Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Journalists never seem to challenge the sanctimonious posturing of Hacked Off – a campaign against press freedom supported by left-wing academics and celebrities who want the media to report the nice parts of their life and stop exposing their hypocrisy.

Spokespeople for Hacked off appear in the media fairly frequently, but are rarely challenged on their illiberal agenda. Hacked off asserts that recent media scandals demonstrate that self-regulation has failed and this demonstrates the need for statutory regulation. In other words, the campaign proceeds from a deliberately false premise via invalid reasoning to a predetermined conclusion of demanding political control of the media.

The false premise is that self-regulation has failed. Plainly, no regulatory system is flawless. Any system will make errors or miss important things. But recent scandals have focussed on criminal behaviour by journalists such as hacking phones and bribing police officers. To say that such criminal behaviour demonstrates that self-regulation has failed and there is a need for statutory regulation is intellectually risible. Phone hacking and bribery are already regulated by statute. It is statute – the criminal law – which has failed in this instance.

I will not repeat their error of logic by declarling that, since statutory regulation has failed, it is obvious that hacking and bribery should now be governed by self-regulatory frameworks. This would be an absurd conclusion. Even if Hacked Off's claim that these matters are presently subject to self-regulation were not blatantly false, their logic would still be absurd. The fact that one system of regulation has failed does not demonstrate that any particular alternative would be better.

But the fact that journalists on Sky (currently subject to statutory regulation)and the BBC (the only medium which actually does regulate itself) do not challenge either the falsehood or the faulty logic demonstrates that the Hacked Off campaign is working. It is having the effect of intimidating journalists from challenging the powerful: the cloistered academics and the rich celebrities. These people get away with peddling any old crap precisely because they have cowed journalists with their calls for political control. 

And this is real danger of Leveson and political conspiracy in favour of censorship: they do not have to control the media if they can intimidate them.