A British Invasion of America’s Newsrooms Impacts Free Expression

Proponents of unrestricted media — with freedom of expression given its most literal meaning — can draw legitimacy from any part of philosophical history. They can do this because every era of philosophy is written by people who want to say things and must, therefore, believe they have the right to say them, and philosophers are typically keen to argue that point.

Thus, almost everyone from the most ancient thinkers onwards has advocated for open dialogue and contributed to an extensive library of quotes. You can make yourself a free speech absolutist by copy-pasting them onto social platforms. Lots of people do.

What you cannot do, however, is point to any examples of unrestricted free speech working, at least not at scale, because there have always been restrictions. The most basic of which, and the one that dominated for most of recorded history, is that free speech only ever applied to the free — as in not enslaved, impoverished, oppressed, etc. — and those it did apply to, at least ostensibly, were more than happy to deny it to others.

And I say “ostensibly” because it never really applied to them either. Socrates was ordered to kill himself for saying things that the Athenian state didn’t like. You’d need a spreadsheet to tally everyone who died at the hands of religious zealots. And Cicero’s silencing didn’t even end at his decapitation — his decaying tongue was pulled out and repeatedly stabbed with a hairpin, just to make sure.

Two thousand years later, and in less violent times (for most of us!), things are still ostensible. You may be able to post almost anything on Twitter, and there are dank recesses of the internet where you can post absolutely anything, but you’re unlikely to make a dent in the broader media discourse unless you have a very large audience ready to hear you.

And such an audience, give or take a small number of exceptions, has to be built through some combination of paid outreach (ads, sponsorship, buying speaking slots), paid distribution (print, more ads, expensive SEO), or paying to leverage someone else’s audience (op-eds, interviews, yet more ads).

Little wonder, then, that even in our social and self-publishing age, media mega players still hold the greatest influence, their deep pockets and huge audiences forming, I’m sorry to say, the true foundations of public debate. And, if you don’t believe me, consider this — Rupert Murdoch terrifies all politicians, but I’ll wager that few politicians even know who Mr. Beast is.

And politicians matter. Over the last century, as literacy rates have increased and ideas have sailed across borders, we’ve formed a legally shaky, paradoxical and incomplete global equilibrium.

Everyone, from the most influential media tycoon downwards, has freedom of expression, as defined by the UN, and is restricted from certain kinds of speech, as defined by the UN. But since the UN is fairly useless, national governments take over and decide what that means, and how their nation’s media should be enabled, guided and curtailed, and in democracies, we get to vote on those governments.

It’s a cumbersome system, and an imperfect one, but this combination of national voting and international law puts a measure of power into the hands of each democracy’s citizens. So, what happens if a democracy’s media is suddenly reshaped by the media from another country, one whose government is elected by other people? What does that mean for democracy and freedom of expression?

American journalists have started asking those questions, triggered by an influx of foreign talent flowing into their newsrooms. And it’s all the same kind of foreign — my kind, Brits.

Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Daily Beast, CNN and The Washington Post are all now under British leadership or editorial direction. And the prevailing theory for this transatlantic shift is that American proprietors are seeking to adopt a hungrier, rougher and more British-style of journalism.

It isn’t hard to see where that desire is coming from. Profits are down, in many cases the better term is losses are up, layoffs and closures are happening, and America’s news outlets need leaders who can operate with small budgets and scant growth opportunities (see Pew Research for a series of fantastic statistical reports). Britain, being a market about one-fifth the size of the US, and crowded to boot, produces lots of talented leaders who fit the bill, commercially, at least.

Culturally, however, British newspapers make up for their resource limitations with a journalistic aggression that has long raised American eyebrows, and not just at the British tabloids responsible for paparazzi car chases and celebrity phone hacking. Even the most reputable papers in Britain run on a fast-paced, elbows-out, scoop-hunting ethos that sees payments going to sources, favours traded with public figures, and stories pumped or dumped in line with the paper’s ideological leanings.

Which, honestly, doesn’t bother Brits one iota because “newspapers” are not the nation’s source of sensible, balanced and sober reporting. That’s predominantly the publicly-funded BBC, which accounts for over half of the domestic news market, and other TV news programmes that are regulated and must, by law, remain impartial.

In fact, so revered is TV news (and its associated digital footprint) in Britain that recent attempts to launch US-style opinion-oriented programmes have faltered miserably. GB news, for instance, a kind of Fox-lite show, hasn’t even reached a 1% audience share, and Talk TV, the British home of Piers Morgan, has announced that it’s closing its TV operation altogether, and is now known simply as Talk.

And the sheer weight of Britain’s stolid TV news is what provides space for its newspapers to act like sharks in a fish tank. It allows them to take freedom of expression much further than a BBC journalist would dream of doing. It allows them to be partisan, opinionated and dogmatic and to behave, at times, atrociously because the public doesn’t need newspapers to maintain TV’s stricter journalistic standards. In Britain, opinions belong in print, and news belongs on the telly, and that’s our version of the shaky, paradoxical and incomplete equilibrium.

In America, the news landscape is balanced differently, even inverted through cable news shows, and many newspaper journalists see themselves, with considerable justification, as guardians of factual and ethical reporting. It is uncertain how British leadership can find harmony with that.

And, if harmony can’t be found, brute financial concerns force questions about how America’s news might find ways to maintain a sustainable landscape. About how America might find a new balance that can arbitrate between free expression, restrictions on free speech, and the interplay between democracy and the power of media moguls.

One thing is certain, though — America’s old balance is dying.