Simply Sue: A Sledgehammer For The Duffle-Coats
Sue Papworth homes in on the subject of press freedom. Certain newspaper editors should read this - and blush.
When I was at university (yes, we’re back in the Stone Age again), the college mounted an exhibition of modern sculpture. You know the sort of thing – lots of heaps of breeze blocks of one sort and another.
Some wag added a rubber duck to one, and then you had the joy of watching serious art critics wandering about the courtyards making serious comments and desperately ignoring the duck, because they weren’t sure whether it was A Profound Commentary Upon Life In The Twentieth Century or just something bunged in by some Philistine vandal.
A less delicate critic was an unhappy student who smashed the lot up with a sledgehammer.
He got suspended for it, and right away there was a demo of furious duffle-coats fulminating about academic freedom. He was, they said, merely expressing his opposition to such things, which ought to be respected, ‘cos if it wasn’t this denied him his freedom of speech plus also his academic freedom.
The argument seemed to be, he’s an academic student, so if he’s not free to do exactly what he wants, he ain’t got academic freedom, for which we will die.
The college told them, and him, to go away and grow up.
I was reminded about all that by the recent argy-bargy about freedom of the press. Apparently, if a newspaper can’t print exactly what it likes about the Prime Minister’s home life, then that’s limiting the freedom of the press, which thing we also must die for.
The lad with the sledgehammer – like the other duffle-coats - was an eighteen-year-old twit, who eventually did go away and grow up, so one can forgive him his twittishness.
But when editors of national newspapers come up with the same sort of piffle, it really is a bit more than irritating.
Press freedom matters to all of us: but what is it? Is it really the right of the press to do whatever it likes just because it’s the press? Only a twit would think so.
In one of Tom Stoppard’s plays, the dictator of an African state tells the reporter “Here we have a relatively free press – the press is run by my relatives”.
The reporter dies wiring home the truth about atrocities of the war that he’s covering – but his story’s binned in favour of a tale about some Minister’s sex life, because our own relatively free press apparently thinks that’s more important.
When I think “Press Freedom”, I am more inclined to think about Kate Adie or Orla Guerin being cool as a cucumber with shells whizzing about their ears, or John Pilger reporting on the consequences of a grubbier and less fashionable little war, so that we can know what’s being done in our names, than I am to think of someone peddling gossip.
I’m more inclined to think about journalists in Eastern Europe and the third world daring, often at the risk of their lives, to reveal corruption and the sordid workings of their Prime Ministers than I am to think of some tacky little hack rootling through the PM’s dustbin in the hopes of finding that one of his kids cheated on their maths test.
Comparing the two is pretty insulting.
