In Function of the Press

Evan Whitton notes misconceptions about the function of the Press, and what it is actually supposed to do.

Misconceptions include the notion that gossip and trivial details are somehow improper; that it is wrong to say people are wrongdoers unless they have been convicted in a court of law; and even that nothing disobliging should be said about the living or the dead.

In fact, the Press has traditional obligations to interest and amuse the customers, to seek the truth, and to serve the community by exposing wrongdoers, particularly those who subvert democracy by corruption.

The Press is a commercial enterprise. There is (or should be) no room for the worthy but dull; the challenge is to make it interesting.

Francis Williams, historian of the Press, says in Dangerous Estate (Longmans Green, 1957) a newspaper is "a vehicle of entertainment, a medium for satisfying the common human appetite for gossip, an answer to the pleasure in news, not as an aid to forming opinion, but for its own sake".

"What would you have, good woman?" asks the Registrar in Ben Jonson's The Staple of News (1625). Her answer, Williams says, echoes down the centuries:

I would have, sir, a groatsworth of any news,
I care not what, to carry down this Saturday to our vicar.

Justice Lennie Hoffmann said in 1986: "Much journalism is trivial and some irresponsible. That is the price of freedom [of the Press]." But Williams says Addison and Steele were "concerned not with one particular sort of man, but with mankind, and they knew - it is the one essential piece of knowledge a journalist must never forget - that in such a study no triviality is so small as to be unimportant".

It thus seems logically difficult to criticise anything - apart from improper intrusions on privacy, unfairness to customers, and gross stupidity - the Press might do to interest and amuse customers, so long as it takes what opportunity it may to expose wrongdoers and defend democracy against the corrupt.

Fleet Street genius Sol Chandler put it this way: "The oldest rule of journalism, and the most forgotten, is to tell the customers what is really going on." If it is forgotten, it is because exposure journalism is quite impossible for all but the most financially secure media organisations.

The reasons lie in the Eighteenth Century. Modern journalism, invented by Defoe in 1704, became what Williams calls "a weapon of freedom, a sword in the hands of those fighting old or new tyrannies, the one indispensable piece of ordnance in the armoury of democracy".

The Press was thus a threat to ruthless Whig oligarchs who ran England: most Whig politicians were corrupt and, as Justice James Thomas notes in Judicial Ethics in Australia (LBC 1997), most judges were former Whig politicians.

Tom Parker, Lord Macclesfield, for example. As Lord Chancellor and head of the perennially corrupt Chancery Court 1718-25, he extorted bribes from barristers who wanted to be Masters in Chancery so they could in turn extort bribes from litigants. His fee was 5000 guineas (some $1.5 million today); Master (as he shortly became) Elde needed a clothes-basket to hold the cash and notes he took from his chambers to the noble jurist's home.

To protect oligarchs and the system from exposure, judges made it a crime, seditious libel, with a catch-all definition: "written censure upon any public man whatever for any conduct whatever or upon any law or institution whatever". They also said journalists were entitled to a presumption of guilt. So much for British justice.

Judges sent many honest soldiers for truth to prison during the long (and largely unsuccessful) struggle for free speech and democracy. Williams says the privations they endured impose the same obligations on all who come after: to report honestly, to comment fearlessly, and to hold fast to independence.

In the Nineteenth Century, Australian judges unthinkingly adopted English libel law. I blame John Macarthur; as Lionel Murphy famously said, following the rule of precedent is perfectly natural in a country inhabited mainly by sheep.

The presumption of guilt remains. That is why the (still unenacted) reforms to libel law suggested by a NSW committee headed by His Excellency (as he now is) Gordon Samuels QC in 1995 seem such a remarkable break with three centuries of bad law.

Difficult as it is, there are two kinds of exposure journalism: disclosure of a new fact, and disclosure of a new pattern from a narrative of a lot of old facts in a strict chronology. Both are needed; as Russell Fox QC, of Norfolk Island, notes in his important new book, Justice in the 21st Century (Cavendish, 2000, $135), an understanding of facts depends heavily on context; people may lie, but circumstances cannot.

James Cameron, an English reporter, noted that getting a result is like making an atom bomb: the public is bombarded with facts until, mysteriously, critical mass is reached; one more big fact and action has to be taken. This is called the Cameron Effect; it means the Press just has to keep chipping away.

Evan Whitton is a member of the Press Council's Freedom of the Press Committee.

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