Michael Gove’s savage comments about Brian Leveson at yesterday’s Spectator awards have been making headlines everywhere today. Here we have the full audio of what he said: listen to ‘Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year – Michael Gove’s speech’ on Audioboo
How strong is the Conservative commitment to liberty? Today’s Guardian front page holds the answer. A long line of Tory MPs have written to the newspaper, calling for the Prime Minister to seize a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to regulate the press. It is surprising as it contains several of the names I would had put down as friends of liberty. Jesse Norman, Andrea Leadsom and Nadhim Zahawi are the last people you’d expect to be writing to the Guardian demanding state action against the newspapers. The Guardian says that the signatories hope to make a ‘cross-party consensus’ is possible. I bet they do. Politicians have always wanted to get some kind
Lord Leveson will be publishing his recommendations for the future of press regulation very soon, and those on both sides of the debate are getting nervous. The Hacked Off campaign has a letter in today’s Financial Times opposing plans for continued self-regulation of the industry that is signed by 26 professors in journalism, law and politics. The letter attacks proposals by Lord Hunt and Lord Black for self-regulation which would be underpinned by contracts between the regulator and the publisher which would be enforceable through civil law. It says: ‘We do not believe these proposals to be in the best interests of journalists and journalism. The Hunt-Black scheme is an
What effect would any form of statutory regulation have on the press in this country? In this week’s cover feature, Nick Cohen writes that if the Leveson Inquiry recommends strong measures to curtail the press, they will not be practical thanks to the constant evolution of the media industry. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick explains the problems of defining who exactly is the press and who are journalists: ‘You can’t say what a newspaper is and you can’t say who a journalist is. When I started in journalism, people used to say it was a trade, not a profession…that was true in theory but false in practice — you