Seminars and Conferences Michael White Good afternoon. It's nice to be back in Prague, one of the great cities of European civilisation, and I'm going to take my watch off and if I keep talking after fifteen minutes, turn the microphone off. We'll try. It's also good to be here because everything you hear reminds you that all the problems we have in relations with media and politicians are the same everywhere. People have said the Czech Republic is at a stage of transition. I understand that but I recognise the problems you have and when we had, let's get the names right, when we had those interesting remarks by Minister Rychetský today, I thought how interesting a British politician would think many of those things but he would not dare to say them in quite the same way or he would get someone else to say them for him. So that was interesting. Interesting, indeed. What I wanted to say right away was that although our circumstances are very different, it's a battle between politicians and the press about proper relations between them that goes on. It's not a big set piece battle, it's not a tank battle, it's trench warfare, and one year they take our trench or they take a hill and then next year we take it back again and it goes on and nobody ever gets the balance quite right. I'll talk about that in a moment. I was, I prepared some notes and I'm going to forget most of them and try and tell you things which might be helpful in the family quarrel which we have just arrived at. We foreigners came here today and I heard about the lawsuit in Respekt in the taxi last night and I didn't know about Super and whether or not housewives like it and, now, I read a little at the time about the Czech TV battle but I've forgotten, so all these things are new and the foreigners have entered a family fight as outsiders, so we are interested. And I hope by the end of the day to learn more. There are two important things I would say about press freedom to some of the questioners which I think my colleagues on the panel, certainly Christian and Hans Ulrich, would I think probably agree with, that, one is, that in the press, objectivity seems to me to be an illusion - you learn it sometimes, I think, in American journalism school - but if I can illustrate the point simply, I would say that if we were all to go now into the street and listen and we see a traffic accident, a pedestrian is knocked over by a car, we would not all agree as to the cause of the accident. Some people would say it was the pedestrian's fault, but you there might say the car was driving too fast on wet roads, your attitude might be conditioned by the fact that you're a Green and you don't think cars should be in a narrow street like that outside anyway. But there's a difference between having an honest disagreement where all the facts are known and people can take different views of it, than for someone to say, well, of course, the driver was drunk. It's a relevant fact if it's true, but if it's not true, then that oversteps the boundary of decent journalism or decent discourse. So, what I would say to people, and I talk to student audiences quite a lot, I would say we all make subjective reactions - when you sit in front of your typewriter, the first sentence you type, which is obviously the one you consider most important (it's important in journalism to get the story at the top, not at the bottom like in New York Times), and you make a judgement in doing that but you try to make a fair judgement. And the second point I would make about freedom of the press - like every other freedom, it is a freedom which can be abused. And the essence of freedom is free choice. Alcohol is abused but nobody, except those fools in America in 1920 (I love America but they will all do foolest things) would try to prohibit alcohol, or possibly Osama Bin Laden in his cave imagines that the answer to alcohol abuse is to ban it, so freedom is there, and newspapers make mistakes and we all make them and sometimes you read it in the morning what you have written and you think oh dear, I shouldn't have done that - you try but you fail. And the other point I would want to make, which I think perhaps has not been emphasised enough by your foreign speakers and visitors, but I'm very aware of because British press, as in many other things, is half way between the European and the North-American tradition, I agree with Christian's description of the shock of the French press, which is surprisingly generous to government, but Le Monde has been, Le Monde in the last few years has changed and Le Monde has driven the exposure of the ELF Aquitaine affair which is a very important scandal in the context of European public life, politics and money-driven election scandal. But all newspaper cultures are different and there are two important reasons which I would wish to stress: one is ownership and the other is circulation. By ownership I mean the obvious thing - who owns the newspapers. Christian, as a Canadian, is very aware of the United States and the danger of American domination of Canadian media. My brother lives in Toronto and in the papers in Canada you can always read the American TV listings or watch American TV, but on the American side, nobody ever mentions the Canadian TV listings and Canadian TV is much better because Canada looks to the outside world more than the United States does. Americans are surprised and puzzled by Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda more than they should be because they don't connect, it's a big country and their media serves them quite badly except for the great papers - New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times (I've lived in America, I know it very well), serves them quite badly. So the Canadians got American TV but the Americans don't get Canadian TV. And that's a loss. So he's worried about the United States. In Czech Republic, you're obviously worried about German capital and German ownership. We have a problem in Britain with our next-door neighbour - Australia. Rupert Murdoch comes from Australia. It's not near but it's quite near. Too near. Murdoch owns 35% of the British press by circulation, quite a lot of the television, and he would like to own more. He's also quite a big player in the United States and in China. He's politically a very good operator, he's a Republican in Washington, New Labour in London and so far as I can see he's a Communist in China. But he does very well dealing with governments to get what he wants. So that's a problem which we all face - ownership. British press is owned by a large number of wealthy corporations with one or two exceptions. The paper I work for is one of them. It's owned by a trust. It was once owned by a family, the Scott family, who gave the newspaper away in 1936, and it's owned by a trust and has no owner, no shareholders, except nominal ones, no dividends, no profits, all the money goes back into the newspaper group. It's not easy, it's not perfect either, but nonetheless, it's an unusual system which works. The Financial Times is owned by a large media corporation, The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Telegraph is owned by a Canadian, Conrad Black, The Independent is owned by an Irish tycoon, Tony O'Reilly, who used to run the Heinz baked beans company in America, for those of you who like baked beans and newspapers. But the other interesting factor, and I don't know how relevant it is to your debate here in Prague, but it is very important in the other countries of which we have spoken, and that is regional patterns of distribution, circulation. Britain is a small country which used to have good railways and as a result of which the dominant medium is London-based, the Fleet Street newspapers as they are called. There are ten national newspapers in Britain, five tabloids (which are like tabloids everywhere), five broadsheets and they go everywhere, you can buy them in Cornwall or Scotland, in the morning. There's quite a strong competition: ten newspapers in a country of fifty million is quite a lot, so the competition is heavy. And that creates a degree of sensationalism in the British press which is one of its weaknesses: sex scandals, scandal of one kind or another, confrontation, sound bite politics which Christian deplored because he's a French intellectual, and the phrase we often use, it's a good phrase if people here don't know it and maybe the interpreters will think carefully - dumbing down, do we know that one? The idea that you have information and entertainment and news all mixed up in each other. It's most advanced in the United States where they merge the two words - information and entertainment - and talk about infotainment. The American television network news has gone a long way down that road in the last fifteen or twenty years and, as other speakers have said, it's a bad road. The other characteristic of newspaper distribution which is interesting in Western Europe and produces different results, not all of them good, is what I call regional monopoly. In Britain, as I say, we have ten newspapers, you get them everywhere. There are regional newspapers in Edinburgh, in Glasgow, in Birmingham, in other big cities, but they're not very important. The big papers are the national papers. By contrast, in the United States, The New York Times sells mainly in New York - Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. The Los Angeles Times - surprise, surprise - Los Angeles. Most of the papers are regional. You can buy The Washington Post or The New York Times in other cities but you don't, they are mainly sold locally. The same, I think, is true for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of the French regional papers which sell far more copies than Le Monde or Libération, so that you have predominantly what is close to being in many of these cases a local monopoly. And if you have no competition, you can produce a different sort of newspaper. Although I am glad to see coloured photographs on the front of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in my hotel last night, it didn't use to have any photographs at all. But the competitive character of the British press is both good and bad and they are much more reader-friendly - bigger pictures, bigger headlines, more human interest, good word, bad word - than papers which have a natural local monopoly and can make quite a lot of money without selling throughout the country. So ownership structure is important too. Now, what else can I say to help you in your debate? I'll make one brief comment about relations with politicians. I've worked among politicians for twenty, twenty-five years and I like politicians, otherwise I'd go off and become a sports writer. But you keep your distance from them. You keep your distance from your friends because if you get too close to them, you become a captured pawn on the chess board, they feed you information, you write it the way they want it and if you don't write it the way they want it, they'll give it to somebody else. And it happens in everybody's media that the politicians, they respect the free press, of course, but they want the free press to be favourable to them. They all do. They don't mean any harm, David Curry is a good man, he wants the press to report him nicely. But major players always want to get the press on their side. And they either flatter or they bully or they leak or they withhold information or they don't give the interview to the television correspondent. They have their ways of trying to bend you to their purposes and as somebody said, you know, politicians, like other people, tell lies. So my advice is: always keep your distance, even from your friends. You cannot give a politician, as a proper journalist, what they want because they want their version and their version may not be true. So the advice I give on one's friends, of course, also applies to people you don't like, either for ideological reasons or personal reasons, you'll be fair to your enemies as well, they'll hate you for it and it'll really annoy them. So I emphasise, no distortion, misrepresentation - distance and fairness. I'll briefly tell you one or two things which happen in Britain in terms of the battleground between the press and the politicians which may help and inform your debate. We have a thing called the Press Complaints Commission which adjudicates, which rules on complaints made by members of the public against newspapers. It's not statutory, it can't impose fines, but the newspapers are expected to print a ruling so that if you are a tabloid who has done something terrible about one of Princess Diana's children - you've gone and photographed them at his school, which you're not meant to do because they're children - and the Press Complaints Commission, the PCC, says that was wrong, you're meant to print it. Slap on the wrist. No big deal. You have libel laws, quite strict libel laws in Britain. In the United States, it is almost impossible for a public figure to sue for libel - such is the power of the First Amendment. In France and across much of Europe, there are privacy laws which are reinforced by the European Convention on Human Rights which is now in British domestic law. Now, we're all in favour of privacy, but privacy is a two-edged weapon. And privacy laws are used in - let us pick on France (the French and the English always pick on each other) - privacy laws are used to protect politicians - let us pick on François Mitterand because he's dead (can't sue me for libel) - to protect not simply legitimate questions of privacy, but illegitimate ones, involving bribery - the ELF Aquitaine scandal, other things. One of his Prime Ministers, Pierre Bérégovoy committed suicide, we don't know why, one of his chiefs of staff was found murdered within the Elysées, his mistress and his illegitimate daughter Mazarine lived within the Elysées, I think. Now, it seems to me that privacy law which is good for protecting ordinary people from intrusion by the tabloids (dreadful, some of it) is also a dangerous weapon in the hands of the political classes or the rich. And only this week, a British court ruled in favour of privacy of a footballer who had two mistresses, he fell out with them both, he found a third, so the two girlfriends went to the tabloids to complain about this man who has a normal happy family in public and the footballer heard that he was going to be in the tabloids and he went to the court and he got a privacy ruling. Well, a footballer and his girlfriends is not important, but it may be that that privacy ruling will come to restrict the British press in a way that will have bad effects long-term for public debate in the public arena in a way that we are describing today. My last point, which again touches upon your debate today, is that politicians seeking to control the press will use ownership regulation, cross ownership - if you own newspapers, how much TV can you own, if you're a foreigner, how much you can own. These laws are much tighter in the United States than they are in Britain - Rupert Murdoch had to become an American in order to hold his TV stations and his newspapers in the United States, I don't think foreigners can own American TV stations, is that right? Anyway, he ceased to be an Australian, became an American. So those powers in the hands of government can be used both as punishments and as rewards and there are people, I spoke to a British politician last week who said Rupert Murdoch's papers are opposed to British entry into the European single currency, the euro zone, and everyone thinks it's serious but they said they will do a deal with Murdoch - Murdoch will (my friend predicted, it may be untrue) that Murdoch will stop his campaign against the euro in return for a relaxation of the cross media ownership laws which will enable him to move more into television. There are other constrictions on the British press, it's always a battle, I will end by saying that during the 1980's, a number of politicians successfully sued newspapers, and showbusiness personalities (there was an American who once said that politics is showbusiness for ugly people). Politicians and showbusiness people sued British newspapers and took a lot of money, up to a million pounds, more, from newspapers, in some cases, circumstances, which were quite wrong. In the 90's, a number of papers, chiefly my own newspaper, have fought these cases and won them. The Guardian won two major libel suits against very leading politicians, and this maybe an important difference for you, Jonathan Aitkin, member of John Major, the Conservative Prime Minister's Cabinet, was, he said, libelled by my newspaper alleging that he was mixed up in arms dealings and making money. There were also some sexual allegations, but the arms dealings was the more important. He had to, he resigned from the government in order to bring a libel suit against The Guardian and Granada Television. It was extremely dangerous and risky for us (libel is quite hard to defend in Britain), we were lucky, we were able to prove that he was lying because one of my colleagues found a credit card bill in a bankrupt hotel in Switzerland which proved that the case was lying. If we hadn't found it, we'd have lost millions of pounds. He resigned from Parliament, was tried for perjury, went to jail; Jeffrey Archer, another Conservative politician, the novelist, won a lot of money in the 80's, he's now in jail for perjury. As I said at the beginning, it is a constant battle - you win some and you lose some. In this case, we lost on the libel front ten years ago but we have taken that trench back and politicians do not readily sue in British courts for libel any more because they've begun to lose. My fear is that they will now go for privacy. Thank you.