It’s often suggested that young people today, who live in a world of excessive consumerism, advertising, an abundance of flashing images and breaking news available at one click, may have shorter attention spans and a desire for all information to be conveyed at a similarly rapid speed.
This is an attitude which, it seems, is not particularly conducive to the type of patience and attention required by such a drawn out and lengthy piece of news as the Leveson Inquiry. Attention span quips aside, as this epic piece of public investigating enters its eighth month, we must remind ourselves of the significance and scale of what is being attempted here. Although the end may not be yet in sight, we must resist temptation to reduce the Leveson Inquiry to “that inquiry which is still going on”.
For anyone who has been living under a rock, or a cosy bubble chair in the Harry Fairhurst building, for the last few months, the Leveson Inquiry is an ongoing public inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics of the British Press”, headed by Lord Justice Leveson which was catapulted into the forefront of the public eye with the hacking of the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. What has emerged is a barrel full of implications aimed at senior conservatives and media personalities, as the full power of the media and the extent to which politicians rely on good press is slowly being exposed.
In addition to the potential of the inquiry to lose the attention of the public in the face of more dramatic and up to the minute news stories such as the Syrian massacres, it also faces dangerous criticism from voices which are much closer to the issue. On facing three criminal charges, ex News of the World Editor, Rebekah Brooks, called the decision to charge her “an expensive sideshow”. This sort of criticism seeks to trivialise the purpose of the Leveson Inquiry, suggesting it aims to make a ‘show’ of punishing a few individuals, instead of cleansing the ethics of the press as a whole.
There has even been speculation as to the possible negative consequences of the Leveson inquiry; the first few tentative articles are starting to voice the worry that perhaps one of the most significant results of such a probing and censorious investigation will be a diminution of the freedom of speech in the press, something that is quite clearly not desired.
To counter the negative slant that is perhaps beginning to be associated with the Leveson Inquiry, it is time to remind ourselves of just a few of the undeniably positive outcomes. In an increasingly competitive market for print publications and journalism as a whole, money is of the essence more than ever. And as the people who are in control of the money behind a newspaper, i.e. its advertisers, are only interested in compelled audiences and not political issues, the ethics behind the process of finding a story become less important than the amount of people who are reading it.
In short this meant that in the past, an advertiser would not necessarily abandon a paper with a large readership, merely on ethical basis. If nothing else, the Leveson Inquiry has shone the spotlight on journalism to such an extent that will hopefully ensure stricter controls for the future of reporting. As this will encompass the entire British Press, advertising as a whole will become more ethical.
While the Leveson Inquiry is lasting longer than the average news story and may baffle us with its level of bureaucratic complexity, but if we value democracy, free speech and morality in our press as much as we say we do, we should shut our ears to the criticism and stick along for the ride.