Brown should act to lift restraints on journalism

Posted by Press Gazette on 1 June 2007 at 08:00
Tags: David Cameron, Freedom of Information, Gordon Brown, Journalism, Milton Keynes Citizen, NUJ, Police and Criminal Evidence Act, Sally Murrer, Tony Blair

When card-carrying NUJ member Gordon Brown takes up office in Number 10 Downing Street this month, he has one clear way he can create a point of difference with former PR man David Cameron and predecessor Tony Blair.

Through straight-talking and by putting an end to spin. This is something he has already hinted at, and it can only be hoped that Brown will also remember his roots, on Scottish Television in the early 1980s, and call a ceasefire in this Government’s often open hostility towards the press.

British journalism is already under threat like never before, because the internet is eroding much of its economic base. If Brown wants a press capable of more than live-blogging the latest episode of Big Brother, he might want to look at easing some of the constraints on serious journalism.

Like ditching the proposed Freedom of Information and Data Protection Regulations, which the Government has clearly signalled are aimed squarely at journalists and would greatly reduce our ability to use the Freedom of Information Act by massively increasing the number of requests thrown out on cost grounds.

He also needs to look at why the police are intimidating local newspaper journalists and locking them up in the cells as part of routine police enquiries. Milton Keynes Citizen reporter, and mum of three, Sally Murrer has had her life turned upside down after spending a night in the cells earlier this month because local cops didn’t like the fact that one of their number had apparently leaked her a story. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Government is currently reviewing the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and could make it even easier for police to seize journalists’ notebooks, computers and contact books.

A healthy body politic is impossible without good journalism and Brown would be well advised to remember that, for the sake of both his short-term popularity and the longterm public good.

Falconer forgets that we journalists act on readers’ behalf

Posted by Press Gazette on 28 March 2007 at 10:01
Tags: Charlie Falconer, Department for Constitutional Affairs, Freedom of Information, Journalism, Journalists, Press Gazette Leaders, Tony Blair

Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer has illustrated once again that he has only the dimmest understanding of the way journalism works. It’s a scary thought, considering the huge influence the Department for Constitutional Affairs has on our working lives.

Defending plans currently under consideration by the Government to massively increase the number of Freedom of Information requests thrown out on cost grounds, he perversely told an audience of lawyers last week that the “Freedom of Information Act is one of the greatest reforms for which this Government will rightly be remembered.”

And defending his proposals to, in the words of the Newspaper Society, “neuter” the act for journalists, he said: “The Government did not introduce freedom of information in order to do something ‘for journalism’.

We did it for the public.

“The job of the Government is not to provide page leads for the papers, but information for the citizen. Freedom of information was never considered to be, and for our part will never be considered to be, a research arm for the media.”

What Falconer apparently doesn’t understand is that journalists are in large part honest agents, acting on behalf of ordinary citizens — their readers — who don’t have the time themselves to do the work of holding public authorities to account.

Thank God that we live in a society where commercial news organisations are willing to pay people to spend large parts of their day filing requests for information to Government on everything from the hygiene inspections at local restaurants to details of the advice to the Prime Minister on the legality of his invasion of Iraq.

We are not some malign commercial force acting outside society, as Falconer appears to believe, but an important and intrinsic part of the civic democracy which he is paid to uphold.