by Brian CathcartLast month the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wrote to David Cameron asking him to think again about the Royal Charter approved by Parliament and arguing that authoritarian regimes around the world could see it as an excuse to introduce statutory media controls.I wrote in reply making clear that such regimes could only find encouragement from events in Britain if those events were misinterpreted or misrepresented. I urged the CPJ to check the facts and reconsider its position.I also spoke to the CPJ director, Joel Simon, who agreed to review the matter and respond. He has done so and his reply can be read here.Disappointingly, he does not seem to have looked at the evidence of the British experience or grasped the consequences. Look at this sentence: ‘The media's shortcomings – which are always present – never justify government intervention.’That position is an attractive one, especially for journalists, but it is unsustainable. Britain’s democratically elected Parliament quite often passes laws that interfere with the press. For example, it has just passed a Defamation Act which is necessary in part because newspapers sometimes libel people, and which has lots of bearing on what the press can and can't publish. Similarly legislation can be necessary to prevent the development of media monopolies, or to protect the private medical data of citizens, or to prevent breaches of the rights of children. These are justified government actions that address media shortcomings. It simply can’t be argued that the media’s shortcomings ‘never justify government intervention’.A cheap point, you might say, but this kind of thinking – general observations that don’t survive scrutiny – crops up several times in the CPJ reply. For all the good work it does, The CPJ seems to be clinging to a principle that demonstrably is not valid in all cases, and rather than rethinking that principle as it should, it seems to be closing its eyes to the evidence.Look at this: ‘CPJ has not been active in the debate over how to address the complex and difficult problems identified in the Leveson inquiry. But we oppose any solution that requires Parliamentary action.’ As I understand that, it means that they have not tracked events in Britain, but no matter what may have happened here the CPJ would not alter its position.That is like a scientist refusing to modify his theory even when an experiment has clearly shown that it doesn’t always work in practice.Britain’s recent press experiences undoubtedly make uncomfortable reading for journalists, but we can’t pretend they have not happened.Here is how I see it, and I am a journalist. We like to think journalists are the good guys and governments the bad ones. In any contest between the two – as the CPJ says, there is often tension – we tend to give journalists the benefit of the doubt.That’s fine as far as it goes, but we need to be clear who journalists are good for. That is to say, we have to acknowledge that journalism is only good insofar as it serves the public. Serving the interests of journalists themselves is not enough, and indeed may actually harm the public. As for journalism that serves corporate or political interests, that is usually a very bad thing.So what happens when, in a democracy, powerful corporate groups of journalists start to operate contrary to the interests of the public? Remember that journalists are not like ordinary citizens, because they have what Rupert Murdoch once called ‘a great power for evil’ – the power to hide, to cover up and to misrepresent.That happened in Britain. A group of newspaper companies that between them control well over 80 per cent of national sales entered into a tacit, long-term conspiracy to cover up each others’ wrongdoings.Some of these wrongdoings were illegal – hacking, data theft, libel, intrusion – and some were grossly unethical – harassment, bullying, surveillance, distortion. What they had in common was that, on the rare occasions when journalists were caught doing them, other papers would routinely ignore, play down or defend what had happened.They all, moreover, enjoyed the shelter of a regulator that wasn’t really a regulator, operating an ethical code of practice written exclusively by editors and rarely applied where it might seriously inconvenience powerful papers.Add to this the extraordinary influence over politicians that these newspapers enjoyed – influence that extended to an almost routine ability to bend policy and legislation in their favour – and you have a serious problem for a democracy.It means ordinary people are not supplied with important information they need if they are to function as effective citizens. Equally, laws are not written or applied in ways that serve the public interest. Public life is poisoned, and all the time the effects of the poison are cynically presented as good health.The effects are not just general, which would be bad enough. Plenty of people suffer personally from press abuses and they very often have no access to legal remedy and little help from the regulator. They can’t, for obvious reasons, take their cases to the press, and some are victims because they have stood up to this abuse of power and become targets as a result.And what about journalists themselves? The CPJ, in its mission statement, says that it ‘defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal’. Here was a case where, if journalists sought to report the news about the activities of their own employers, they had every reason to fear reprisal from those same employers.In this situation – and I believe that I have not exaggerated this British case study – what should people do in a democratic society?If this problem involved corrupt banks or utility companies you might turn to the press for help, but you can’t do that here. So whom should you turn to? Your elected, representative politicians.In Britain, that is what happened. And the politicians responded. They set up a public inquiry under an independent judge who heard the views and evidence of all interested parties, including the press. When he reported someone had to implement his recommendations and it was not going to be the press corporations themselves, which have refused to change for 70 years and are not about to do so voluntarily now. So it had to be our Parliament.And what did they do? They took care to act together – all of the parties. And they acted with the utmost restraint, introducing a system hedged around with far better protections for the freedom of public-interest journalism than ever existed in this country before. It is a good system, one that any democrat can be proud of.But the CPJ, which ‘has not been active in the debate over how to address the complex and difficult problems identified in the Leveson inquiry’, blithely tells us that no, a better solution can surely be found – and it apparently suggests handing the problem over to the same journalists whose failures and wrongdoing caused the crisis in the first place.It must be comfortable and convenient for journalists to live in a world where the rights of journalists trump everything, no matter what the journalists actually do. Unlike the CPJ, we in Britain can’t afford to do that because real, ordinary people have been suffering, and so has our democracy.And so we suggest, once again, that the CPJ looks more closely at the British experience and the lessons it teaches.The Committee says it is worried about what it should tell dictators about events in Britain. It is surely best to follow the golden rule of journalism and try to tell the unvarnished truth.(The CPJ notes that I alleged that its letter to David Cameron contained inaccuracies and distortions and says that, having looked, it has not found any. I will discuss this in another blog.)Brian Cathcart is director of Hacked Off. He tweets at @BrianCathcart.