Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1998 by George Evans

Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public. Edited by Hugh Stephenson and Michael Bromley. Longman. [pounds]12.99. 192 pages. ISBN 0-582-29332-4.

The accountability and regulation of the press, this book asserts, has become a central theme of contemporary life. Have newspapers, it asks, a case for asserting their right and moral obligation to call those in the public eye to account?

The national and international media academics who contribute to this critical wide-ranging study of the British press leave no room for doubt about the depth and extent of public resentment caused by press intrusion and the invasion of privacy, particularly Royal privacy. Though it lays most of the blame on the popular tabloid papers, the so-called qualities or broadsheets also earn a share of it for adopting tabloid values themselves.

This is fair comment. The scramble for circulation driven by the cut-throat price war started by Rupert Murdoch has undoubtedly hastened the spread of the 'tabloid culture' increasingly demonstrated in the serious papers by creeping trivialisation of news and features, bigger headlines, bigger pictures and more personal columns devoted to inconsequential trivia.

The history of the British press over the past fifty years has been described as an unremitting story of crisis, closure and complaint. It is not, perhaps, quite as bad as that but the statistics must give publishers cause for concern. More than twenty national and regional daily papers have closed since 1947, seventeen of them in the twelve years between 1949 and 1961. More people than ever now read no national newspaper regularly. There has been a dramatic fall in readership of the national tabloid papers in the past twenty-five years. Television has undoubtedly been a major factor in this but it is by no means the only reason for the great British public's disenchantment with its newspapers.

Four out of ten adults questioned in a series of MORI polls in the 1990s said flatly that they were dissatisfied with the national newspapers, twice the number who found fault with the BBC or ITV. A large majority believed that local papers and, to a lesser extent, the 'qualities' behaved responsibly but two out of three thought the tabloids did not. Nearly half felt there was too little control generally over the activities of newspapers in Britain.

But are the newspapers and in particular the tabloids as bad as they are painted? This book, which is soundly based, though not, it has to be said, noticeably 'media-friendly', offers this unflattering view of the British press, seen through the eyes of foreign students encountering it for the first time when they come to London to study journalism at City University. 'Their reactions are invariably ones of disbelief, dismay and, occasionally disgust - in tabloid terms one might say Shock Horror. Their overwhelming view is that no press is as intrusive, offensive, quasi-pornographic, arrogant, inaccurate, salacious and unprincipled.' This exaggerated and overwrought view of the British press as a whole will not go down well in what is still called Fleet Street but there is clearly an element of truth in it, in so far as it relates to some of the downmarket tabloids and magazines.

Britain, as John Tulloch, Associate Head of the School of Communication, in the University of Westminster, observes, has a press which combines some good quality, even world class, newspapers with some of the worst in Europe. Few British journalists, he believes, would sincerely mount a defence of some of the tabloids. If they did they would argue that the price of a free press was to have some bad newspapers; that although the ethics of their news-gathering or their regard for privacy were indefensible, they were extremely well-produced; and that snobs who took themselves too seriously, failed to realise the entertainment value of popular newspapers.

Hugh Stephenson, Professor of Journalism in the City University and a former editor of the New Statesman, says the argument seems to be strong that the journalistic values of today's popular press - and the reaction of politicians and the 'chattering classes' to them - are part of an historical continuum. Sex, lies and the invasion of the privacy of individuals have, he writes, been an important part of the staple diet of popular British newspapers for as long as popular British newspapers have existed.

The pivotal role of the Press Complaints Commission which is charged with enforcing the industry's code of practice, is central to the debate on the accountability of newspapers for their conduct. Some of its critics who would like to see it abolished and replaced by legislation to control the press, compare it to a watchdog which is willing to bark but reluctant to bite. This does it less than justice. The Commission does bite in the cause of upholding ethical and professional standards in journalism. Whether it bites hard enough is a matter of opinion.

GEORGE EVANS