Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney speaking to the media outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London last week. Photo courtesy of Sarah Kavanagh
ALMOST 60 years ago, weeks after he became Prime Minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson said that "the freedom of the press is now accepted as one of the essential liberties; indeed, a necessary condition of all our other liberties".
Yet, Wilson would later proclaim he was "nauseated that a large part of our proprietorial press is not free at all".
It’s symptomatic of the cognitive dissonance of how the establishment speaks out of both sides of its mouth when hailing the important role of a free press in a democracy while viewing it with suspicion and cynicism.
From the simplicity of the relationship between those in power and the press in the 1960s, the complexity of the role of the media today has serious implications for democracy.
The current case in which three British police forces, including the PSNI, Durham Constabulary and the Metropolitan Police are implicated in a scandal over allegations of spying on the communications of journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey is alarming. It opens a big can of worms about the level of snooping on journalists’ work by the authorities.
It’s almost 10 years since American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that GCHQ - the UK's intelligence, security and cyber agency - had captured emails of journalists from top international media.
The fact that the journalists’ communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in less than 10 minutes in one day indicated the power of government surveillance.
It prompted more than 100 editors to protest directly to then Prime Minister David Cameron about the safety of journalists’ communications, with concerns over police's use of surveillance powers.
The Birney/McCaffrey case would indicate that far from introducing safeguards, the snooping continues apace.
It’s not just the technology that has changed dramatically since Harold Wilson’s day. The media itself is different beyond recognition. Some newspapers have moved inexorably to the right with press barons, including owners from outside the UK, pushing their own agendas unashamedly.
The British Government missed an opportunity after the Leveson Inquiry, which examined the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press in the wake of a phone-hacking scandal, to properly regulate the power of media owners.
Over the last few decades, broadcast media has dramatically changed.
In the mid-1990s, Murdoch’s Fox News was set up in the United States. Over the decades, the channel has become a key player in the American news landscape, with a strong influence on viewers and the wider political right.
Two years ago, academics at the University of California at Berkley and Yale University published the results of a 2020 study which paid a group of Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month.
The study found "evidence of manifold effects on viewers' attitudes about current events, policy preferences, and evaluations of key political figures and parties" - essentially that watching Fox News had an impact on how viewers saw the world.
Britain took a little while to set up its own right-leaning news channels, but it now has several similar, albeit smaller outlets, most notably GB News.
There is a need now, more than ever, for good public service broadcasting. But despite a lot of good output and a raft of good journalists there are serious concerns about how BBC management in Northern Ireland and RTÉ in the Republic are held accountable in actually serving the public.
So-called mainstream media has struggled to regain the public's trust.
In addition to this, the use of social media algorithms sees us being fed controversy day and daily. Indeed, the press owners themselves fall into the trap of competing for clicks.
The battle for control of the two big beasts of the establishment, along with the rise of partisan outlets, have created a maelstrom where the truth is hard to find.
Denzil McDaniel
The irony is that there are many, many journalists of independent mind who want to get to the truth, particularly in informing citizens what their government and its agencies are doing on their behalf, particularly when there is corruption or other failings.
Journalists of integrity who honestly try to fulfill the true purpose of journalism in a healthy democracy are being undermined by the public’s mistrust of media on one side and the shocking and sinister targeting of their work by police trying to get at their sources.
Secrecy is in the DNA of government generally. The level of unaccountability in Northern Ireland has again been revealed in recent revelations such as those in the Sean Brown case. So, there is something dark in the way Birney and McCaffrey have been spied on in attempts to discover their sources.
The fact that two mainland British police forces, including Scotland Yard, are involved should be of major concern for every journalist across the UK trying to get to the truth.
They seem to be the target, rather than those involved in corruption.