Neil Kinnock's proposal for media regulation would turn our newspapers into print versions of the BBC
By Daniel Hannan
How depressing to listen to Neil Kinnock just now. The former Labour leader, who once saw himself as a British radical, an heir to John Milton and John Wilkes, calmly proposed that the print media should be controlled by the state. Newspapers, he argued, should be “subject to a charter” which “requires balance”, and owned only by people approved by the government.
In their excitement at Rupert Murdoch’s discomfiture, some Lefties are over-reaching badly. There was utter revulsion against the hacking of the phones of murder victims and fallen soldiers; but this revulsion has not, as Kinnock and Ed Miliband seem to believe, turned into a general discontent with the idea of an unconstrained press.
Every censorious government uses the same argument. It doesn’t want to repress free opinion, it says; it simply wants to prohibit malicious lies. To which the surest response is the one offered by J S Mill:
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
No statute can guarantee neutrality, for the simple reason that no two people will agree on what constitutes neutrality. If you doubt this, consider the BBC, which is subject to precisely such regulation as Lord Kinnock wants for newspapers. In its own eyes, the Corporation is a model of impartiality; in everyone else’s, it is Left-wing.
The best defence against media bias is not legislation, but pluralism. The more news outlets we can choose from, the louder the din of clashing interpretations, the harder it becomes to repress the truth. In a free market of stories, the plausible narratives drive out the false ones. As Milton put it: “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”
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