A Ten-point London Guide to journalism's chances of survival

by William Horsley

London the soon-to-be Olympic capital can also claim to be the world capital of jaw-jaw about the future of journalism. Especially about the survival chances of something called "good" or "high-quality" or "investigative" journalism. What lies ahead for this endangered species: a slow death? a rapid death? a glorious future? or re-incarnation in new forms on the net? Opinions are sharply divided but everyone has a point of view.

Intelligence Squared staged an debate on the Future of News in central London on 24th March. It was discursive, since no formal motion had been proposed. But a strong cast of speakers all spoke their minds. Simon Jenkins, in the chair, suggested the key issue was whether the "economics of free" associated with the shift of the news media onto the internet was "killing serious journalism". A good starting-point.

I found ten points in the ensuing discussion that shed light on the prospects for the future of news and journalism on the internet:-

1) Andrew Neil: the UK has the most competitive and vibrant press in the world, and millions of Britons are still prepared to pay to hold hard copies of their chosen title in their hands. Consumers would be willing to pay to read stories in online editions of The Times and the Sunday Times, just as millions already do for the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. The end of the world of journalism is not nigh.

2) A.A. Gill: The Internet is an "e-box of nothing". The economics of free was not and could not be serious journalism. And without investigative journalism parliamentary democracy could not work.

3) David Elstein: a big confusion in the journalism debate lies in the mixup in too many people's minds between information and journalism. Press owners and editors made a great mistake by handing over their content to the "aggregators" like google which have earned fabulous riches by selling access to journalism done by others. Nick Davies' "Flat Earth News" analysis had made people aware of a general decline in journalistic standards under the combined pressures of lack of time and resources. Yet the Daily Telegraph's extended exposure of the MPs expenses scandal proved that the quality of serious journalism was "undiminished."

4) Matthew Parris: News values will survive the means of transmission. The "chaff", whether on the Internet or in print, would be blown away. News hierarchies that are good would win trust and survive, just as in the past. Sooner or later, those bloggers and solo artists who win a serious following on the web would pool their expertise, find an editor, and form something very like the successful model that we all know -- the newspaper, news agency or magazine.

5) Claire Enders, a leading analyst of the media industry, warned about the real hollowing out of journalism that's under way. The collective expertise of successful news organisations costs a great deal of time and money, and those resources are getting think on the ground. The logic was that "the big will get bigger", but their numbers may be very few.. Meanwhile, new "blog experts" were successfully weaning sizeable followings away from journalists working in the conventional media. Tom Ricks in the US, a writer and reporter with a blog on ForeignPolicy.com, was one such example. But he's an established name and Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist already. Anyway, will Britain necessarily go the way of America? It's a moot point.

- Representatives of new web-based news businesses, who live from the internet, believe of course in the wisdom of crowds. They also pay full respect to the textbook values of journalism; they emphasise the need for accuracy and added value, not just unsifted information, but they see a very different future. The key difference is that they want citizens themselves to choose the stories and believe that force is changing the whole news media landscape.

6) "The free model works", said Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate and other US websites. Examples include the participatioin of large numbers of people as bloggers, Twitter or other social network

sites in China, Iran and Italy. The logic of this deserves closer examination: he said a hundred staff and freelances were involved in producing Slate internet magazine "and we pay them". So, how "free?"

7) Turi Munthe of Demotix, a citizen-journalism website and photo agency, made a case that countless bloggers and internet entrepreneurs were now cracking important stories, so breaking into what used to be the exclusive domain of the mainstream news outfits: bloggers in Egypt successfully exposing police brutality; WikiLeaks breaking stories through anonymous leaks. But Munthe acknowledged that "it's hard for citizens to learn journalistic skills", and the wholesale closure of foreign bureaus by traditional media titles was a bad omen for foreign coverage. Will that gap ever be filled by new-style websites like Demotix which boasts "over 12,000 contributors in over 170 countries?" That's a very big ask. Watch this space.

8) Members of the audience put other very uncomfortable points to the barons and columnista of British journalism lined up in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster: the "guild system" of journalism was a barrier to inquiry, inhibiting the mainstream media from speaking truth to power. The craft (or profession) of journalism might be doomed because many of the young generation no longer know what "real" news is or even what they may be missing if they never see it. They just expect to get it free. One member of the speakers' panel mentioned the large number of what he called "asinine" comments that appear in response to online articles and blogs, by contrast with the Letters page of the nationals. Basic editing, really...

9) Matthew Parris said people should realise that journalists in Britain were fortunate. In large parts of the world journalists face constant danger from physical or legal attacks, or in all too many cases even murder, because of their work. No live and free journalists means no journalism.

10) Andrew Neil closed the debate with a bold definition of journalism -- "to publish things that powerful people don't want to hear." But he gave this significant compliment to the bloggers: that their barbs, comments and sometimes corrections help to keep the journalists honest.

Please send any comments on this blog to william@cfom.org.uk

Reporting barriers in East and West -- subtle, obvious, sometimes fatal. How media freedom shapes politics everywhere

by William Horsley, International Director, CFOM

Spending ten days in East Asia prompts me to these thoughts about the variety of methods that governments and other powerful forces employ to stop journalists from reporting things they are determined to suppress. It's the same the whole world over.

The irony is that reliable information about violence, harassment and legal or practical barriers to reporting is plentiful and well-known. Yet inquiring journalism remains dangerous or difficult, in varying degrees, almost everywhere, in the east and west alike. CFOM was set up a year ago at the University of Sheffield with the aim of contributing to better understanding of the destructive effect of these abuses, and to work with others, including governments wherever possible, to remedy them -- through better laws, restraints on misuses of state power, proper administration of justice, and support for independent journalism.

Souheast Asia: Last December's massacre of 31 media workers, among the 57 people killed in Maguindanao province in the southern Philippines, is the most brutal method of suppression of all. The International News Safety Institute calls it the highest death toll of journalists in any single incident in recorded history.

Gunmen adbucted and apparently killed everyone in a large party of people travelling through Maguindanao, including a woman filing her husband's nomination to run for provincial governor of the area in forthcoming elections. The carnage pushed up the total number of targeted killings of journalists in 2009 to 132 in 35 countries, making last year one of the worst on record, INSI said.

Why then has the international community not agreed and implemented ways of investigating such atrocities quickly and thoroughly, and bringing the perpetrators to justice? Why especially in view of the UN Security Council's Resolution 1738, passed unanimously in 2006? That text calls on all states to protect media professionals in armed conflicts and to prosecute those responsible for serious violations of international law. It is not formally binding, but it is a political commitment by which every country has agreed to be measured. A matter of justice and honour. A pledge honoured, too often, in the breach but not in the observance.

By all accounts the investigations into the Philippines massacre were neither as prompt, well-resourced or well coordinated as they should have been to be effective. An experienced British professional, Chris Cobb-Smith, who took part in one of several parallel invesigations on the ground after the massacre, told an audience at the Frontline Club in London in January that the lack of clarity or of any coordinating authority resulted in confusion, and severely limited the usefulness of the efforts of national and international bodies.

The Philippines has one of the bloodiest records of any country in the world for the murder of media workers in recent times.

South Asia: As I write, the evidence is piling up by the day of intolerable pressures and alleged abuses of authority against journalists in Sri Lanka. The Committee to Protect Journalists says journalists there have been subjected to government intimidation, arrests, censorship, and harassment in the aftermath of the recent presidential election.

"We are receiving reports of government retribution against journalists who sided with the opposition in the election", the CPJ says in a statement. It cites reports of government retribution against journalists who sided with the opposition in the election.

The Commonwealth heads of government's annual summit meeting, held in Trinidad and Tobago last November, was an opportunity for an open and constructive debate on some of the chronic abuses of human rights, good governance and freedom of expression that mar the societies of many Commonwealth states. Instead, the closing statement trod a safe and un-self-critical path. It focused on climate change, terrorism and Zimbabwe.

Europe: And the hard truth is that Europe can no longer claim to be a haven from large-scale or violent assaults on journalists and on the media as watchdogs on those who wield state power.

On 27 January the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) passed a Recommendation http://assembly.coe.int/Mainf.asp?link=/Documents/AdoptedText/ta10/EREC1897.htm

which it sent to the governments of the 47 member states, condemning the murder of at least 20 journalists in the European region since 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in an apparent contract killing in Moscow.

The elected parliamentary representatives from across Europe called on governments, in effect, to stop evading their responsibilities, and to end the climate of impunity for those responsible for killing or attacking journalists -- not only in Russia where at least thirteen journalists have died in what are suspected to be targeted attacks, but wherever evidence points to weak or inadequate criminal and judicial investigations.

The PACE also asked the Council of Europe's new Secretary-General, Thorbjorn Jagland, to set up a continuous monitoring system, to mark the cards of all member states with regard to serious violations of media freedom of all kinds, and step up pressure on them to live up to their pledges. The monitoring is to cover more than 20 specific aspects of media freedom and media-government interaction --including suspected cases of judicial impunity, the need to abolish criminal libel, and national reviews of national anti-terrorism laws to challenge measures that contradict Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

China: Here in East Asia the repurcussions of Google's dispute with the Chinese authorities, over their attempt to entrench their own state-imposed limits on the population's access to Internet information, has assumed the dimensions of a major clash of civilisations in much international media coverage. I for one don't doubt that the path that China takes in the coming years with regard to freedom of information and public debate will be crucial to the issue of whether or not its wider political development goes towards accountability and openness, or the reverse.

Japan: Meanwhile the Japanese have sprung a surprise. A new government, which last year won a landslide election victory and so ended the half-century of unbroken rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has promised a shakeup of entrenched political power structures (especially the pervasive power of the unelected civil servants, heirs to the Tokugawa tradition of mandarin rule with an iron hand).

As part of the shake-up, it has announced it is also pulling down (at least part of) the pervasive Japanese system of exclusive reporters' clubs ("kisha clubs") which have delivered something close to a monopoly on real-time government-related news to the privileged, mainly national, media ever since the end of World War Two. Smaller fry, freelances and foreigners have thereby often been denied access not only to press conferences but also to key sources of information.

The proposed reforms of the government's information and media policy may or may not turn out to be real. But in my view -- and I reported from Japan for many years myself -- the influence of the kisha club system on the evolution of Japan's unique (and in many ways baffling) political culture has been enormous. So much so that I venture to say that the privileged mainstream Japanese media, beneficiaries of the kisha club system and working closely with the political establishment for all these years, can be said to have played a real part in the maintenance of the one-party, LDP-dominated, system for so long.

The proposition is worth further examination. For now I just quote a highly independent Journalist, Tetsuo Jimbo, the founder of one of Japan's first online news broadcasting companies. He told the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan recently: "The kisha club system has spoiled the Japanese media, as it means they don't go out and do investigaive journalism."

In each of the cases I've touched on in this eclectic east-west tour, the degree of vigour and independence of those who investigate, report and analyse public affairs -- journalists, editors, scholars, think-tankers and the rest -- is closely linked to the the freedom and independence of the politicians and policy-makers -- in other words, the governments themselves.

Britain: It's time to wrap up this blogspot. But not without a mention of the lively debate about news media as a central element in civil society in the UK. I look forward to the final report of the Carnegie Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, which is due out in March 2010.

As a taster, one of the commissioners, Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman, spoke cogently at a big-tent media event, the Oxford Media Convention, on 22 January. Her theme: the vital link between independent and inquiring local reporting ... and the future of democracy.

I wrote about Joyce's insights, and those of other Convention speakers, on the website of the BBC's College of Journalism. (I's accessible only to those using a .uk domain I fear

http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/2010/01/hearing-the-sos-for-watchdog-j.shtml

How great headlines mislead

How great headlines mislead - William Horsley's CFOM blog, January 11 2010

This nice example comes from Prof Robert Watson, one of the UK's top authorities on climate change and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On December 29 last year, following the shambles of the Copenhagen mega-summit, the Wall Street Journal carried an article which Watson co-wrote with another authority on (and firm believer in) climate change, Mohamed El-Ashry.

The point of the piece was to support the "orthodox" scientists' position that carbon dioxide is the main culprit causing long-term and inexorable climate change, but also to get across a second important message -- that in the short term we should be focusing more on cutting the "other greenhouse gas": methane.

Watson and El-Ashry explained that cutting emissions of methane can make an immediate impact to "buffer" or slow down climate change. And compared to taking action on CO2, cutting methane "requires only modest investment".

The article was printed on the Journal's op ed page all right. But Prof Watson was dismayed to see the sub-heading above the piece. It said "Forget about carbon. If we want to buffer global warming, cutting methane is the key". Forget about carbon? No way was that what the authors meant.

Watson was talking to a meeting of the Association of European Journalists in London on January 4, the first working day of the year for many of us.

The 25 journalists there were quite typical of the general public in Britain -- only half-persuaded about the scientific orthodoxy that climate change is due mostly to rising levels of CO2 and is mostly man-made, but well aware of the gaps in our own understanding of the science.

Robert Watson is a brilliantly clear and expert speaker, the most articulate scientist many of us have ever heard talking about policy issues.

He frankly acknowledges that scientists "are not winning the battle for public opinion" about the real threat of climate change.

But he was (I thought, as a non-specialist) pretty convincing on the central arguments -- those deeply annoying points about the need for carbon capture, emissions trading and climate change being man-made.

He also seems to be onto something important when he says that methane is responsible for 75% as much warming as carbon dioxode, and while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years (so reversing global temperature increases by cutting carbon emissions is bound to take many decades, at least), methane "lasts only a decade but packs a powerful punch while it's there".

For the journalists Prof Watson had a special message: "The role of the media [in informing the public about climate change and other seminal scientific issues] is unbelievably central".

Which I translate as meaning "get your facts straight and dump your misleading headlines!".

He was too polite to put it so directly. But he does accuse the media of distorting the way the facts are presented to the public at large.

The media, by their nature, love controversy. So the climate change debate, Watson says, is often presented as a roughly balanced contest between two opposing sides. Whereas in fact, he says "95% of scientists now believe in climate change".

But, he complains, newspapers like to run stories that say things like "2,500 scientists say one thing -- but one scientist at MIT (or wherever) disagrees!". Indeed they do run stories, and headlines,like that.

A couple of days after Watson's appearance at the AEJ I spotted the issue of apparently overhyped media coverage being examined somewhere else -- in Vanity Fair's January edition.

VF nowadays regularly does more investigative and original journalism than most of the conventional news magazines.

Their science feature on the Large Hadron Collider was the first piece I have seen anywhere (OK, I don't subscribe to any specialist science publication) that explained in graphic detail the metal-crunching accident that occurred some 100 metres underground in September 2008, when the collider broke down just before the proton beams were due to be shot round the whole circuit to start the experiment in multiple proton stream collisions.

In the article Kurt Anderson took aim at the way much of the media made headlines out of the scientists' talk about the possibility of the L.H.C producing weird and wonderful things like extra dimensions and black holes.

The kind of black holes that scientists are excited about perhaps finding at CERN are "harmless ones, microscopic and incredibly short-lived", Anderson says. Yet alarmists who hyped the danger of the L.H.C destroying the earth had a much bigger platform thanks to the internet and cable news channels, and mainstream media, he writes, "consistently took the apocalypse possibility seriously."

OK, but those headlines -- "forget carbon" and "maybe our scientists are about to destgroy our planet" probably ensured that a heck of a lot more peope read about those complex "scientific" topics -- didn't they?

So is Professor Watson right about the media muddying vital messages about science? And does it matter?

Well, perhaps it's a coincidence, but the BBC Trust has just ordered a review of science coverage on the BBC -- reportedly the world's largest news organisation -- after complaints from the British public that it doesn't give enough weight to climate change sceptics.

In praise of serious journalism

In Praise of serious journalism William Horsley's CFOM blog: September 4 2009


Amidst the talk of journalism's decline, bankruptcy and loss of purpose, I sense a fightback. Journalism is rediscovering the serious role it must play in an open society. On the really big issues -- war, the facts of history, and the biggest economic crash in living memory -- journalists, it turns out, are necessary. Essential, in fact.

And all this at the height of the midsummer "silly season".

It is precisely the loss of public trust in elected politicians and the media, in Britain and other countries, which has thrown into relief the vital role of inquiring, fact-based journalism. I read the events of high summer as a time when the value of serious journalism won new recognition because recent events have shown the urgent need for it.

* In August, at a stormy public meeting in the Society of Friends meeting house in London organised by Action for UN Renewal and others, participants spoke with fury about deceptions used by the British governments to justify the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Special venom was reserved for the "metropolitan media" in London, which was accused of parotting official falsehoods about the evidence for Iraq's possession of WMD. Robert Fox of The Evening Standard accused his own tribe of allowing Tony Blair's chief spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, to dominate the "information space".

Very true. Yet a maverick journalist working for the BBC, Andrew Gilligan, did puncture the government's carefully constructed "Iraq story" in a live radio broadcast. He paid for it with his job, as did the BBC's chairman and director-general. Was most of the BBC's coverage of the occupation too unquestioning? Or that of UK newspapers? It didn't seem like that. The new Chilcot inquiry into the war will again test the media's ability to get at the facts of the judgements and mistakes of all sides.

* Then, on 1 September, it was the key facts about the outbreak of the Second World War that became the stuff of headlines, when the political leaders of Poland and Russia each used the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland at the start of the war to make rival points.

Poland's President Lech Kaczynski tried, as he saw it, to set the muddied historical record straight. At the gathering of world leaders in Gdansk he described the Soviet Red Army's occupation of eastern Poland later in September 1939 as a "knife in the back of Poland". He used the accusing words that "we are here to remember who in that war was the aggressor and who was the victim, for without an honest memory neither Europe, nor Poland, nor the world will ever live in security."

Vladimir Putin, now Russia's prime minister, took what was seen as a rather moderate line, denouncing the Nazi-Soviet Pact which paved the way for the double invasion of Poland, and declaring that "huge numbers of mistakes were made by all sides." It was a positive step that the Russian leader attended the ceremony in Gdansk. Poland's foreign minister Radek Sikorski praised his courage in doing so.

But from Russian officials, historians and media in Moscow has come a fresh campaign of falsification and misinformation about the circumstances at the outbreak of war, which seems to raise a grave danger that today's Russians may accept a one-sided and partly false record of those hugely important events. The thrust of the campaign, on TV, in print and in briefings given to journalists, is that the Poles were Hitler's "first ally", or even secretly plotted some kind of combined invasion with Germany of Stalin's Soviet Union, so they somehow brought their subsequent national tragedy upon themselves.

President Kaczynski faced some criticism at home for the stridency of his remarks. But in Russia, as the Council of Europe and the OSCE have documented in detail, journalists face growing pressures and even coercion if they challenge official orthodoxies. Killings of independent journalists and human rights defenders mean that Russia has become one of the most dangerous places in the world for champions of free speech.

Critics of the Russian authorities now say that the powerful state-dominated media in Russia are again being instrumentalised to spread biased and distorted accounts of the war and the Soviet subjugation of eastern Europe that followed. In the light of the selective treatment of the historical record it is no surprise to find that in a Levada opinion poll in July of this year, 61 percent of Russians did not even know that Soviet troops invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Serious distortions of big historical events harm the chances of good relations between countries today, especially if cover-ups are enforced by state power.

There are present dangers too. After the killing in Chechnya in July of Natalia Estemirova, to stop her doing her vitally important work documenting human rights abuses there, her organisation Memorial said it was being forced to close its operation in Chechnya. Facts must be respected; and journalists as well as historians must defend them.

* The big story affecting most people now and over the past year is the financial crisis and economic downturn. It's another theme that excites heady emotions.

The BBC's Business Editor, Robert Peston, presented his own powerful testament on why inquiring journalism matters in a lecture on 29 August at the Edinburgh Television Festival entitled "What future for media and journalism?".

His starting-point was that the traditional model of news provision is being wrecked and needs to be overhauled.

And in a riposte to James Murdoch's pugnacious claim that the only reliable guarantor of independence in journalism is "profit", Robert Peston set out his grounds for saying that society needs a choice of high-quality news providers, and that a raw commercial model could not meet that important need.

He acknowledged that parts of the media had acted as cheer leaders for the orgy of profits and debts run up by licentious money-men. The media had at best been "myopic while the authorities were blind". But he identified the core issue raised by the whole saga as the ability -- or inability -- of the media to challenge orthodoxy -- to ask the big and hard questions.

Robert Peston invoked Walter Bagehot, the 19th century British constitutionalist and lucid writer on economics, who defined democracy as government by discussion. "You can't," he concluded "have a good chinwag without the facts."

No good discussion without the facts. It sounds like a sound basis for re-building and advancing the reputation of journalism in Britain, after the obvious lapses in the reporting of issues surrounding the Iraq invasion, as well as the fantastic deceptions woven by some of those bankers.

It is encouraging, after so much doom and gloom about the media, to hear journalists themselves, and others, insisting on the need for the media to challenge authority as their right and their duty.

That's the difference between a society with open and plural media, and one where criticism or even simple questioning of those in high authority can easily bring negative and direct consequences.

The summer's "silly season" is over and a new political season has begun. Despite their imperfections, the UK media go on day after day probing current issues -- like the layers of truth behind the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and plans to reform parliament and the financial system after a year of ripping scandals.

We badly need serious journalism. That means journalism that gets at the facts -- especially when they are unwelcome to those who wield power and would like to airbrush them out.

The "very British revolution" is a big one for the media

by William Horsley, International Director of CFOM

The Daily Telegraph's multiple scoop about British MPs expenses claims may not quite have the political explosive power of the Watergate or the Pentagon Papers stories. But it has led to what's been nicely dubbed a very British revolution, which may or may not end up changing the basic machinery of British political life. That's not bad as scoops go.

Will Lewis, the Telegraph's editor must take the lion's share of the credit. It could have blown up in his face. The risk was apparently judged too big for a couple of other newspapers which turned down the offer of the story of the year. Heather Brooke, an American investigative journalist, gets top prize for getting the story revved up and ready to break by relentless use of the Freedom of Information Act.

But the episode shows the British media as a whole in remarkably robust health and spirits, despite recent laments about threats to the survival of the mainstream media from economic pressures, the spin doctors' toxic medicines and the loss of public trust.

Consider these pugnacious comments by leading BBC presenters: I can't see or hear them being uttered by their counterparts in many (any?) other countries as part of a public debate on programmes of a national broadcaster -- that is, TV and radio channels paid for by public funds.

Evan Davis to a government minister at ten past eight on the popular BBC Radio 4 Today Programme one morning last week. The minister tried to argue that the present government would be competent to see through an adequate reform of the expenses system for British MPs. Davis: "But you don't have the moral authority, do you? You're all responsible for a complete screw-up!"

The language may be unparliamentary, but it's definitely Anglo-Saxon.

And here's Gavin Esler, known as a fair but incisive presenter of "Newsnight" on BBC 2 TV. Note that the date was April 14 this year, and the issue was the disclosure -- via the political blogger who styles himself Guido Fawkes -- of the action of Gordon Brown's special adviser, Damian McBride, in sending out e-mails slandering opposition politicians in preparation for a concerted online smear campaign based apparently on gossip and inneundo.

A senior government minister, seeking to defend Gordon Brown's decisive action in sacking Mr McBride at once, argued on live TV that the Prime Minister knew nothing of what his adviser was up to.

Esler: "They say that a fish rots from the head. People sitting at home want to know the truth about a prime minister whom we haven't had the opportunity to elect, and if it's true that he has a "dark side" - isn't he responsible?"

What does the encounter say? And the language used? Everyone can make up their own mind. To me, it is further evidence of a de facto rule, a fact of life about the British -- call it a "Britishness test".

That rule says that, presented with an argument between a TV interviewer and a politician, and provided that the interviewer is demanding more forthright information or an apology while the politician is seeking to evade the issue, the majority of British people will back the journalist. They will say that politicians and public figures must answer the question.

Obvious, you may say. But actually quite rare.

Consider the case of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, convicted more than once on corruption-related charges in lower courts but each time (so far) able to escape the consequences, thanks to the statute of limitations or changes in the law enacted by a government headed by... Silvio Berlusconi.

Right now Mr Berlusconi faces a challenge from a critical newspaper, La Repubblica, which has started a "ten questions campaign". The paper has published ten questions directed at the prime minister about his relationship with an 18-year old model on whom he lavished an expensive gift on the occasion of her birthday party. Soon afterwards Mr Belusconi's wife Veronica demanded a divorce.

The ten questions include this: "Is it true that you promised Noemi you would help her career in show business or in politics?"

Italy's prime minister, far from submitting to any probing or critical interviews on television, has furiously attacked the newspaper. He has gone a long way towards branding the Italian press as an enemy, just as he had earlier declared "war" on judges, accusing them of a vendetta against him and calling them a "scourge".

Latest word is that Mr Berlusconi's soaring popularity with voters has taken a bit of a knock. But on past form he has reason to believe that he can brazen it out, counting on sympathetic coverage on the television channels he owns or controls, as well as the loyalty of the members of parliament whom he leads, to turn the tide of public opinion.

Or take the case of Hungary. Three years ago the then prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcany, was the improbable survivor of a political storm after a recording was leaked of a speech he had made to supporters in which he admitted gross economic mismanagement, saying (according to his own website) "No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have", and adding "we lied morning, noon and night".

How long did it take for that story to come to light so that Hungarian voters could read about it in their newspapers? Five months. The speech was made in May, and its contents were at last revealed in October of 2006.

Or take another extraordinary case from Germany, a country where many journalists have cosy links with senior politicians, and almost all senior figures in the powerful public broadcasting system depend on support from one or other of the main political parties to secure their jobs as editors or reporters. In November 1999 the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was forced to admit that over a period of several years he had operated a system of secret and unlawful bank accounts for party funding purposes for his favourites within the conservative CDU party. Unproved allegations linked the secret accounts with alleged under-the-counter payments related to large industrial or military contracts.

All those years and none of those well-placed journalists knew enough to blow the whistle? At the very least it was a miserable defeat for the media as a force for disclosing fishy politics. Helmut Kohl was investigated. He refused as a matter of "personal honour" to divulge the number or amounts of cash in the slush fund accounts. The case was soon dropped on the grounds that it would not be in the "public interest" to take it further. Mr Kohl's reputation was irreparably damaged, but the secrets have stayed with him.

The lesson I take from this catalogue of stonewalls and cover-ups is that disgraceful collusion between journalists and politicians is commonplace. Exposure of very high level abuses of power through determined media investigation is the exception not the rule. "National security" was cited by the Blair government in the UK when a Serious Fraud Office investigation into alleged bribery in connexion with a huge BAE Systems arms deal with Saudi Arabia was dropped in 2006.

In Britain the political journalists belonging to the exclusive and privileged club of "lobby correspondents" at Westminster has been exposed to sharp criticism and some ridicule for not digging out at least some of the dirt about MPs expenses long ago, despite the great stink the story has created now that it has been exposed.

There are those, too, who think the Telegraph and the rest of the media have got above themselves, that they are behaving like hypocrites, and that the natural order will re-assert itself in time. The order of secrecy about high politics, that is.

Perhaps. But this season of Saturnalia in British public life will never be forgotten. And for now at least elected politicians have learned, in the words of the London Times, to understand that they are meant to be "the servants of the people", not the other way round.

As was demonstrated by the case of Conservative MP Anthony Steen, who attacked the media after it emerged that he had claimed some £87,000 over a period of years to cover the cost of maintaining his "very, very large house" in Devon, including the cost of inspecting hundreds of trees on his property. "What right does the public have to interfere in my private life? None", he said in a BBC interview.

The British public seems to have decided, resoundingly, that they do have a right to know about such things when they are being paid for from public money.

Mr Steen has shown, incidentally, that in his case, too, the "Britishness" test works.

Who will save the world's media?

William Horsley, CFOM International Director, 3 April 2009

The spectre of a global economic crash may have motivated world leaders at the G20 summit in London to seek new rules to replace a postwar system that failed. What about the great information system built by the world's traditional news media? That too enjoyed its long heyday in the same period, but now face what looks increasingly like self-destruction, brought on by the Internet revolution, the collapse of demand from the global public, and the credit crunch.

Who will save the media -- or is it already too late? The Open Society Institute has published a massive and alarming report -- "Television across Europe: more channels, less independence". It chronicles the retreat of freedom of thought and impartiality of information in post Cold War Europe, and most of all it blames governments for seeking to manipulate the most potent medium of all: broadcasting.

So should the world's elected leaders really be concerned to shore up democracy's defences by reviving the health of television as a guardian of freedom of expression? That is what Jean Seaton, in her foreword to the OSI Report, says they need to do. This eye-opening study should be on the desk of every politician and international agency concerned about Europe's future, she says.

The OSI examines just nine countries, from Poland to Italy. But the now-familiar patterns of political interference and control, rank populism and declining revenues have betrayed the hopes of people on both sides of the Berlin Wall when it fell, that a new era of free choice and accountable politics, kept clean by inquiring and dynamic media, was about to begin.

The Soros-funded report says the crisis of public broadcast funding across Central and Eastern Europe may also be prophetic for Western Europe. Indeed, with French broadcasters scarred by their dispute with the government over what they allege is a political power grab, that shadow is already darkening the landscape all the way from the Atlantic to Moscow and beyond.

Europe's representative journalist organisations are also sounding the alarm, The European Federation of Journalists, with over 260,000 members, has written to the Commission President and the heads of the political parties in the European Parliament with an unprecedented warning that media markets are "collapsing", with a dramatic and negatiive impact on the democratic life of Europe.

The EFJ asserts that private and public media are also at acute risk in the UK, Germany and the Nordic countries. It calls on the political leaders, as well as civil society organisations and the media themselves, to engage in an urgent debate in order to revive commitments to public service values in media and to ethical journalism.

It seems to be asking a hell of a lot for governments to come to the aid of the big creatures of the media jungle, especially now when they are hardly any more beloved by ordinary people than investment bankers.

It has indeed become commonplace for government leaders to treat the press openly as an enemy. The Slovak prime minister Robert Fico openly insulted journalists as "hyenas". Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged his supporters to boycott newspapers that write critically about him. And less than two years ago Tony Blair, before leaving office in the UK, famously attacked the media as "feral beasts".

But Europe's politicians should curb any instincts they may have to gloat or to join in the weakening of their troublesome and inquisitive media. Serious surveys such as those by the OSI, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and the Association of European Journalists all provide evidence that the fourth estate is at risk of losing the ability to hold the powerful to account.

Instead elected politicians could do as they have been asked by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, and start treating the condition of their media as a key indicator of the health of each nation's democracy. Its proposal is that every parliament in Europe should conduct a regular independent audit of the media, supporting media professionalism and diversity and the independence of public broadcasting.

CFOM came into being this year, bringing together senior journalists and editors with leading media researchers at the University of Sheffield, because we recognised the urgent need for all countries to comprehend the dangers that this haemorraging of mainstream news media presents for the values of open societies and for the post Cold War system of rules-based international relations.

The OSI Report and the EFJ's warning point to the same sources of danger. One is the dramatic attrition of established media of all kinds caused by the economic downturn and the flight of advertising to the Internet. The other is a pervasive climate of neglect and seeming indifference regarding media freedom and independence which has been described as a "meltdown of OSCE commitments".

That phrase was coined by Miklos Haraszti, the respected Representative on Freedom of the Media of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

At CFOM's founding conference at Chatham House in London on February 3 Miklos Haraszti publicly called for public figures and journalists everywhere to show their commitment to the OSCE values of real democracy and freedom of expression, by speaking out against harsh political pressures and the murders of journalists and human rights campaigners in Russia and elsewhere.

His demand was backed up by Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, who described as "shameful" the silence of many leading European politicians over the cold-blooded killing of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.

Jens Reich, a co-leader of the New Forum pro-democracy movement in the former communist East Germany, expressed dismay at the "state of terror" in which other journalists in Russia have also faced intimidation, violence or death when they have challenged powerful interests.

He reminded the audience of diplomats, public figures and journalists that the fall of totalitarian communism in 1989 was made possible by the people's determination then not to accept political propaganda in place of truth.

Today two things are evident: first, that the explosion of free information on the Internet has not so far led to a better system of holding political leaders to account. Freedom of information laws and the blogosphere have breached some old taboos about privilege and secrecy, but in many countries a new threat has grownup -- what Julian Petley aptly calls the "fusion of political and media power".

Secondly, the high-minded international mechanisms that were supposed to guarantee media freedoms and human rights across the whole of Europe have fallen into disrepair or even, unfortunately, into disrespect. They are principally the OSCE, which grew out of the Helsinki accords concerning European security and human rights in the 1970s; and the Council of Europe, whose European Convention on Human Rights was first signed sixty years ago this May.

So yes, it is high time for Europe's leading media and its top political leaders -- including those meeting in London's ExCeL Centre in April -- to concern themselves with the consequences of the neglect of those high ideals in the two decades since the collapse of communism.

A broad coalition of media professionals and concerned groups is now working to raise awareness about the crisis for media independence in Europe and beyond, and to encourage political authorities to play a constructive part in repairing the damage. Prof Jackie Harrison and I from CFOM took part in a timely conference in London on April 7 examining the growing pressures on Freedom of Expression in the Media. It was organised through the Clemens Nathan Research Centre; more details on that wesbite and this CFOM site soon.

On May 1 I shall be chairing a public debate marking World Press Freedom Day at the Frontline Club in London, sponsored by the UK National Commission for UNESCO and the UK Press Freedom Network. The topic for debate is "Governments at War are winning the Battle of controlling the international Media.

And later this year (date TBA) CFOM will hold an inaugural lecture event at the University of Sheffield, as a follow-up to our launch conference on February 3 which took the theme "Twenty Years after the Fall of the Wall: What Became of Press and Political Freedoms?"

Transcripts of the presentations at the CFOM-Chatham House conference in February can be read on this website.


If you would like to comment on this or other blogposts please send an e-mail to william@cfom.org.uk

MY JOURNEY INTO CFOM

By William Horsley (International Director of CFOM)

I am writing this in London just one day before the birth of CFOM - Britain's first university-based Centre for Freedom of the Media. I await the day with excitement and some nervousness (London is lying under the heaviest snow for 18 years). What I do know is that the current age of uncertainty about political systems, economic storms and the survival of the traditional forms of media call exactly for what CFOM will be doing -- that is, forming research networks and working with others to bring a more well-founded understanding of the role that the media, broadly defined, must play for open societies to work and in letting democracies thrive.

CFOM is doing something quite new -- in the UK at least -- by joining the skills and expertise of a leading research university with the experience and understanding of leading journalists and editors to define and expose ways in which news media freedom is abused, and to examine media standards of independence and truthfulness.

In the past year I have journeyed often between Sheffield and London, and travelled to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, to Vienna and to America, still the world's media superpower, while preparing to work with my CFOM colleagues, including Professor Jackie Harrison and others in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield and Jock Gallagher, a former senior BBC editor with whom I worked in past years planning the annual World Press Freedom Day events in London.

The public launch is taking place on Tuesday February 3rd. We expect about 200 people to attend the birth, which we are marking with a conference at the UK's leading think-tank, Chatham House in London. The theme is "Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: What Happened to Press and Political Freedoms?"

Jens Reich, the former leader of New Forum, the East German pro-democracy movement which helped topple the communist system headed by Erich Honecker, is giving the keynote speech. Remarkably, he says that the electrifying effect of western TV broadcasts which flooded East German homes with pictures of the good life in the West was more effective even than the efforts of the anti-communist opposition in bringing about the Fall of the Wall on November 9th 1989, and with it the collapse of the communist regime in the heartland of the Soviet empire in central and eastern Europe.

CFOM's conference, organised together with Chatham House, will be the first major public event in the UK during this 20th anniversary of the 1989 Year of Revolutions. The dramatic collapse in quick succession of the Soviet-backed communist governments across the then East bloc, from Hungary and Poland to East Germany and finally Romania, is unique in history as a sweeping victory for free expression and free media, as well as free political choice.

Other speakers include the dedicated Representative on Freedom of the Media of the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe), Miklos Haraszti, talking about the "meltdown" of some member states' international commitments to media freedom as a pillar of social freedom and the rule of law. Lionel Barber, the Editor of the Financial Times, is reflecting on new forms of the age-old struggle between media authority and political power -- the "pen and the sword". Leading media and civil society figures from Russia are to share their insights and reflections on our theme.

My belief in our new creation, CFOM, arises from the plain evidence that freedom of the media and free expression are suffering harshly in large parts of the world, in spite of the astonishing opportunities offered to billions of people by the Internet and ever-faster communications. The independent American-based organisation Freedom House, which produces a thorough survey of press freedom around the world each year, has found that it has declined for each of the past six years.

CFOM will add our resources -- the combined skills of a leading British research university and a dedicated group of experienced journalists -- to the work of an extraordinary array of specialised media monitoring and human rights organisation around the world, which already chronicle many aspects of the rising threats to global media freedom and independence. Those include violence against journalists, censorship, political pressures, ownership monopolies, and the drastic decline in the ranks of professional journalists caused by what has been called "the most disruptive transition in the history of the media".

Despite many warnings and the close documentation of that decline in the capacity of the media to inform and hold the powerful to account, in most parts of the world there is still too little understanding of the often crucial role that independent media actually play in setting the political course of nations. Out of that ignorance comes mischief, and the risk of misrule and even conflict. Wars and rival nationalisms distort facts and blot out the paths to mutual understanding, and all too often the media serves as a willing or unwilling tool of official propaganda even in this new century. These are core areas for CFOM's future research and public activities

CFOM, the Sheffield Centre for Freedom of the Media has a bold ambition, to treat the media's role as a proper subject of study for political scientists. Now more than ever before the media, in their countless forms and platforms, must be seen as an integral part of the system of governance for countries, and even of wider structures of international relations.

The double murders in a Moscow street of a young Russian woman journalist Anastasia Baburova and the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov on January 19th drew fresh attention to the risks of death and regular intimidation faced by countless journalists in troubled or illiberal societies.

Yet political and legal means to halt such corrosive abuses are in place and can be made effective when governments and their public opinion are mobilised to recognise the dangers and take action. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg has ruled many times against Russia, and many other governments, in cases where victims or their relatives have taken legal action to protect their rights in the face of government neglect or culpability.

So the contest between state power and the moral force of newspapers or other media does not have to be loaded in favour of one side alone. When national courts are corrupted or media fall under state control to do the bidding of political forces, international laws and rules are on the side of the citizen whose rights have been abused. The media must be true to its own well-aired principles in defence of free speech and the imperative to speak truth to power.

The President of the ECHR, Jean-Paul Costa, in a telling interview to the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta last year, rejected official Russian accusations of bias based on the large number of court rulings against the Russian state. There is nothing anti-Russian, he said, about the verdicts when they protect citizens of a state from abuses by their own government.

CFOM will be holding other public events and debates as part of its goal of building over time a wide community of academics, journalists and editors, and public figures in order to raise awareness and understanding of how crucial thriving and independent media are to the health of every body politic.

The Centre is also setting out to conduct original research investigating key issues such as improving Freedom of Information rules, the sometimes damaging effects of harsh national security-related laws, the impact of new media technologies and consumer behaviour on the editorial independence of public broadcasters and others, and the media's performance in countries where political freedoms are restricted.

We are encouraged by the support we have already received from the Open Society Foundation and the British Foreign Office, who have helped us with the ground-breaking London conference on February 3rd. We ask others to give generously to support our programme and our goals.

CFOM believes that the time is ripe for governments and other international organisations to recognise the fact that in the media-driven world we live in, the freedom of information flows and freedom and independence of the media need to be protected and sustained more actively than before.

The great human rights organisations of the postwar world, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have forged completely new expectations around the world that abuses including torture and imprisonment without due trial will be monitored and countered by collective action.

Now, the widespread assaults on freedom of the media in countries around the world must also be contested with new vigour and determination. CFOM will work with institutions, universities, media and other civil society organisations everywhere to help independent media to build stronger foundations for political and civil freedom.