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`BEYOND ANGER'
Anyone who has observed journalists at close quarters must at some time have been repelled by their self-importance and their unshakable belief that the rights of a free press overrule all others.
The present attitude of the Government towards both press and television, how- ever, goes well beyond momentary irrita- tion. It displays a fundamental misunder- standing of the part the mass media play in a free and democratic society, to whose principles it claims to be devoted.
What the British Government is apparently asking is that neither press nor television comments on the summary kill- ing of three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar by agents of the British armed forces until after a somewhat tardy coroner's enquiry has been held, on the grounds that any such comment would be prejudicial to that enquiry.
Naturally, the Government does not hold that a ministerial statement is prejudi- cial, presumably on the grounds that a) ministers know everything and b) they are incapable of error or omission. It has come as a genuine surprise to a government that is virtually devoid of parliamentary opposi- tion that this view of ministers and their statements is not universally accepted. And the Government has reacted to the discovery in a way worthy of totalitarians. To bolster its rather feeble arguments it has resorted to exhuming a 20-year-old report. It has used a concept of prejudice which clearly does not apply, since Gibral- tar is an overseas territory. It has encour- aged a civil servant, Mr Bernard Ingham, publicly to lose his temper in defence of political interests, thus breaking a constitu- tional convention. It has signally ignored the service to truth that the television crews have done by uncovering material witnesses who would otherwise not have been called in the enquiry. But the Government is not interested in truth., it is interested in coming unscathed out of a potentially damaging situation. It can hardly expect the media to share this aim. And would a peep have been heard from the Government if the television programmes and newspaper articles in question had wholly corroborated the Sir Geoffrey Howe version of events?
The Government speaks of the irres- ponsible powers of the media. This is a curious line to take for a government that in economic matters believes so firmly in the beneficent hidden hand that regulates affairs so much better than any revealed hand. For does not the truth play the role in the sphere of information that the market plays in that of the economy? The motives of reporters and newspapers are as unimportant as those of entrepreneurs, providing only that there is competition. Censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, is to the media what protectionism is to industry: profitable for some, but dis- astrous in the long term.
In all the complaints of the Government, whatever their patina of theoretical justi- fication, there is the ring of guilt, or at least — to change the metaphor — the rattle of skeletons in the cupboard. Why should the Prime Minister be 'beyond anger' unless she has something to hide? If she has nothing to hide, her rage is not merely insensate, it is senseless. As La Roche- foucauld said, 'We never forgive those whom we have wronged.'
However, it is in its positive ideas about how the media should be managed, rather than in its complaints, that the Govern- ment shows its true colours. It appears to believe that a gentlemanly ministerial tele- phone call to the head of a vast and centralised broadcasting organisation is an appropriate way to decide what a nation of nearly 60 millions should or should not see on television. This is a very cosy arrange- ment, convenient to governments and ministers, but surely anachroniitic in an age when it is technically possible to diversify as never before the sources of information available to everyone. It stems from the idea that the public must be protected from itself, that it is incapable of assimilating information to draw reason- able conclusions for itself, and that a tiny elite of mandarins is best able to decide what is in the national interest. Can a less democratic, more Leninist attitude be im- agined? Mrs Thatcher has consistently said she wants to hand back power to the British people. But knowledge is power. And whenever there has been a choice between secrecy or making inconvenient facts known, she has opted for secrecy.
This tendency is not only redolent of incoMpetent bureaucracy, but demons- trates just how deeply totalitarian ideas have influenced our politicians. For Mrs Thatcher appears to believe that for it to survive her government must be shown to be right, always to have been tight, and to be without possibility of ever being wrong. But the electorate is, let us hope, more sophisticated than this. It knows that a government that commits no errors does nothing. It is not error that is unforgivable, but failure to learn from error. And in its relations with the media Mrs Thatcher's government shows every sign of this fai- lure.
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