Though Cowards Flinch

Max Mosley versus the News of the World in the matter of an allegedly Nazi-themed orgy in which Mr Mosley took part, and to add a bit of spice to tickle Private Eye, Mr Justice ‘Eagle’ Eady presiding. Just by reading the first eight words I can tell you who I want to win that particular legal debacle and it ain’t News of the World. Is there a larger issue at stake however?

Freedom of the press is about to fall under the iron heel of “an aggressive judge-made privacy law over which parliament has no control”? So Paul Dacre thinks anyway, whatever credence one wishes to give to the editor of the Daily Fabrication, er sorry, Mail. On the other hand, we’re giving the media too much rein to investigate our private lives, so thinks veteran journo Sholto Byrnes.

To top the matter off, to reach every last quarter of the political spectrum, there’s even a European angle because Mosley is suing the News of the World under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to respect for one’s family and private life (though it also mentions a long list of exceptions, one of which is the ‘protection of morals’).

And so the stage is set for a remarkable battle of legal wits, to decide issues of freedom of… gigantic yawn!

When the Sun can print contradictory stories on consecutive days about Beckham or Rooney, who the hell cares what the News of the World says about Max sodding Mosley? Who even knew who that was before this thing about him having sex Nazi-style? Probably the same people who think Formula One is a sport. Wow, Schumacher can touch a button better than Hakkinen. Bigger yawn.

Moreover, is anything about this remotely new? No. It’s all been done to death. Illegal wire-tapping and surveillance on the part of the less salubrious newspapers, private eyes employed to track down what you threw into the garbage, celebrities caught topless unawares, unapproved photos of the Royals followed by grovelling apologies. The privacy invasions of the media are rivalled only by their simultaneous hypocrisy.

What difference does any of it make? It’s only fifteen years ago that the government had D-notices on virtually anything related to the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein. Doesn’t anybody remember statements from Republican leaders being read out on the 6 o’clock news by actors? Whether by judges or parliament, laws on freedom of the press are never going to favour the average punter.

Why? Because the average punter basically has the freedom to choose which banner he wants at the top of his daily choice of bilge-filled dead tree. The gung-ho pro-war type can choose Sky News on Iraq, complete with its own little badge and jingoistic strapline; the more restrained can watch BBC; the more self-consciously intellectual can read Patrick Cockburn’s column in the London Review of Books.

The average punter is not oblivious to the fact that most of what gets recycled as news is publicity-seeking press releases, or that fairly often the government adjusts bad news to the media cycle by dumping a lot of it at the same time. Most of us simply choose to ignore that, and so day after day we buy the same papers (“now with Polly Toynbee as a regular columnist!” so I was informed by a gushing banner the other day. Oh whoopee!).

To describe the vastness of the distance between the world of press-related laws and the needs and perceptions of the rest of us is virtually impossible. If we wake up tomorrow and all mention of one’s private life is banned from the media, it’ll make no difference to anything we do. If we wake up and actually the media can print a list speculating on the names of Nick Clegg’s thirty sexual partners, it’ll still make no difference.

We’ll read it and think, “same old shit” and happily get on with the crossword. We live in a world where every media organ is screaming at the top of its lungs to the point where perspective is totally drowned out by the wailing of the tabloids and the learned “I told you so” from each of the broadsheets when they reproduce reports on immigrants, homosexual parenting or any of the other literati favourites.

Once the national spectacle that is the Houses of Parliament is adjourned things will be even worse. The media will be back to sob stories about kids going missing, as they do virtually every summer. Meanwhile city and county councils get away with unscrutinized privatisations, hundreds of thousands work for crap wages and all the local press cares about is the three car pile-up on the A2.

If democracy is about a conversation going on between the various parts of society, the largest part of our conversation is about banalities. The weather, human interest stories, complaining about crime (or other pet hate of choice) and none of it geared towards a method of fixing what is so obviously a system of free press for which the term ‘free’ is meaningless to the people for whom a press exists.

The real spark of a free press is when people engage with the material circumstances in which they find themselves. As if by magic, pamphlets appear addressed to community residents. I walked through a part of Deal the other week and was confronted by a sign in virtually every window, each bearing a large-print “No.” It transpired that this was in reaction to a local planning application that the Council had sought consultation on.

Evidently Deal council hasn’t been taking lessons from certain other parts of the UK where ‘consultation’ is another word for filing the application and not mentioning the matter to anyone until the consultation deadline has passed, thereby avoiding the intervention of pesky commoners who just don’t understand the wider economic importance of whatever vital structure has been planned.

Our current system of a free press is utterly biased; the national media is amply dealt with by men with more knowledge than I – such as Nick Davies recent book. On a local level, however, matters are just as biased. Local businessmen can take a heavy interest in publishing propaganda when their interests are at stake and politicians at city council level are no less in hoc to people with money than at a national level.

I write a blog because it allows me to escape the echo chamber of 24-hour news channels with the news basically on a loop and commentators who have nothing more to offer viewers than the man in the street. I’ve always wanted to get a local newsletter going too – one that deals with political issues and allows residents to contribute. A local fete offers a good opportunity to sound out an idea like this – and there is one being held shortly by the residents of Wincheap, Canterbury.

Watch this space.