We are richer by far in having a varied media as part of the life of the community. Sometimes, I suppose, those in authority must doubt this. Certainly the new government will come to doubt it. Beset by huge problems and by the daily anxieties of state, they will often look upon a vigorous and searching media as a vexation they could well do without. But should such a thought ever cross the mind it should be instantly dismissed. Quite apart from being an essential part of a functioning democracy, a strong media in fact helps those in authority seek out error and identify misconceived policies.
Certainly those who govern, indeed those who run anything from corporation to cricket club, must be big enough to accept that anti-establishment sentiments are meat and drink to any red-blooded journalist.
It is deep in all of us to be critical of those who are in control and we love to hear such criticism expressed as strikingly and amusingly and as fully as possible. Richard Hooker, the 16th Century English theologian, said all that needs to be said on that score when he wrote:
“He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attention and favourable hearers.”
And it is good that this universal inclination to criticize and challenge those in charge should be able to express itself in the media of the day, else it will go underground whispering, festering and undermining.
A free media almost daily will infuriate intelligent, knowledgeable people. It tends to take as dogma what the philosopher A N Whitehead suggested in his Adventure of Ideas: “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.” A free media is always forgetting the dictum of C P Scott, great editor of the Manchester Guardian: “Comment is free but facts are sacred”. A free media will probably never learn the truth of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words: “Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” H L Mencken, himself one of the greatest of American newspapermen, put his finger on the main trouble when he wrote:
“The educated man … knows that newspapers are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge …. and so he assumes that they make the same or even worse errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. The assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.”
Yet, in the end, which is better – that a nation’s media be gagged or that it should breathe easily even if the breath is sometimes foul?
When I was young I grew up with the words of John Stuart Mill echoing in my head because they were so often quoted by a marvellous history teacher we had named Arthur Farrell, the “serious ghost” we called him. Arthur Farrell used to intone Mill’s famous prescription, holding the book before us as if it was a bible:
“A State which dwarfs men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished.”
And even more frequently “Ghost” Farrell would quote Mill’s solemn advice:
“If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
These words are the bedrock of all freedom of speech and they are well known. Not as well known are some other words of John Stuart Mill which argue just as powerfully for freedom of opinion.
“To question all things: never to run away from any difficulty; to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny … letting no fallacy or incoherence or confusion of thought step by unperceived; above all, to insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood before using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to it.”t a bad credo for any journalist worth his salt.
