For anyone concerned with the pursuit of truth, repelled by the raking of muck, or mildly interested in the shaky state of England, Thursday may or may not have been a red-letter day, but was certainly worthy of bold type. Lord Justice Leveson, commissioned in July, 2011, to delve into the conduct of the British media, has finally published his report—or, to give it its full and noble title, “An Inquiry Into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press,” with the indefinite article wisely placed at its head. To read the complete work will not be the work of a moment, or even of a week; it runs to four substantial volumes, and only those who have been weaned on the “Ring” cycle, perhaps, will feel themselves qualified to consume it at a sensible tempo, and in a suitably resilient frame of mind. The reaction in England has leapt ahead to Götterdämmerung; the Prime Minister, who ordered the inquiry, took immediate issue, in Parliament, with one of its conclusions—namely, that Parliament itself should have some say, if not exert direct control, over the regulation of the press. His deputy, Nick Clegg, rose to disagree with his coalition partner; uproar ensued. The arias have only just begun.
For now, the easiest approach to the report is to try the executive summary. At a paltry forty-eight pages, this is best treated, and welcomed, as the exact judicial equivalent of “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Chuck Jones’s Wagnerian homage from 1957, which took less than seven minutes to whip through all four parts of the “Ring” with the aid of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Near the start, Leveson pays tribute to the vital role of the press in a free society, and mentions some of its finest investigative hours, in the poised and sympathetic tone that people tend to adopt shortly before they administer a kicking. He then, without ado, adds that certain newspapers have “caused real hardship and, on occasion, wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people whose rights and liberties have been disdained,” and, from here on, little escapes the highly polished toe of His Lordship’s boot. Members of Parliament, in their snug cohabitations with useful journalists, are censured with a thunderous frown, as are the Metropolitan Police, who have sometimes, in return for cash or other favors, dished up succulent canapés of private information, most frequently when it involved the wrongdoings of the famous. As for the hacking of mobile phones—the crime which, however unsurprising, precipitated this entire process, and about which I wrote last year—Leveson pauses to highlight the hypocrisies at play: “The press did nothing to investigate itself or to expose conduct which, if it had involved the Government, Parliament, any other national institution or indeed any other organisation of significance, would have been subject to the most intense spotlight that journalists could bring to bear upon it.” (He does have the grace, elsewhere, to credit the Guardian, an honourable exception to this rule).
None of this, it must be said, is new, nor is most of it specific enough to generate fresh outrage; if you want particulars, you should turn to the full report, and to the transcripts of the witnesses, three hundred and thirty-seven of whom were summoned to the enquiry in person. (Consider, say, Margaret Watson, whose daughter Diane was stabbed to death at her school, in Scotland, in 1991, and whose fifteen-year-old son Alan killed himself a year and a half later; in his hand, when he was found dead, were newspaper articles that the family believed slighted the character of his late sister.) A considerable number of alleged misdemeanors are currently grinding through the mill of the legal process and have not yet come to court, leaving Leveson constrained from offering precise comment, let alone condemnation. He restricted himself generally to those cases which have already reached fruition: a News of the World reporter, for example, plus a private detective employed by that newspaper, who were tried, convicted, and jailed—and then, as Leveson points out in one of his more sulphuric applications of irony, “paid very substantial sums as compensation for loss of employment when they were released.” Accompanying this is a startling historical cameo in which the cops, seeking to execute a warrant at the News of the World, “were confronted and driven off by the staff.” Just as one tries to weigh, as soberly as possible, the ethical substance of the enquiry, up rises a vision of Peter Rabbit being chased out of Mr. McGregor’s garden.
And what will happen next? For what should we hold the front page? Leveson proposes to scrap, or radically to remake, the Press Complaints Commission, about which, until now, the press itself has had amusingly few complaints. What should replace it, he suggests, will be a “new independent self-regulatory body,” which sounds the sort of thing that we can all approve of, especially those of us who eat enough fiber. This healthy body, moreover, should be reinforced by another body—a statutory one, backed by new legislation. And so the bodies mount up, to the evident alarm of those in the media who peer ahead and foresee a dark time when the press finds itself denuded of its traditional freedoms. Are they right to worry? Will British newspapers in five years’ time look and sound markedly different, in Leveson’s uncertain wake? A more pressing question might be whether half of them will even exist in five years’ time, at least in print editions, but my suspicion is that, as so often occurs in Britain, far less will change than is feared—(or, if you have been a victim of press intrusion, than you have fervently hoped for)—and that what changes are enforced will arrive at the pace of molasses. After all, what will not alter—what may, indeed, heightened by the feeding frenzies available online, grow ever more insistent—is the appetite of the public. Only a dreamer, or a fool, or a highly educated peer of the realm whose own cultural standards float far beyond reproof, would imagine that British readers, abashed and chastened by this report, will suddenly forego their interest in the sexual scores of soccer players, or in the nimbus of wild grief that causes the families of murder victims to become even more absorbing than the perpetrators. None of this is a pretty sight, but it is a sight for sore and avid eyes, and the newspapers, lightly or severely regulated, will find an enduring way to dish it up. That is the shock of the real, and it will surely survive the ideals to which Lord Justice Leveson so admirably cleaves. Just read the sixty-fourth paragraph of his executive summary:
There you have it: a whistle-blowing hotline. The News of the World no longer exists, but its heirs continue to thrive, and their response to that paragraph, today and for years to come, is not hard to imagine: pick up the phone, put your lips together, and laugh.
Photograph by Matt Dunham/AP.
