Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Our suicidal newspapers are throwing press freedom away

The Tory papers seem to want their own human rights abolished. The leftist ones cheer when journalists are arrested. Does their civil war matter more to them than their civil liberties?

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issue 11 October 2014

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[/audioplayer]With the possible, although far from certain, exception of the men and women who hire me, it is fair to say that Britain’s editors have a death wish. They suppress their own freedom. They hold out their wrists and beg the state to handcuff them. They are so lost in ideological frenzy that they cannot see that free journalism is the first casualty of their culture wars.

The Daily Mail acclaimed David Cameron’s threat to repeal the Human Rights Act and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights as ‘triumphant’. Within days, we learned how the ‘triumphant’ state treats the Mail on Sunday when it thinks no one is looking. Without a warrant from a judge, Kent police officers trawled records of thousands of calls to its news desk.

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