Image by Getty Images via @daylife

In December I had the pleasure of chairing a Democratic Society debate on media regulation. Contributors were Kevin Anderson, Kathryn Corrick, Douglas White, and Anthony Zacharzewski. This is part of a series of events, including future discussions, blogs and online debates, supported by the Carnegie Trust. Over the next couple of months, contributors will consider as many aspects of media regulation as time permits.

Inevitably, in the light of phone hacking and associated abuses, and the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry, the initial discussion focused heavily on regulating print media. There were differences of opinion and emphasis on whether new regulation is needed, but as debate progressed, these proved subtle rather than marked and irreconcilable. Contributors argued that the existing legal and self-regulatory redress mechanisms for victims of real abuses had proved inadequate. However, there was concern about the possibly problematic interplay between some proposed remedies and the preservation of a free press. Any future regulatory regime should eschew the invasiveness found in some jurisdictions, where journalists are licensed by the state and where sometimes journalistic custom and practice, even business models, are prescribed. Regulation, it was argued, should be confined to matters genuinely remediable through regulatory solutions. Some contributors suggested many of the problems highlighted recently related to press (and especially tabloid) culture, as well as readership expectations. Regulation can support and even effect cultural change, but its impact may be optimised when deployed alongside other long-term interventions.

Participants also argued that the Leveson Inquiry had, at least initially, suffered an image problem. Disproportionate time was devoted to privacy invasions experienced by celebrities, compared with the routine and daily abuses endured by many more vulnerable, less well-heeled victims. This furnished ammunition for those who believe that the wider question of a citizen’s right to freedom from unwarranted harassment had become hijacked by famous middle aged lotharios keen to keep a lid on their affairs.

This is a little unfair. The individuals in question had pointed to instances of bullying, harassment and virtual blackmail. The Inquiry itself is rigorous and presided over with thoughtfulness and gravity by its chairman. Recently, the focus has shifted onto submissions by media practitioners, and Leveson himself has dropped hints on the possible scope and design of a future regulator.

Nevertheless, contributors felt the issues of privacy and abuse were not easy bedfellows. A “sensitive” fact may become known to the press as a result of legal enquiries or criminal actions. It may concern anything from marital infidelity to the health of a child. If the former, it almost certainly concerns a public figure for it to be marketable. That person may be someone who has pronounced publicly on “family values”, someone who has traded on a wholly different set of values, or someone whose values are unknown and who has never engaged in self-publicity beyond the requirements of their profession. These are different circumstances with differing moral dynamics. All differ in turn from privacy breaches affecting wholly “private” citizens.

A regulator may have some role in helping differentiate between the various categories of privacy breach. However it may be preferable in many cases for the balance between privacy and freedom enshrined in Human Rights legislation to be examined on a case by case basis by courts, with criminal circumventions of privacy left to a police force sternly reminded of its obligations to treat press illegalities like any others. Giving a regulator the responsibility for enforcing an emergent and contentious privacy principle may prove problematic. For many, privacy is not a Kantian moral absolute, but a matter of context. For still others the concept is frequently rendered meaningless by the realities of social networking.

(Indeed, contributors wondered whether we might need to develop a new moral category. If Twitter made it nearly impossible for a celebrity to suppress public awareness of an affair, then certain matters might at once be public – widely known – and private – so imperfectly understood in terms of background and context as to be only properly subject to the moral judgements of the participants themselves. This new duality might require us collectively to outgrow the old tabloid one of titillation and righteous indignation, but that would be no bad thing.)

Despite these reservations on regulatory scope and emphasis, and the balance between press freedom and regulatory control, most contributors felt that abuses such as those endured by the Dowler family, Christopher Jefferies, and countless others, demanded a robust response. Yet, because of these reservations, all contributors felt that the regulatory component of any response should be thoughtfully designed and carefully targeted.

In my next blog, I will outline a possible model we discussed in December and consider its possible overlaps with what we can deduce of Leveson’s emerging thinking.