalism. After Beveridge in the 1950s, commercial television, eager for sportsman-like respectability, naturally fell into line.
So it has continued to be ever since without comment, accusations of bias from one political side weighed in the scales against accusations from the other. Today an expectation of 'balanced' broadcasting reigns, despite 'Death on the Rock' and allegedly tampered-with dossiers – you have only to watch a few minutes of American so-called debate, with openly partisan presenters, to see the difference. And now we have the internet, digital and a plethora of channels whose likely trajectory to put it mildly, to be towards a more judicious approach.
So what is the likely impact of Offcom, a giant organisation which will be concerned with accountability for quantity and quality of Programming for TV, radio, non-print advertising, and all other non-print media - funded by a levy on independent programmes?
The BBC is accountable because of public service, because of its monopolistic heritage, because of public ownership, because of the two-party system and because of cancelling-out political pressure. It is not inevitably balanced, just as the print media are not inevitably unbalanced. Their history is just different. Retrospectively, it was not external controls that made the difference, it was internal dynamics - accountability to itself.
But it is not merely newspapers. Controlling the challenging array of other media will get harder and harder to achieve and accountability in them will become a vaguer and vaguer concept.
What does the future hold? One is reminded of the comment by the German philosopher Hegel that for modern people, newspapers substitute for morning prayers: people know that millions of others are performing the same ceremony. In the mid 20th c it was radio, in the late 20th TV. Already - as every parent knows - it has changed and fragmented. When I was a child, the nation was hypnotised by two television channels, which dominated conversation on the Clapham omnibus. Today, computer games, the internet, chat-rooms, text messages, multi-channels disperse the nation's attention. Morning or evening prayers have become a post-modern cacophony of competitors for attention in a multi-interest world, and attempts at regulatory power over content are unlikely to succeed. At the same time, the new regulatory Offcom threatens to undermine what leadership in the non-print media that the BBC continues to offer.
Anybody in doubt on the uncontrollability point need merely to note the events of recent weeks, in which the Prince of Wales won a formal battle to keep an allegation out of the press, while losing an informal one to anybody with access to the internet. As a result everybody in the United Kingdom who wants to know details of the rumour, does.
There are other blockages to applying limitations over content, as well as market forces and the anarchy of new technology. One is the rapidity with which public attitudes change. Another is the cussed instincts of the profession - or, to put it another, its collective code.
The shifting sands of public taste, a notorious hindrance in film censorship, makes electronic media and print statutory censorship virtually impossible - unless you are prepared to put up with legal clashes every fortnight, as the media triumphantly crunches its way through the latest High Court judgement, and sets a new precedent.
What is ethical, what is decent, what is acceptable? The answer to these questions has changed almost by the hour during our lifetimes as indeed through history. The record shows that, alarmingly, not only are there no absolute standards, there are scarcely any consistent standards at all. It is a commonplace, for instance, that the Romans - authors of moving poetry and builders of straight roads - regarded the enjoyment of unspeakable human suffering in the arena as a sign of refinement, a bit like going to the opera today. Unspeakable, that is, to us, but the stuff of happy family chatter then. Even as the Roman Empire civilised the Mediterranean brim, its tortures increased in exquisite ferocity.
In the Middle Ages, the contemplation of pain did not cease. On the contrary, a religion based on a tableau of Roman cruelty hung and hangs in every Christian church - a scene so horrific that, if invented today, it would be banned from the cinema or any art gallery, on the grounds of its sadistic obscenity. But this scene was by no means the worst.
Any visitor to the National Gallery will be familiar with hyper-realist pictures, from the 14th century to the seventeenth, of saints burnt, flayed, broken on the wheel, boiled in oil, not to mention saints with their severed breasts on a platter, and daughters generously suckling their fathers. So far from such images offending against canons of public decency: they were commissioned by kings and bishops as the fitting subject of warning or ascetic instruction.
Today, tastes have moved on, not necessarily for the better. We do not like to see little children being hanged for stealing handkerchiefs, or if we do we get sent to prison for it.
But we do choose to watch - if we didn't we'd switch off - aeroplanes crashing into tall buildings, and big explosions in Bagdad or Istanbul and their bloody aftermath.
And then there are sex and royalty. Sex famously has moved from something that barely spoke its name to by far the biggest single topic in the media, still with boundaries but ones of turbulent fluidity.
Royalty comes almost within the same package, with a parallel ebb and flow. In the 1950s, newspapers carried adulatory royal stories on an almost daily basis, and couldn't publish ones that weren't - not because of legal punishment, but because of a readership revolt if they offended. In the 2000s, by contrast, royal articles that lack a derogatory twist get automatically spiked.
Perhaps the papers lead, perhaps they follow. At any rate, the transition of Royalty from what the late John Grigg called British Shintoism in the 50s, to the celebrity monarchy of the eighties, and the age of ridicule in the 90s, had little to do with censorship or the lack of it, and a great deal to do with changing public mores. Take, for example, the recent Prince of Wales/valet story and the unwise St James's Palace attempt to prevent its publication. In an earlier generation, the possibility of such a rumour reaching the public simply would not have existed - proprietors, editors and readers would not have stood for it.
How do you control the press, and make it accountable? The answer is you can't. Tastes and standards are like an ever rolling stream, and if you legislate for today, you will look a fool tomorrow. You can regulate the sale of companies, stand out against the formation of global conglomerates, and you can - hopefully Offcom will - provided incentives to channels that wish to offer a quality product. But the actual control of content must, in the end, remain in the hands of the autonomous audience.
There is the Press Complaints Commission route and there is the law of privacy one. True, it is hard to think of any really big story that has been held back for long because of the PPC's intervention. Nevertheless, the PCC code at least throws responsibility back at the editors, who prefer not to be caught out in a lie or professional malpractice, and do not enjoy eating humble pie, at least too often. Editors hold to John Wayne's dictum: 'Never apologise. It's a sign of weakness'. They hate having to do so. Moreover - though editors may or may not be villains personally - they do not like to be tarred as such by the public if they can avoid it. Calls for restraint by the PCC, for example after the Dunblane massacre or over the privacy of the royal princes when they were growing up, were tolerably observed. All the evidence is that self-regulation is more effective than regulation. By contrast, a regime of punitive fines would be seen as an occupational hazard which a campaigning paper would turn into a martyrdom and put down as a business expense. In any case, it would be the papers most like to offend, the tabloids, who would most easily shoulder the burden.
In sum, there are no easy answers.. A neat, tidy, democratic fourth estate is a mirage - it never existed and never will. The media - all the media - are newcomers to the political scene. In 1833, half a century after the American revolution, the biggest selling US newspaper had a circulation of 4,500. When George VI died in 1952 most of the British population and almost the entire Commonwealth one, didn't have television. Today, there are internet cafes in Outer Mongolia, contributing to a global culture over which we in Britain have no control. It would be an absurd arrogance for anybody to lay down a scheme for forcing the media into some accountability straightjacket, as if - dare I say it - a newspaper or a television station was a mere university. In half a generation, everything will be completely different.
But this doesn't mean that media should shrug off responsibility, or that we should either. Self-regulation does not just mean sticking to an external code. It means adhering to an internal one as well. The media needs to be accountable to its audience, as it needs to be accountable to itself.
Back to Reithian, Olympian, Auntie BBC. The Corporation has recently been criticised and rightly so, not so much for sloppy reporting, as for its ethic of despising politicians. The 'Why are you lying to me, you lying bastard?' style of interviewing on Newsnight or the Today Programme needs reviewing. In the understandable words of a No 10 aide, 'We don't see the BBC as a medium any more. We see it as a barrier.'
Yet there is much, much more about the BBC to admire, and the question is whether the good things - and the good things still lead the world - come from controls or self-belief. I would suggest that it is not the BBC 's rules that produce Panorama, Today, The Archers and Have I got News For You. It is an evolution that could not have been imposed and which goes back three-quarters of a century - just as it is the evolution of the partisan Guardian and Telegraph that has given those papers their distinctive characters.
Thus the evidence points in two directions at once. As far as the commercially anarchic air waves are concerned, the picture looks gloomy. On one hand the new regulatory machine is likely to free up major independent TV Channels, allowing them to cut down on their statutory public service requirement - offering new freedom which they could, if they so chose, .decide to use to the public benefit. On the other, there is the danger they the same Channels will off-load their public service obligations on the already burdened, already effectively self-regulating, BBC. If so, ITV and Channels 4 and 5 will be allowed to leap out of what they see as ITC- imposed straightjackets, while the BBC will groan under the excessive weight. Meanwhile, the whole process will be tacitly encouraged by Offcom, keen to gets hands on the BBC, while a bruised government in the background will do nothing to get in the way of the Corporation's declining autonomy. But perhaps that is unduly pessimistic.
'Three characteristics seem to mark the behaviour of British newspapers:' writes the commentator on British media, Raymond Snoddy. ': an almost pathological reluctance to admit errors and say sorry, a deep sensitivity to criticism and a marked distaste for thinking about the consequences of what they do'.
Would tough 'rules of accountability', off this and off that, combined with varieties of forms to fill in improve them? There is the regulatory route, hitherto performed for independent TV by the ITC and - from December 29 2003 - a route to be taken by most of the non-print media when Offcom assumes operations. It remains to be seen what the advantages will be of this great leap in the dark. There is also the light-touch route.
To quote Patricia Hodgson of the ITC in a lecture on a related topic, Moses brought ten commandments from Mount Sinai. If he had delivered ten strategic aims, 100 core objectives and 1,000 key performance indicators, would he have got the children of Israel out of the desert any quicker? What we need to do is to encourage the good within a code of freedom.
And there is a straw of comfort. In a democracy, the dull, the bad and the ugly eventually fail. The good do not always succeed. But those who have stuck most firmly to principle on the air waves as in print, have shown a remarkable ability to survive. Who, for instance, would have expected the unlikely formulae of Channel 4, or of the Independent newspaper, to have lasted as long as they have? As for the BBC, the system of accountability to an internal Board of Governors - not to an external watchdog - has for the past seventy-seven years served the public interest, providing instruction, entertainment and good taste, remarkably well. Crucially, it has provided - and still can provide - leadership elsewhere, to companies and channels where quality is not necessarily a watchword.
The BBC is the best of British. There are no easy answers, but we must seek to preserve and develop what we can. Which could be one way of saying that the British media is the worst in the world - apart from all the others.
End.