BEWARE MEDIA TRIUMPHALISM
The press: Paul Johnson
repudiates the new theory that a journalist is above the law
IF I were asked to categorise Britain today, I think I would term it the Superstitious Society. Faith has gone, to the point that a policeman who utters the old Christian truism that he is an instrument of God is widely denounced as a nut-case and a menace, and forced to come to the Home Office to explain himself. And, since hu- man beings feel they need to know more about existence than their puny reason can supply, the loss of faith has left a huge vacuum, which a variety of superstitions is filling. G. K. Chesterton, the wisest child of his age, predicted this. If men cease to believe in God, he forecast, they will not believe in nothing; they will believe in anything.
If anyone doubts the rise of superstition as a feature, perhaps the most characteris- tic feature, of modern society, he has only to attend, as I did last October, a Labour Party Conference debate on nuclear pow- er. Reason did not come into it: it was pure superstition. Because nuclear reactors are mysterious things, difficult to understand, they are regarded with the superstitious awe George Eliot described in Silas Mar- ner, where the old-style farmworkers treat- ed the indoor machinery of the weavers as inhuman, wicked and devilish. The fear of nuclear power is not based upon a rational calculation but on superstitious dread of a ray-like emanation, akin to a diabolic force.
What is notable about these modern- style superstitions is that they are held most strongly by people who are compara- tively well educated, or think they are. The really passionate opponents of nuclear Power are overwhelmingly middle-class, radical, secularist, the sort of people who would sneer condescendingly at the specta- cle of someone praying before a statue of the Virgin Mary. Ordinary working people are not over-fond of having a nuclear reactor nearby (unless they work at the plant) but they do not go on about it. Everyone has superstitions, but to be systematically and argumentatively super- stitious, to raise a form of superstition to the level of a political issue, requires education.
Another, equally powerful, superstition — again largely confined to the radical middle class of pseudo-intellectuals — is that Britain is a secretive society, in which the authorities keep electronic (and other) watch on large numbers of citizens, and store immense quantities of data about them in gigantic depositories. This super- stition is linked to a further one, in which the authorities themselves are engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to protect their own malign secrets — hence the repressive apparatus of surveillance. I hasten to add that this notion is by no means confined to Britain. It is also common in the United States. At a recent international confer- ence on state secrecy and information, an American woman 'expert' was heard to mutter darkly about the Five Great Secrets which 'they' were keeping from 'us'. From there it is only a short step to concern about the dimensions of the Pyramids. The secretive society superstition is, of course, behind the BBC Scotland series. Duncan Campbell is not a rational figure but a man with an obsession, an evangelist of superstition. He is the true type of sub-religious fanatic, born to believe some- thing, or anything. A hundred years ago he would probably have been a comparatively harmless clergyman working for some Baptist or Primitive Methodist sect in the South Seas, teaching the natives to make love only in the 'missionary position' and to clothe their nakedness in Manchester prints. Today he is given the freedom of a BBC pulpit and thus becomes a public menace and, among those who share his particular superstition, a persecuted hero.
Unfortunately, the idea that authority is engaged in a conspiracy against the citizenry fits neatly into another ideology of our day, the doctrine of media trium- phalism. The idea that the journalist is, or ought to be, a legally and morally pri- vileged member of society and entitled to place himself above the law emanates from America. At the same conference I heard one supporter of this new credo state, quite seriously, that a reporter would be justified in breaking into someone's house to obtain information which, in his opinion, the public had a right to know. I don't know whether our own media triumphalists would go so far but certainly they seem to be advancing the view that journalists, or at any rate editors, are better judges of what constitutes a legitimate state secret than a democratically-elected government. The Observer's editor, Donald Trelford, has just put forward the proposition that the true patriot may not be the official who keeps secrets but the journalist who dis- closes them. Oddly enough, this extremist view of what constitutes press freedom comes from an editor who has conceded the right of the print unions to impose a veto on who is allowed to write for his paper. He may be prepared to defy a D-notice on Zircon but he can't ignore a V-notice on Bernard Levin.
Having worked with journalists all my adult life I would hate to live in a country where they were accorded, de jure or even de facto, privileged status. The doctrine of media triumphalism is, in my view, a much greater practical threat to the liberties of ordinary folk in this country than anything a parliamentary government is likely to cook up. Media people attribute to them- selves all kinds of altruistic motives, and often claim to be more trustworthy custo- dians of the national interest than the government elected to preserve it. But then so do go-getting businessmen who evade Board of Trade regulations. The truth is, the media are motivated chiefly by the pursuit of circulations and ratings, and those who serve this by the desire to acquire money, fame and power. They are entitled to their self-esteem, even their self-complacency. What they are not enti- tled to do is to break the law of the land.
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