Every collector of modern quotations knows Tom Stoppard’s: ‘I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’ Probably most of us would agree. What’s less well known is the context of the quote, perhaps because the play from which it comes, Night and Day (1978*), now reads as impossibly dated.

The play is set in a world where British newspapers send staff reporters and photographers off to central Africa on unlimited expenses at the drop of a hat to report on an imminent civil war. Where journalists deliver their words by telex and their pictures as undeveloped film entrusted to a ‘pigeon’ on the last flight out. And where trade union chapels stop the printing of an entire edition because they don’t like something in it.

Impossibly ancient history, as I said. (Though I’m lucky enough to have experienced it.) However, the play’s theme, press regulation, couldn’t be more contemporary – and of interest to other regulated sectors as well.

The run-up to ‘I’m with you on the free press’ (IWYOTFP) is a flirtatious conversation between Jacob, an idealistic young reporter, and Ruth, who once suffered 15 minutes of fame at the hands of the popular press. Jacob is warning about a colleague’s wish for newspapers to be regulated by a committee of union bien-pensants. ‘Once you establish the machinery, it’ll be there for someone else to use. Drum you out if you’re too left-wing, or not left-wing enough, or the wrong colour, or something.’

But why, Ruth asks, should journalists, of all people, be offered a regulatory free ride? ‘If some group got control of the Law Society, they’d be just as free to have only right-thinking solicitors. What then?’

‘Then you’d really need a free press, otherwise you may never find out about it.’

IWYOTFP…

More than 30 years on, with Leveson about to report on patently appalling press standards, the case for exempting journalism from regulation looks flimsier than ever. And that’s before we even start on bloggers and trial-by-Twitterers. Even the National Union of Journalists, to whose code of conduct (yes, it has one) I voluntarily subscribe, is making the case for ‘a decent system of press regulation which promotes, supports, and safeguards quality journalism’.

Reasonable enough? No, no, no. In 2012 as in 1978, the idea of some ‘decent system’ restricting free speech to ‘quality journalism’ is massively wrong. To paraphrase Stoppard, junk journalism is the price you pay for the bit that matters.

I hope some of these arguments will surface at the Law Society’s free public debate on the Leveson report, on 11 December. I don’t expect many attendees will like newspapers much. But I hope someone puts a word in for a free press.

*Faber and Faber, 1978 [ISBN: 0571113729]

Michael Cross is Gazette news editor

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