There is No Such Thing as a Free Press: ...and we need one more than ever

Mick Hume

elo 2012 · Societas Kirja 31 · Andrews UK Limited

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The aim of this book is to a launch a polemic for the freedom of the press against all of the attempts to police, defile and sanitise journalism today. Once the media reported the news. Now it makes it. From the phone-hacking scandal to rows about press regulation, super-injunctions, leaks, libel and privacy laws, the power of the Murdoch empire, and the future of the BBC, the media has become the story. The British press is in crisis and under scrutiny as never before. In the fall-out from the phone-hacking scandal one national newspaper has already been closed down and some would like to see others go the same way. However, this book argues that there is not too much media freedom in Britain today, but too little. There are not too few controls and restrictions on what can legitimately be published and broadcast, but too many - both formal and informal. Some newspapers in Britain and elsewhere might be going 'free' in financial terms, under pressure from declining sales and the new online media. But in almost every way that matters, the press is less free - thanks both to external constraints and the internal corrosion of the foundations of good journalism. This book aims to shake up the one-way 'debate' about the freedom of the media. It will argue that the media's standing has been undermined both from without and within, and put the case for standing up both to the censors and to the conformists in all their guises.

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Mick Hume is a writer and a journalist. He is currently editor-at-large of the online magazine Spiked, and a writer for The Times (London). Hume was the founding editor of LM magazine, which he originally launched in 1988 as Living Marxism, until it was forced to close in 2000 after being sued for libel. In 2001 he launched Spiked, the first UK-based web-only current affairs magazine, which he edited until 2007. Hume has been writing about issues to do with the media, freedom of expression and a free press for many years. His previous publications include Whose War Is It Anyway? The Dangers of the Journalism of Attachment (1997), and Televictims: Emotional Correctness in the media AD (After Diana) (1998).