Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
I would like Leveson Part Two. I think Leveson was a good exercise. That is why the Tories blocked it, because it was beginning to develop more accountability within the media itself.
I think the industry can probably self-correct without regulation, but I don't believe an individual outlet can regulate itself.
The cable law. Prasar Bharati. The Broadcasting Bill. These are all overlapping things.
It's worth knowing that there's very different sets of regulation for the print press and for broadcast media. They're different things, particularly during campaign periods.
Media access to us is more regulated than in golf.
The decision of what, when, and how to publish is for editors, not judges.
The notion of a neutral, mainstream national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.
In the U.K., the history of regulation, certainly regulation of the media, is one in which, time and again, successive governments lacked the 'bottle' to enforce the powers that were available to them.
The present combination of corporate or commercial control theoretically answerable to politically appointed Boards of Governors is not in any sense a democratic enough procedure to control the power the broadcasters have.
Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.
Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
We need to police ourselves in the media.
