by Brian CathcartHacked Off has pointed out many times recently that the big newspaper groups are isolated and in denial. One of the most striking aspects of their present position is that there seems to be nobody to whom they will listen.A good example was seen at the High Court this week, when, with the support of 400 pages of documentation, representatives of PressBoF made a desperate and no doubt extremely expensive appeal for a further delay in the granting of the Royal Charter. All of their arguments were crushingly and convincingly dismissed in the judgement, and the judge refused them leave to appeal because their case had so little merit. But they are trying to appeal anyway, because they don’t listen.It’s the same with every voice that is raised to urge proprietors and editors to do the right thing, the thing that the judge at the inquiry urged them to do: to embrace real change. They don’t listen. Not to the public and their readers. Not to their past victims. Not to the National Union of Journalists. Not to an exceptionally rare consensus of all parties in Parliament.We all know that there are occasions when it is right to hold to your views and plough on, even when those around you are telling you to stop. But those cases are rare, and those who act in that way are surely under an obligation at least to listen to other voices.When the voices are those of your readers, of our democratically elected politicians, of the people over whose rights your industry has trampled, and of senior, independent judges, there is surely a far greater imperative to listen. Your choices remain your own, but they should be made in the light of the facts and the arguments that others put to you.Yet all the outward evidence suggests that if the newspaper bosses listen at all, it is only to each other.That is why the arguments they put forward to justify their position are so transparently weak. There is nothing in the detail of the Royal Charter to which they can reasonably take exception – it is painstakingly crafted to protect freedom of expression and it will actually bring them financial benefits – so instead they resort to amorphous concerns based on half-baked hypotheses.Among themselves, when they talk, it may well sound sensible to suggest that if, in future, Britain had an authoritarian government that wanted to gag the press, that government would be able, through Parliament, to amend the Royal Charter in ways harmful to free expression. They seem to have grasped this idea with enthusiasm, because the hardcore papers and their friends repeat it endlessly. It’s a pity that nobody in their conversation pointed out that it’s nonsensical.If we had an authoritarian government with a parliamentary majority that was ready to gag the press, it could find a hundred more effective ways of doing so than by tinkering with a Royal Charter that establishes a body that carries out inspections on a press self-regulator. The existence or otherwise of such a Charter would probably be a matter of complete indifference to such a government, since it could pass whatever law it liked in whatever form it liked. In short, if we had an authoritarian government, that and not the Charter would be our problem.Similarly, when they talk to each other nobody seems to point out the many flaws in their suggestion that the problems exposed by the Leveson Inquiry can all be solved by the law, if only the law is properly enforced. This is a not-very-artful attempt to blame the police for a decade of hacking, blagging, intrusion and fabrication by journalists.Nobody in their coterie points out that if we are to rely on the law alone to prevent press abuses we will need more and tougher laws, and the police will have to spend a lot more time in newsrooms. Who wants that?To give one more example, when they talk only to each other they are not confronted with inconvenient facts, and the result is that they make claims that are transparently absurd. They say, for example, that their proposed IPSO self-regulator, with all its faults, would be the toughest regulator in the free world.This simply blanks out the experience of most of Europe. Many European countries have statutory press regulation and/or a statutory right of reply. Finland, which in 2003 passed an ‘Act on the exercise of freedom of expression in the mass media’, is routinely top of the World Press Freedom Index.None of the arguments or claims they rely on in opposing change can survive real scrutiny – because they only hear what they want to hear.How can this change? How can they be lured out of the bunker and into the daylight? That’s a challenge for everyone who believes in the vital role of journalism in our society – which, on the evidence, is everybody.The change should happen now. The Royal Charter has been granted and will be implemented. Their efforts to salvage and rebrand the Press Complaints Commission as IPSO are doomed to failure. The arguments and incentives for setting up a Charter-compliant self-regulator are so compelling that it is certain to happen even if the big companies continue to sulk. Others will carry on without them.Trust in newspaper journalism in this country could hardly be lower. Here is an opportunity to win it back by stepping forward and accepting that real journalism has nothing to fear from being held to high standards – the standards that the reading public expects and recognises. If only they will listen.