Crackdown on the British Press p.

By: Robert O'Connor

In the wake of scrutinizing coverage of the royal family, the
British government may seek stringent curbs on press freedom sp.

AFTER EXTENDED TABLOID newspaper coverage of the private lives of senior politicians and members of the royal family, the British government is preparing legislation aimed at controlling the press.
The announcement, by National Heritage Secretary Peter Brooke, came after a lengthy study by David Calcutt, a senior lawyer, into whether the Press Complaints Commission ? established at the beginning of 1991 ? had succeeded in curbing abuses by the press. Calcutt concluded that it had not.
He argued in his report that "The industry, in setting up the Press Complaints Commission, has gone as far as it is prepared to go, but it has not gone far enough."
The government, Brooke told the House of Commons, agrees "that the Press Complaints Commission, as constituted at present, is not an effective regulator of the press. It is not truly independent, and its procedures are deficient."
The government is expected to support Calcutt's recommendation that a criminal law be enacted against trespass and that the use of surveillance equipment on private property be made illegal without the permission of the owner.
The law might even ban the taking of photographs with telephoto lenses on private property. Also, a civil statute is likely to be created to cover infringements of privacy, but any new press law is expected to contain a public interest defense.
"Measures on these lines," Brooke said, "are now necessary to signal society's strong condemnation of this kind of behavior and to deter similar instances in the future."
The aim of legislation, Calcutt wrote, should be "to enable the press to operate freely and responsibly and to give it the backing which is needed, in a fiercely competitive market, to resist the wildest excesses."
However, the government did not endorse Calcutt's recommendation that a statutory press tribunal be created, with the power to assess fines, award compensation and prevent the publication of offending material.
Newspaper editors reacted with some relief that the government rejected the creation of a tribunal.
"We'll have to look at what comes forward point by point," said Peter Preston, editor of The Guardian. "I am very glad, however, that apparently the government is not going for a statutory tribunal. I think that's the substantial element of unfairness in Calcutt."
Andreas Whittam Smith, editor of The Independent, has warned that any new law of trespass "shouldn't be applied only to journalists. Otherwise, we end up in a situation where there are anti-press laws but no press freedoms."
Ann Clwyd, national heritage spokeswoman for the opposition Labor Party, warned the House of Commons that "under no circumstances will the Labor Party support legislation which prevents the proper scrutiny of the lives of the rich and powerful, including public figures, such as politicians, business tycoons and members of the royal family."
Calcutt's study, which began last summer, was his second investigation of the British press. A report he issued in 1990 led to the creation of the Press Complaints Commission, which was intended to be a final attempt at press self-regulation.
The atmosphere that led to Calcutt's second appointment was fed by a comment last year by PCC chairman Lord McGregor after press coverage of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
A biography of the princess, serialized in the Sunday Times, depicted her as a deeply unhappy and neglected young wife who had tried more than once to kill herself.
After the tabloids picked up the story with customary enthusiasm, McCregor accused "sections of the press" of "dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people's souls." The continuance of such intrusiveness, he warned, "will threaten the future of self-regulation just at the time when it appears to be succeeding."
It has since emerged that Princess Diana had cooperated with the biography and had also orchestrated much of the coverage of her marital difficulties. The Guardian recently printed a private letter written by McGregor to Calcutt in December 1992, in which he suggested that the government knew of this manipulation as early as December 1991.
McGregor had recounted to Calcutt a conversation he had had at a private dinner in May 1991 with Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the tabloid Daily Mail. Rothermere, McGregor wrote, had told him that the Prince and Princess of Wales had recruited rival newspapers in order to do battle with each other. McGregor added that he told then-Home Secretary Kenneth Baker and Gus O'Donnell, press secretary to Prime Minister John Major, of this in December 1991. Both men have denied any recollection of such a conversation with McGregor.
If McGregor's account is true, it would mean that the government authorized the second Calcutt investigation knowing that there had at least been the suggestion that the Prince and the Princess had been responsible for feeding stories to the newspapers.
Prince Charles is now regarded as having been less active than his now-estranged wife in manipulating the press, but Chris Davis, assistant editor of the tabloid Sun, Britain's largest-selling daily, told a BBC television interviewer that "Prince Charles' camp is equally close to the newspapers. People very close to him who are obviouisly working on his authority and with his knowledge will frequently telephone newspapers."
Within the last 18 months, Davis said, "we had a story which we were a little bit unhappy about concerning Prince Charles and his relationship with Diana. At his request, the Sun newspaper faxed a copy of that story to his office before it appeared in the newspaper. He read it. He contacted us again, and said he was most unhappy about it. He told us why, and we did not publish the story."
The issue has been further complicated by the publication in an Australian magazine of the "Camillagate" tapes, recordings of intimate telephone conversations apparently between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, a married woman with whom he appeared to be having an affair. Although the tapes were subsequently published verbatim around the world, most British newspapers held back, fearful of bringing down the wrath of the government.
Davis said that the Sun, which did not print the full transcript, is "very, very wary in the present climate of the possibility that we might just be the patsy in all this, that somebody might be setting us up. They might be handing us a piece of rope so that we can finally hang ourselves."
This skittishness, suggested Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, was reminiscent of the 1930s, when the British press avoided printing news of the impending abdication of the king.
"We now live in a two-class society as far as information is concerned," he told a television interviewer. "The posh folk know. The plain folk will not be allowed to read it."
The Labor Party's Clwyd told the House of Commons that the Calcutt report "has to be considered against a background of establishment intrigue involving the royal family and their advisers, government ministers, press barons and Lord McGregor, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, who have all made fools of themselves and each other."
To Americans, it might seem inconceivable that a modern European democracy would frame legislation on such a fundamental issue as press freedom according to how newspapers report on what seems from afar to be largely a tourist attraction, but the British take their monarchy extremely seriously.
The queen is the head of state, and she is treated almost as a deity. The state opening of Parliament ? in which the queen is transported, amid great pomp, in an ancient royal coach ? is covered by the BBC without a whisper of irony, and there was genuine indignation last year when Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating touched the queen while she was visiting Australia. The tabloids report on the daily doings of a wide range of royals, and serious newspapers print a Court Circular that could easily have been written by P.G. Wodehouse. A recent sample from the Independent:
"The Princess Royal, Master, the Worshipful Company of Loriners, this evening attended the Installation of the New Master, Guildhall, London EC2, and was received by the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor of London (Sir Francis McWilliams).
"Miss Victoria Legg-Bourke was in attendance."
Eric Barendt, professor of media law at the University of London, believes that the reaction to the recent royal press coverage has obscured what should be a genuine debate about press invasion of privacy. He also regrets that the legislation being prepared is not expected to contain an American-style distinction between public figures and private citizens.
A privacy law, he argues, should protect "the little man who is caught up in some national story, whose past is put all over the scandal sheets and is of no public interest at all. He ought to be able to get damages."
Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun, alluded to the lack of a public-figure provision in British legal thinking in an appearance before a parliamentary committee. He noted that Lindi St Clair, a.k.a. Miss Whiplash, a well-known prostitute, had claimed that more than 200 MPs had been among her clients.
"If you had the U.S. privacy laws," MacKenzie said, "we could publish the name of every single MP named in the Lindi St Clair file, every single one of their alleged sexual peccadilloes, and you couldn't claim one single penny."
Barendt believes that any benefit from privacy legislation would also be limited by its expected lack of a provision for legal aid. This would effectively rule out protection for all but those who could afford to embark on what often prove to be expensive lawsuits.
British lawyers do not normally work on contingency, and libel litigants face the prospect of having to pay the legal expenses of their opponents. Such costs can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The current debate on press regulation, Barendt said, exposes "a real conflict" in British life. "There is the liberal tradition which would regard any significant erosion of press and media freedom as a very significant restriction on all our freedoms, and I think there is quite a body of support not just in the media but also in Parliament which would be very, very reluctant to introduce new laws. On the other hand, there has been widespread revulsion at some of the tactics used by the tabloid press in gathering information."
More pressure on the press came in the form of a vote by the House of Commons on Jan. 29 in favor of a bill that would establish an independent press authority with the power to require newspapers to print corrections of inaccurate reports.
"The underlying agenda of my bill," said Labor Party MP Clive Soley, its sponsor, "is designed to raise standards in journalism. The problem is not that there aren't sufficient laws surrounding journalists. The problem is that the standards and the ethical code of some editors and some journalists is too low."
The government is opposed to Soley's bill.
The tension between the press and the government raises questions about the government's relationship with the tabloids, which ? except for the Labor Party-oriented Daily Mirror and its sister tabloids ? have supported the ruling Conservative Party over the years.
One of the first victims of the recent skirmishing was David Mellor, the government minister who had warned the tabloids in 1989 that they were "drinking in the Last Chance Saloon."
Mellor resigned as national heritage secretary last year after heavy coverage of his private life that began with an expos? of an affair he had been having with an actress. It was the apparent use of electronic surveillance equipment in the initial Mellor coverage that enraged senior politicians.
A more recent victim was Norman Lamont, who, as chancellor of the exchequer, is responsible for running Britain's economy. The Sun reported, accurately, that Lamont had exceeded his credit card limit 22 times. The coverage turned him briefly into a national figure of fun. Lamont himself gave a possible hint of the government's inner thoughts about the propriety of such high jinks when he subsequently referred to the tabloids as "overmighty subjects" and compared them with powerful labor unions of the 1970s.
Despite its support of the Tories and its constant denigration of the Labor Party, the Sun presents itself as the champion of the little guy, implacably hostile to "the establishment" and always willing to tweak the noses of the rich and powerful.
In his appearance before the parliamentary committee, MacKenzie argued that any attempt to bar publication of the Camillagate tapes would reflect an attitude that "the whole world can know what's going on, but not you poor little people in the U.K., not you people who actually pay their taxes, who support their castles."
Recently, Lord Gilmour, who served in the cabinet of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, accused her of having undermined British television while boosting the pro-Tory tabloids.
The result was "to vandalize the best television in the world, and pander to the worst newspapers in the world, which performed the seemingly impossible feat of achieving even lower standards than before."
Gilmour, the former editor of The Spectator, a right-of-center political and arts magazine, supports Calcutt's main recommendations, including the establishment of a press tribunal.
To Barendt, the wide circulation of the tabloids says something unflattering about the British.
"I think we are a nation of hypocrites," he said. "We buy all these rubbishy papers and then say that there should be curbs on them."