Why was this a government matter in the first place? Don’t we have a free press?

Media plurality is completely separated from criminal law – and quite rightly! The OFCOM acquisition guidance, including the much mentioned “fit and proper” test, doesn’t go into details of an owner’s criminal record, as it’s all about making sure there’s a responsible, diverse set of media outlets distributing news. OFCOM looks at the proprietor’s conduct while running other broadcast media channels to see if they stick to the rules, and as such, a parliamentary debate isn’t allowed (under competition law) to prohibit Murdoch from buying the rest of Bskyb, and why they had to simply apply pressure until he backed off (as he did, in spectacular fashion, this afternoon). Parliament is still sovereign, of course, but in order to interfere it would have to repeal competition law, which would also (probably) involve leaving the EU, which would be a much busier afternoon!

But some people DID break the law…

Criminal behaviour is something completely different to plurality, and is dealt with by the Police not a regulator-QANGO. There was, however, a problem where the police failed to fully investigate suspected crimes including voicemail hacking and bribery of police officers, and that’s why we’ve got ourselves an independent judicial enquiry that can pull in former Met officers and quiz them alongside the journalists and politicians. In the meantime, the Met have got their act together and are also investigating the hacking itself, finally, too.

What’s to be done about all this?!

Finally, in addition to all of this, we have people calling for new regulation of the Media. I was lucky enough to attend a Westminster Skeptics meeting on Monday, and a few interesting points were raised about how this should (or should not!) be done.

Firstly what I’d like to point out that if existing criminal laws had been followed, or if the police had done a real investigation in 2002, most of the horrible bits of this wouldn’t have happened – all the victims of the nations tragedies wouldn’t have had their privacy invaded and been hounded by the gutter press.

Of course, politicians would still be cozying up to media barrons like Murdoch, which isn’t a healthy state of affairs anywhere, and that’s one bonus of the judicial enquiry – the full nature of this unconstitutional relationship will be exposed, and the next election might not be about getting the Sun on your side.

But in particular, one WesSkep speaker David Allen Green said that existing media laws (namely the policial neutrality laws and libel law) were a strong enough framework already, and that with proper police investigations all would be well. I would only differ from this slightly — Libel law is not universally assailable (it costs a lot to get into suing people!) nor universally applicable (it is impossible to defame an idea, hence the legitimacy of the No2AV campaign full of downright lies,) and as such doesn’t really work as a proper regulator to make sure media coverage is not dangerously misleading at times.

These are not insurmountable problems though, and with appropriate access and reframing I think a response-based system of regulation could work. It sure beats an even quasi-governmental censor for individual stories because, as Mill argued, restricting freedom of speech cannot be satisfactorily distinguished from restricting freedom of thought, which we can plainly never do.

Edit: Nick Clegg gave a speech on this today, and I agree with Nick.