State-imposed control of the internet is ‘inevitable’ if the conflict between the right to privacy and a free press is ever to be resolved, lawyers and journalists suggested last week at a Law Society public debate.

They also warned that the current press regulator is toothless in a ‘culture without moral boundaries’ and where ‘public interest’ was a viable defence in less than 10% of privacy cases.

The occasion was the second in a series of Law Society public debates, for which the Gazette is media partner. The panel comprised media and privacy law silk Hugh Tomlinson QC; London firm Schillings media litigator Gideon Benaim; Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville; and Guardian newspaper investigations executive editor David Leigh.

The meeting also heard that the media should not panic over injunctions and super-injunctions – there have been fewer than 100 in the last decade – and that printed newspapers will be extinct within a decade.

Tomlinson began by saying that current media and privacy laws work ‘up to a point’, but that ‘parliament should specifically address the issue so that the law has democratic legitimacy’.

Benaim agreed, saying that a ‘regulator with teeth’ would make journalists more cautious about what they wrote and how they got their stories. Glanville asked him: ‘But how could the Press Complaints Commission, even with teeth, have stopped the hackers when the police and Crown Prosecution Service were unwilling to act?’

Leigh said that no amount of regulation would control the work of ‘citizen journalists’ to whom freedom of speech was inviolable. Tomlinson said that this was why state regulation of the internet was ‘inevitable’. He added: ‘But there are dangers – think of Assad in Syria.’

Leigh blamed ‘canteen culture and peer pressure’ for fostering the tabloid attitude that ‘anything goes’ when a good story was in the offing. The culture was allowed to develop because of the ‘political power of one media group that frightened the politicians’, Leigh added.

The panel agreed that online media and falling advertising revenues meant print journalism was a ‘dying world’ and would be extinct in 10 years’ time. But Tomlinson concluded: ‘A tabloid that can explain complex issues in a comprehensible form is a good democratic resource.’

‘Privacy, Free Press and the Public Interest’ was chaired by Law Society chief executive Desmond Hudson.