LONDON — As the Leveson inquiry into the behavior of the British press produced its report last week urging laws to underpin new controls, U.S. journalists could feel proud, or at least relieved, that the First Amendment protection of free speech inoculated them against such constraints.
Equally, though, some practitioners of British journalism, which prides itself on being raucous and rambunctious, offered the counterview that the Americans had paid the price of “becoming monumentally dull,” as one columnist here put it, in return for their freedoms.
The competing visions reflected a history of divergent notions of what the press is supposed to do.
U.S. newspapers evolved as the voices of cities like New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington. Only a handful emerged to compete for a national audience.
But Britain’s big daily newspapers have long done battle on a national stage, slicing and dicing markets defined most obviously by the class divide of blue-collar tabloids and white-collar broadsheets, but also by political persuasion — liberal for The Guardian, for instance, conservative for The Daily Telegraph.
The scramble spawned a tradition of cutthroat competition — the hunger for the scoop, sometimes ahead of the facts — that propelled the best of British journalism and contributed to its worst failures, lurching beyond reporting into accusations of criminality chronicled in the Leveson report.
The document totaled about 2,000 pages in four volumes — dimensions that almost begged the question of whether it would make waves, or sink without trace in the current maelstrom swirling through Britain’s established media, from newspapers to the BBC.
Weighing the sworn testimony of 337 witnesses during nine months of hearings conducted by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, the report’s central recommendation for stricter self-regulation buttressed by new laws — in addition to the gamut of restrictive legislation already on the statute books — drew howls of predictable outrage.
“Leveson’s remedy is to terminate centuries of bold, brassy, often vulgar and disreputable — but also brave and important — British journalism and dress the press in a tight, clumsy straitjacket of his own manufacture,” the columnist and former editor Max Hastings wrote in The Daily Mail. (Writing in The Financial Times, he also observed that “most modern American journalism is impeccably sober and politically correct but at the price of also becoming monumentally dull.”)
But there were other considerations, largely relating to the rise of the Internet, to elbow aside newspapers as the vehicle of spreading the news in a land where the daily circulation of the printed editions of the main national titles totals some 8.6 million.
That is roughly one million less than one year ago. “There will come a time soon when many newspapers are not on paper,” the columnist Hugo Rifkind wrote in The Times of London. “And I do mean soon. We’re not talking decades. We’re talking years.”
“What matters today is content, not the media that delivers it, and there’s frankly something quite depressing about a nine-month inquiry that fails to figure this out.”
To some analysts, Sir Brian resembled a general using the lessons of a previous campaign to fight on a new and unfamiliar battlefield — or a steward redrawing the catering arrangements on a stricken ocean liner.
Only days before the report was published, a furor involving the BBC’s reporting of a sexual abuse scandal exploded, not simply because of what had been broadcast but by what had been said about the story on Twitter.
Covering the publication of the report, and the divided response to it, it was somehow easy to recall the old Sicilian proverb that everything must change so that nothing changes.
Here were celebrities like the actor Hugh Grant and the author J.K. Rowling — both campaigners for tighter restrictions — sensing that a time was now approaching when, as Mr. Hastings put it, they would be able to close the spigot of personal publicity “whenever they are not promoting a book or movie.”
Here was Prime Minister David Cameron arguing in Parliament that press laws would “cross the Rubicon,” jeopardizing three centuries of freedom from legislative restraint.
Step back a little, and there seemed to be a subplot, as if the titled elite of the British establishment was quietly gathering to cap the myriad crises like so many oil field gushers. In the soul-searching and maneuvering, just about every player — seeking variously to investigate failure, herald a new era, or seek to avert one — bore the title of lord, sir or dame.
In the British honors system, titles often acknowledge achievement earned by providing safe hands in a crisis. This time, that might not be enough.
By early Monday, the signatories to an online petition organized by the pro-regulation Hacked Off advocacy group exceeded 126,000 — not so much safe hands as an angry show of them, demanding changes that the politicians might find difficult to ignore.
