91Èȱ¬

Thank you for inviting me to speak at your Conference. Judging by the sort of attention that the 91Èȱ¬ gets from some of your members – I chair apparently the high-rolling Pravda of Hampstead – it's a bit like Beelzebub being asked to address the angelic host. I'll do my best to behave within the bounds of public decorum.

I note the drama implied by the title of your conference. "Magna Carta II: a modern Media Charter". No understatement there! Has the history of the media really come to this - another confrontation at Runnymede? Don't forget that Pope Innocent III called the original Magna Carta, with just a hint of tabloid style, "shameful, debasing, illegal and unjust". So much for yesterday's barons, who most certainly never raised with John Lackland the issue of freedom of speech.

So why is it on the agenda of serious journalists today, as the Leveson inquiry opens its doors? No one should exaggerate. This is not a post-Gutenberg moment when the introduction of printing led to an avalanche of censorship by the Church. Nor do we face the suppression of freedom that led to John Milton writing his polemic "Areopagitica". When we cite the fundamental values of speaking truth to power, we should take care not to exaggerate. What we are discussing is not "the power" that in Soviet times led to Vasily Grossman's plea (in the words of a character in his work Life and Fate) – "Can you imagine what it's like to have freedom of the press… Can you imagine a newspaper… that provides information…you're allowed out onto the street without your nanny."

Nor is this "the power" that has just jailed two officials in China for giving economic statistics to the foreign media, and locked up Liu Xiaobo for eleven years. But slippery slopes exist even in free democratic societies. This was the point made by George Orwell when, during the Second World War, he defended the lifting of the ban on the "Daily Worker", much though he hated its views. "Tolerance and decency," he wrote, "are deeply rooted in England but they are not indestructible". I am not sure how much of Fleet Street at the time was on his side and that of the "Daily Worker". But he chose to be guided by what Milton called "the known rules of ancient liberty". We should be similarly guided today.

What exactly is today's challenge?

In a speech just before leaving Number 10 in 2007, Mr Blair described a media world fragmented and transformed by technology with hundreds of TV stations now available in Britain, and with newspapers fighting for a share of a shrinking market against competition from the internet (with its growing advertising revenue) and the social media. Moreover, he noted that a 24-hours-a-day news schedule imposes new disciplines and makes new demands. Mr Blair's conclusion was that this, not human wickedness, had encouraged the press to lower their standards and behave like "feral beasts". Mr Blair's analysis was rather lost in the denunciation of a conclusion which for many newspapers raised the unseemly prospect of someone who had manifestly lived by the sword objecting when the blade turned in his direction. Whether or not this was deemed fair was a judgement inevitably affected by one's personal experience of dealing with Mr Blair's administration.

The world described by the former Prime Minister was clearly darkened by the alleged systemic criminality exposed in one newspaper's behaviour last summer. And more attention focused on this because the breaking of the story – which had been diligently pursued for some time - coincided with the attempt by News Corp to purchase the whole of BSkyB. The alleged hacking and police pay-offs were indefensible. But we know that hacking and related activities have taken place for years; Ministers and the Royal family have been among the targets.

Presumably when a Minister's mobile phone call was intercepted by paramilitaries in Northern Ireland over twenty years ago, it was wrong for a Sunday newspaper to publish on its front page the details of his intercepted phone conversation with his wife. But I don't recall anyone saying so at the time. What has changed over the years is that the practice became widespread and involved not only public figures but many others too, including those coping with terrible private grief. Did we think that politicians or celebrities were fair game, that because they were public figures they had no right to privacy? They would plainly attract less sympathy than others would receive, but were their rights any different? Whatever the precise reasons for the change in attitudes, we quickly remembered that "feral" behaviour could be criminal too. So the cry went up, "Something must be done". The media must behave better. The government stepped in. An inquiry has been set up. It goes conscientiously about its work. And meanwhile Britain's ancient liberties, including the right to freedom of speech, are asserted not only by the editor of the "Daily Mail" but by the Lord Chief Justice of England himself.

I find myself agreeing with Paul Dacre that a lot of the noise is unfair and unwelcome to a great number of journalists in this country, not least in the local and regional press, who are doing an honest job without any great reward. But I need no convincing that the overwhelming majority of journalists do their job conscientiously and professionally and have been disgusted by the stories of malpractice that have surfaced this year.

I mentioned local and regional papers. They are important not only because they hold those in power to account, but also because they fight their readers' corner in seeking to make their lives better and their communities safer. Recent examples I am personally aware of include the Yorkshire Post's "Give Us A Fair Deal" campaign which has sought to raise awareness of the impact of the recession on the Yorkshire and Humber region, and the Enfield Independent's "Don't Carry, Don't Kill" campaign for tougher sentences for knife crime among under 18s.

Clearly, a gulf lies between this form of journalism and the sort of criminal behaviour that, it is alleged, was institutionalised at the News of the World. How, then, can we make sense of the broader issues of public debate that extend across this gulf and beyond to other parts of the broadcast and online media?

I want to make three arguments today:

• First, that it is a bit of a distraction to focus too heavily on broadcasters, including the 91Èȱ¬
• Second, that it would be wrong to try to import any model of regulation from the broadcast media to the press
• Third, that newspapers themselves need to find ways to re-build public trust in what they do.

Leveson and the broadcasters

While all media must account for themselves to the current inquiry, the main focus is on the newspaper industry. Of course broadcasters must examine how they too have behaved in the course of their journalistic activities.

At the 91Èȱ¬, the Director-General has reviewed the Corporation's practices with producers and editors and has pursued an audit trail through past financial arrangements. The Trust is assured that the 91Èȱ¬'s investigative journalism has been in the public interest and there appears to be no evidence of phone hacking, computer hacking or the corruption of public officials by 91Èȱ¬ journalists. The 91Èȱ¬ Trust is working with the Executive to ensure that our editorial guidelines are as strong as possible to prevent abuse.

The main reason why broadcasting organisations are not the main targets of investigation by the Leveson Inquiry is that they are already subject to a system of statutory regulation, which does not in my judgement inhibit our freedom to act as journalists with integrity. We are regulated but not censored. For other broadcasters, Ofcom is the regulator. For the 91Èȱ¬ the framework of regulation comprises both Ofcom and the governance of the 91Èȱ¬ through its Trust, the 91Èȱ¬'s sovereign strategic authority. Ofcom has, in my view, done an excellent job as a broadcasting regulator, operating with clarity and a light but effective touch. The fact that it does good work with broadcasters, whose medium is so intrusive, does not mean that it provides a model for regulation of the written press.

The principal roles of the Trust as the 91Èȱ¬'s sovereign authority are to defend the Corporation's independence and to ensure that it does not lose the trust of the licence fee payers who fund it out of their hard pressed incomes. No one owes us a living. The 91Èȱ¬ has to work to retain this trust, and when it errs – as it did for example, completely absurdly, in fixing the competition to name the Blue Peter cat – confidence in it sags. Life being what it is, there will inevitably be further editorial errors in future. The important thing for the 91Èȱ¬ is to respond in the right way, to acknowledge mistakes early, to apologise and to take prompt action to address them. And to remember that it is by maintaining the highest standards of journalism that the 91Èȱ¬ will secure public trust in the long run.

The polling evidence shows that overwhelmingly people trust the 91Èȱ¬ more than they do other news organisations – written or electronic – to tell the truth. Does that make us impartial in their eyes? Understandably, the public find the whole notion of impartiality difficult to define. Perfect impartiality is difficult, perhaps impossible, to attain. I think most people understand that and understand that the 91Èȱ¬ is not perfect. As for newspapers, I don't imagine people buy them because they think they are impartial. That is not what most newspapers set out to be. But the 91Èȱ¬ is in a different position. Balance and accuracy are the qualities that licence fee payers seek in 91Èȱ¬ output- telling things as they really are, not as this or that political party or interest group might wish them to be. Taking those yardsticks, they usually appear satisfied with the quality of 91Èȱ¬ journalism.

Admittedly, that is not the invariable rule as far as governments are concerned; indeed the history of the 91Èȱ¬ since the very beginning has been one of disputes with the government of the day. Churchill, Eden, Wilson, Thatcher, Blair: the rows have sometimes been incendiary. We have been attacked from both the Left and the Right. How governments invariably define balance and accuracy is not always the same as the view of a broadcaster which seeks to serve the nation not act as an agent of the State.

I find the charge of bias difficult to deal with unless there is context. Certainly looking at the whole range of our broadcasting output and the quality of individual reporters and editors – Stephanie Flanders, Nick Robinson, Jeremy Bowen and so on – I would refute the charge of political bias. That said, of course we get things wrong from time to time. When we do, we should examine the evidence and, when mistakes have been made, apologise and correct them straightaway.

There is in my view a more justified charge than that of political bias, and that is that we should try harder to reflect the full range and diversity of the life of the nations that make up the United Kingdom. This has been a heavily centralised country, which applies to its cultural as well as its political and administrative life. It is odd to find ourselves accused of failing to reflect the whole of our society, and at the same time criticised for moving more of our programme-making away from London and the South East. A major reason for our own devolution of creativity and management is so that we can better understand, represent and draw strength from the life of all our different communities.

As a publicly funded broadcaster whose output is so directly intrusive, there are some areas where we ought to be particularly careful in our journalism or even decline to follow where newspapers or online journalism may properly lead.

Despite the 91Èȱ¬'s tradition of investigative journalism, the 91Èȱ¬ could not have paid for the information on MPs' expenses as The Daily Telegraph did, nor could we have pursued the hacking story at News International as remorselessly as The Guardian campaign did. When this hacking story broke, some suggested that we were giving it excessive coverage, as it were leading the hue and cry. But when a spot check was done on the amount of time devoted to the story by different broadcasters, it showed that both ITN and Sky were giving more time to the story, in proportion to their total time on air, than the 91Èȱ¬.

The hacking story inevitably coloured the debate about News Corp's bid for full ownership of BSkyB. That's not something I want to comment on as Chairman of the 91Èȱ¬ Trust. What I do have an opinion on is the suggestion that the issue of pluralism is not how much of the media in Britain is owned by News Corp but how much is provided by the 91Èȱ¬. For some bloggers and commentators, the main issue raised by the hacking scandal was not criminality by a few journalists and the location of the responsibility for their behaviour but, rather bizarrely, the alleged dominance of the media in Britain by a publicly-funded broadcaster.

This is a particularly odd assertion given that the 91Èȱ¬ has represented a steadily diminishing part of the broadcasting economy. From a monopoly position in 1950 to a situation today where commercial revenues across TV and radio are now at least double licence fee revenues.

Today, if people still get most of their news from the 91Èȱ¬ it is because they choose to do so, not because there is no alternative. The 91Èȱ¬ itself estimates there are now over 120 news websites in the UK with more than 100,000 users. Yet 91Èȱ¬ News still reaches 80% of adults every week. And it has a greater reach than Sky News, which I think is an admirable 24-hour news service, even in Sky homes. Only 27% of total TV news minutes are from 91Èȱ¬ News but those minutes attract over 70% of audience viewing of news. I might add as a post-script to this argument that if we are so powerful in the 91Èȱ¬, it is curious that the diaries of our political leaders have not been as full with meetings with our staff as they were with meetings with newspaper executives.

What in my view should most preoccupy the 91Èȱ¬ is not rebutting the charge that its journalism is biased or too dominant but whether it is always as good as it should be. We will be in future a slimmed down organisation. I do not believe that should affect the quality of our journalism. Indeed, a wholly integrated news operation from local to global should aim to do even better. We should certainly be constantly challenging ourselves to raise the quality of what we do.

Why the 91Èȱ¬ needs a free press

So the responsibility to ensure high standards of professionalism rests with journalists, their editors and their proprietors. My rather prosaic conclusion is that newspapers have to be given the chance to find their own solution – although I note that already there is talk of Ombudsmen and backstop powers to help make any new system work.

But how can you give a system of self-regulation – a form of accountability that newspapers invariably scorn when others advocate it for their own industries and professions – the credibility that the public seek?

It is particularly important because newspapers have played and continue to play a fundamental role in our democratic life. They can continue to do so - in particular if they can carve out a distinctive role and a position of trust in and amongst the din of the internet. They can help to close the democratic deficit that risks opening up in that new online world of endless unmediated opinion and information.

But trust needs to be built. Back in 2002 in the Reith Lectures, Onora O'Neill gave this warning on trust: 'if we remain cavalier about press standards, a culture of suspicion will persist'. That is now more true than ever.

The answer is not necessarily to look immediately for a legal or regulatory solution. It may be to think more widely about how trust works. Everyone inside and outside the media needs to be clear about why trust in the media matters, and what responsibilities that trust entails. In particular we need:

• First, maximum clarity about what is agreed to be ethically acceptable;
• And second, transparency about how ethics are applied, in a way that forms part of readers' everyday experience of the journalism they read.

To take a simple analogy - doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, and we all understand broadly speaking what it means. The PCC Code is not understood or trusted in the same way. If it is to be replaced, are there some clear and simple principles that we could all look to as a guide for print journalists and editors in their work?

Can you, as the leaders of the industry, develop some form of watermark to distinguish proper, ethical journalism from the mass of intrusive and unregulated material that is available elsewhere?

This will require more humility about the challenges involved. It may require an increased sense of shame where things go wrong. It is not at all straightforward-Tom Stoppard, who almost invented paradox, notes that so far as newspaper behaviour is concerned he thinks that the time has come to draw a line, but the trouble is that he doesn't trust anyone to draw it.

It also requires us to revisit what we mean by free speech and what its boundaries are. JS Mill is an inspiring example from the nineteenth century but it is hardly more appropriate for people today to use his name in support of their arguments than it was for the American Revolutionaries of the eighteenth century to pray in aid Magna Carta (your conference organisers' theme of the day).

It is true that a free society needs a free press. But the press can harm as well as enhance the freedoms of the rest of us, if editors abuse their power. Like free markets, freedom of speech can produce harmful effects if it is completely unlimited. As Edmund Burke wrote "Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed". And it's not helpful if newspapers cite 'free speech' as a blanket justification for every story, every intrusion, every piece of celebrity tittle-tattle, no matter what the circumstances.

Let me leave you with four ideas that are surely worth thinking about:

• Free speech is not an end in itself but a means of developing a more effective, plural, accountable, democratic society
• Free speech does not excuse any/or all forms of behaviour - rights of privacy are important from a human perspective and are not simply a legal inconvenience for journalists
• Free speech is for individuals not institutions (as Onora O'Neill argued)
• Trust can very often be a necessary condition for us to exercise our freedoms in a plural society.

It is sad that it took the News of the World to get us debating these issues. But debate them now we must and will.