 Welcome to the British Library. My name's B. Rowlatt and I work here in the cultural events team. I'm at the entrance of our brand new exhibition, Breaking the News. It's just opened and you can book online. Tonight is the first event in our season of events around news and it's about press freedom, the freedom that underpins all others that Nelson Mandela referred to as the lifeblood of any democracy. And to explore the related themes, we've got a stellar panel for you and the chair is the distinguished journalist, Isabel Hilton. Isabel has had a career that's taken her all over the world and when I was a baby journalist in BBC World Service, she was an absolute icon to me and many others. During this event, you can post your questions in the box below. You can donate to the British Library, you can give us feedback and you can also buy Jacob's book, Free Speech, a History from Socrates to Social Media. And after you've seen him speak, I'm sure you'll be ready to buy that. In the meantime, I'm handing you over to Isabel. Over to you, Isabel. Thank you so much. Thank you first of all for the wonderful invitation to be part of this event and also for the pleasure of having a sneak preview of the exhibition itself last night which I found really interesting and I hope that anyone who's within striking distance of London or any of the regional centres will be able to visit. It certainly, for me, it put into perspective a number of issues that we'll be talking of but also things that we think of as rather contemporary. Turns out they have rather deep roots. I mean obviously things like how you cover a war is a long running issue but personal scandal, hideous crime, leaked private papers, fake news, turns out that they all have a very long history and even the challenge of new technology isn't really new. So we're here to talk about that fundamental issue of press freedom which Merriam-Webs's dictionary defines as the right of newspapers, magazines to report news without being controlled by government. I don't disagree with that. I'm not sure that it tells the whole story though. There are some fundamental questions about what news is, news about what, news from what angle, with which reader in mind and whose news. If the press is only telling us the story of a narrow section of society, what is this freedom being used for and is it a lack of freedom for those whose lives and concerns are not reported? Does the right to freedom also carry duties, obligations and if so how should these be defined? How should they be policed and again by whom? And what about ownership and transparency, unseen influences, accountability? Should we care who owns our media? Should we follow the money and wonder when someone buys a newspaper what exactly are they buying? So should we set rules and if so what should they be? Are there boundaries that even a free press shouldn't cross? So how free is the UK press in any event? We have an official secrets act, we have an anti-deformation act and there's a whole noisy universe of social media with it shouting and it's dark actors, it's manipulation of emotion under the guise of news and supposedly free speech. So we have a lot to talk about. Unfortunately, we have a wonderful panel for this evening's discussion, so let me introduce them. The longer bios are on the website and if we went into all their collective achievements, we would be here for quite a while. So very briefly, Inaya Falurin Iman is a writer and a broadcaster. She's the creator and host of the discussion, which is A Weekly Ideas, a culture and politics show on GB News. She's also the founder and director of the Equiano Project, which describes itself as a forum for freedom of speech and open dialogue on race, identity and culture. Jacob Mamtengama is the author of Free Speech, as we've heard Free Speech, a global history from Socrates to social media, which I have been reading with great interest and I warmly recommend it. He's a lawyer, he's a human rights advocate and a think tank founder and he's written for many national and international outlets and continues to do so. Mark Thompson is co-chair with Maria Ressa, the Nobel Laureate at the International Fund for Public Interest Media. He has had a very distinguished career as director general of the BBC for eight years, then CEO and president of the New York Times. He had a great effect and he's currently also chair of ancestry.com and deputy chair of the Royal Shakespeare Company. So a very warm welcome to our panel, a very warm welcome to all of you online. And just so we see if we're starting from the same baseline, beginning with you Jacob, I wonder if you could just define press freedom for me and tell us why you think it matters. Well actually I think press freedom is really only a subspecies of a larger freedom, which is free speech or freedom of expression. And the roots of that are very ancient deep and sprawling going all the way back to ancient Athens and the democracy there, which distinguished itself from other contemporary civilizations by being, by their standards, rather equal and an emphasis on freedom. All freeborn male citizens had a voice in public affairs and there was a tolerance of social dissent that set them apart. So I think free speech is wound up with democracy, with freedom with equality, but press freedom only really becomes an issue of course with the printing press. And of course the reformation sets off a very long and bloody distorted history which has some parallels to the times that we live in today. And we start to see calls for press freedom, which is initially just a call basically to say that there should be no prepublication censorship and one of the most famous appeals for that, of course is John Milton's area of Pagetica. But in many ways I think it's a little bit unfair that John Milton gets all the credit because in fact John Milton did not believe in press freedom for Catholics. He believed in burning books that were impious and other things. And I think that in this country the levelers are much more deserving of the prize as the true champions of free speech because they not only did not believe in prepublication censorship. They did not believe in sort of seditious libel laws that send a lot of critics to prison. But again there with the levelers you see that they were also in favour of representative government, universal male suffrage. So you see this intimate connection between democracy and press freedom. And then I think there's another element to press freedom and free speech which I think is really important to stress today because a lot of people make the argument that free speech has become a weapon against the marginalised against the oppressed. But I argue in the book that free speech and press freedom might actually be the most powerful engine of equality that human beings have ever stumbled upon. And it's been absolutely fundamental for every oppressed group and all the groups that have been subjected to oppression and discrimination throughout time whether they were racial minorities, colonised people or women and so on. So in that sense I would say that press freedom is absolutely essential for democracy, for freedom. It becomes the bulwark of liberty as an enlightenment meme called it. But also for tolerance and ultimately it is also I think the antithesis of violence. It allows us to settle conflicts through dialogue, through being pragmatic and compromising. In order to be pragmatic and compromise we need radical freedom to express controversial ideas. So that would be sort of my initial remarks. Great, thank you. Inaya, how does it look to you, why define press freedom for you and why does it matter? Well first I just want to say thank you so much for inviting me on this panel and I'm really honoured and inspired to be honoured to be on the panel with so many distinguished speakers. And I think Jacob really set out a very clear and eloquent historical outline there and I think I would associate myself and echo many of the things that he has said. But I do think you know from a very simple definition it is the right to express and communicate free published media be that print video or otherwise. And I think it is set out in various international standards but very simply the government should not interfere with this freedom or censor media that is critical of state power. And I think within that I think journalists therefore have often viewed themselves as engaging in the fearless pursuit of truth highlighting opposing perspectives and exposing wrongdoing without fear or favour. Ultimately holding the powerful to account and I think that this is why freedom of the press and journalism have been regarded or are regarded as rightfully so fundamental pillars of democracy. And I do think, as was already said that I think it is intrinsically linked to freedom of speech because as citizens the presumption of democracy is that we are able and capable to weigh up competing information. Look at a wide range of perspectives come to our own conclusions and make up our own judgment and I do think that that is the liberal ideal within freedom of the press that we will have our biases. We get things wrong, but ultimately we are striving to create a more freer society and that is the basis of a liberal democracy to which press freedom is essential to that. So that's what I would summarise as what press freedom is. Thank you and Mark. The same question. I want to agree with everything Jacob and Anaya have already said terrible outbreak of harmony here. I know, I know, I'll try and break it if I can. Three three kind of comments from me really very much in the spirit of what's just been said. It's worth saying that the freedom of expression. I think it's also it's the freedom of impression. It's the right of the public to hear what they choose to hear and to make up their own minds about things. And so captured in this right is actually not just a handful of creators and journalists and rest of it. It's actually it's all humanity. It's every citizen and the right not to have someone decide on your behalf what you what you can and can't look at. Again, I want to, I guess, emphasise that the big threat to freedom of expression is always the government. It's those in political power. We have a real and actually also I think very important ongoing debate about the boundaries of what, as it were appropriate to say in public, what are the bounds of debate on topics like identity and gender, what offends some people and or more than that is is emotionally damaging to them and so forth. That debate also goes back hundreds of years. And I think it's quite important to say, although I think it is very important debate, it's actually a slightly different one. From the boundaries of what used to be called what you can say in polite society has always been an intensely fiercely argued point with, you know, I mean I'm somebody much attractive when I was director general of the BBC to open the criminal prosecution against me for blasphemy for putting on the musical Jerry spring of the opera. I mean, but it was the last actually a last attempt in Britain to to launch a criminal prosecution. That's really an example of, you know, taste convention offence. I think freedom of expression, I think of is the is the use of political power to stop the public having the freedom to choose what they want to see and hear and listen to. And the suppression of the right of individuals to be heard. And I want to say, although obviously these belong to the same family, I think they're very different debates. If I remember rightly gay news was prosecuted for black blasphemy for a poem. Was it was I can't I have to I can't remember I think I can't recall how that ended. They won. I mean, they won on appeal, I think. Yeah, yeah, but but it may have bankrupted them anyway. The Jerry spring attempt to the prosecution essentially ended up with the appeal court essentially abolishing blasphemy. So, so Marcus has stated very categorically that the biggest threat to press freedom is always government. Jacob, do you do you agree with that? Do you see other threats? I do actually. I think that the culture of free speech is incredibly important. So, you know, I talk about the Athenian democracy. And there there was a tolerance of social dissent which which underpinned free speech. And I think that, you know, if you go to John Stuart Mill, for instance, he warns in on liberty. He warns as much about the tyranny of the majority and his and its ability to impose its ideals on social dissenters, which may be as tyrannical as the tyranny of the magistrate. George Orwell says much the same. So his his his assessment, I think of of wartime censorship is that the British government was sort of not too bad. You know, you had you had a, you know, the BBC did not engage in overt propaganda and you had a gentleman sitting in Germany who spread propaganda into the UK that that was not that was not stopped. He was prosecuted and executed after the war, but but nonetheless. But but he says all all warns against, for instance, the concentration of power among private owned newspapers, that that can be a threat to. So, for instance, if you have privately owned newspapers, you could you could you could go to Hungary today, where you don't have as oppressive laws as you have in Russia, but you have laws that concentrate ownership of media so that most media are government friendly. So so that I think is also problematic and ultimately I think the culture of free speech determines the limit, the legal limits of free speech. So if you have a very intolerant society civil society that will likely reflect in laws that are also intolerant and vice and vice versa. So I think in that sense that the that the laws and culture play together and I wouldn't distinguish a sharply between the two as Mark perhaps does. That's very helpful. I definitely want to come back to to some of those points, but just briefly and I what do you where do you see the biggest threat to press freedom today from where you sit. I think from an international perspective, I think governments remain the primary threat to press freedom from many of those aspects that we've all become so familiar with locking up journalists criminalizing certain aspects of journalism, but also banning non state backed media and so on. But I also agree with what Jacob said about the culture of freedom. And I think particularly within Western society, there has been a growing cultural problem of a kind of suspicion of freedom and democracy. And I do think that it's actually primarily driven from within the cultural, political and intellectual establishment itself rather than necessarily from the majority of people when we ask questions about kind of wider cultural problem. And I do think that we we see that in particular as was kind of briefly touched upon in relation to kind of questions of identity. So there has been a cultural elevation and almost a kind of sacralization, at least in my view of of certain identity groups, which I think has made it very difficult to the question as it's been related to identity groups has prioritized questions of harm over freedom, or the capacity of either the identity group or the other person questioning that identity group to be able to come to a democratic solution on various different questions. So I think that that that has been a really big problem. And I also do you think there has been a wider cultural problem of a kind of technocratic mindset where, for example, truth is known by a select minority, and it's to be dished out to the masses, so to speak, and rather than something to be discovered or investigated in a kind of free and open way and then I think on top of that as well. I do think social media and not just the so called cancer culture and the debates around that but also the ability of certain big tech companies for example to be able to suppress or increase the traction of certain stories. We have, for example, in the last years, most of us have been locked up that social media space often became the kind of digital public sphere. So their ability to do that in an unaccountable way has a genuine real impact on the public debate and the political implications. So I think there's cultural questions. Big tech companies, but also a kind of elite suspicion of freedom and democracy that we've seen increasingly. Okay, that's that's interesting. I mean, I think we maybe started off with a very, I guess, a romantic, slightly romantic view of press freedom of the noble, the noble journalist striving after truth when I'm sometimes reminded that there was a little saying about British journalists, which was you cannot hope to bribe or twist the average British journalist but given what the beast will do unbribe there's no occasion to I only throw that in just to just in case we sound too self congratulatory at this point. But I think that a lot of questions have come up that I that I want to explore and the questions of ownership of monopoly of of of prior of pre censorship and perhaps we should maybe just go back quickly to the question of pre censorship, which is the obvious unfreedom if you like. I just want to suggest that there might be circumstances under which some pre censorship is committed or even desirable and we, we effectively have it in court cases, if a court case in a pending court case, you're not allowed to write about it being for fear of prejudicing the outcome of the court case. The question of how you cover a war. You know, if you are a war correspondent and certain there are very few wars in which you can cross small guerrilla wars, you, you probably can, but larger set piece the war in Ukraine very hard to cross lines. And we are effectively getting one side of that war, which is the side I think probably most of us would wish to get but nonetheless, there is another side that we're not hearing Jacob you have written about this you've written about the EU decision to ban Russian state media propaganda, for example, and you've been very critical about that explain why you think that banning Russian propaganda in in this moment of very acute and war suffering and you know with it with a war that I think most of us would condemn what why should we listen to Russian propaganda. Well, if we were Ukraine, I could understand it, obviously, because it's the Ukrainians who are bearing the brunt of the war. The European Union is not officially at war with Russia, and so we're not being bombarded. But I think that, first of all, it sets a very dangerous principle when the EU almost overnight can can decide not only to take away broadcast the licenses but also say to Google and social media platforms that no content from RT and can be shared or found. So even if I want to debunk Russian propaganda, I can't do so I can't I can't share it. So that that seems to me a very, very dangerous principle but I also think that it, it shows a lack of faith in the very citizens from from whom these politicians have their powers. I mean, if you don't trust the average citizen in a liberal open democracy in the West to be able to discount Russian propaganda and find alternative sources then really what what what was the basis of having a democracy and then you know when you look at it overwhelmingly I think Russian propaganda and disinformation has failed you know the vast majority of people in in the West, not worldwide but in the West are very much on the side of of Ukraine. So I think you know we have this is where I think social media is playing a very important role we have people who work with open source intelligence who use Russian information to in real time debunk Russian propaganda document war crime show you know use geolocation to show why the story is coming out of the Kremlin simply are not true. And I think that's incredible valuable and in that so in that sense I actually think that free speech and access to information going back to to what Mark said that that right of also the public having access to to information and being able to to distinguish between competing narratives is is is a competitive advantage for open democracies but these are the these are the authoritarian states like like Russia. You, you say that we must trust the average citizen to distinguish between false information between propaganda and truth, which is asking quite a lot of the average citizen to be honest and and you also say, I mean that that social media has allowed you talked about a fire hose of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, which originated from Donald Trump amplified on TV networks and weaponized on social media, which was absolutely instrumental in fomenting to coordinating the violence in in the United States over the contested election, when the mob stormed the capital. So clearly, not every citizen can distinguish between good information and bad information. And should we really expect them to do that sort of forensic work when after all bad information can look pretty compelling. First of all, I think it's important to distinguish between the Russian propaganda and then sort of the situation in the US, which is so where tribalism, political tribalism is really means that you have almost two nations that that that have their own sets of effects. The problem, of course, is if you want it in the US to if Democrats say, well, the solution to to the fact that a number of Republicans now believe, or at least say that they believe that Trump election was stolen from him. That is to regulate false information. Well, that was the exact thing. Same thing that Donald Trump said when he was in office and he was being criticized. And so would Democrats have been fine with Donald Trump and a Republican dominated Congress adopting laws against false information when he was in power. I don't think they would. And if they adopted a law and he came back into power in in in 2024, would they would they then be happy with the way that it was being that it was being enforced. Clearly not. So so that does not mean that free speech does not come with harms and costs. It certainly does, you know, go back to the printing press and the and the reformation. But I think that very often restrictions and censorship is a cure worse than the disease when it comes to these things. And, you know, in in in this country, you know, I'm not an avid follower of of British politics, but it seems to me that there have been more than a few occasions in the past year or so where politicians have been caught lying. And these are the same politicians then who want to adopt laws defining what is true and false and wants to make those calls on the behalf of the population. And I think that is incredibly dangerous, a precedent to set. Can I go in on that briefly. The first thing I want to say is, we went from in your last question, but one from court reporting, which is an example of an extremely narrow restriction on freedom of speech in aid of another fundamental human right, which is the right to a fair trial, essentially. That's a very narrow case for for pre publication censorship to something much broader. And I think really troubling the the the the the the object of the exercise in having a right of freedom of expression is for the public to make up their own minds, not to make up their minds for them by interfering with the flow of information that's called censorship. And the thing about censorship, it's almost always presented as if there are that it's kind of, it's justified by some, some other desert desert or autumn. So yesterday, President Obama was talking about disinformation and calling for regulation of the major digital platforms. We know in many parts of the world, regulation of the digital platforms, meaning censorship in in in given countries is done explicitly, because the government repressive governments are arguing it's a way of reducing disinformation. The Russian government at the moment is is is using the risk of disinformation as an argument for stopping Russian citizens hearing what's going on in Ukraine. So, so the impulse to control, not to trust the public, their sheep, they can't be trusted to make up their own minds, they must be helped by the removal of of socially untoward, or politically unacceptable content and spoon fed, whatever the government chooses to give them. That is, that's, that's the particular pathology of of censorship. And what's interesting is the impulse is very strong in Western governments as well and I strongly agree with Jacob. It's really troubling that the moment the war starts, suddenly we're shutting down access to the Russian point of view. I think that's a really, that's a, you know, it's both at once politically and emotionally understandable, but really troubling. And that's really why I try to make this distinction between the very noisy and important debate we have about how we conduct conversations and arguments about really important topics. And the moment when the government starts literally turning off the lights, theoretically in our interest. Can I can I just say something I very much agree with you, Mark, but and the troubling thing about social media laws in authoritarian states is that many of them have actually copy pasted the German law from 2017 called the Network Enforcement Act, which is sort of the first way that has, you know, Germany's way of trying to to cope with hate speech and so on. And it said basically that social media platforms had to remove manifestly legal content within 24 hours or risk. Huge fines. And that would then was then suddenly copy pasted by Russia by Turkey by the Philippines by Venezuela, all these governments. Of course they did it in bad faith. Of course they don't have the same safeguards as they do in Germany. But it legitimizes authoritarian censorship and right now the European Union is finalizing the Digital Services Act, which is very much related to the to the to the Network Enforcement Act and which I which I fear will will again sort of legitimize. Authority because you know, what do you say to someone like Putin when when he when he then adopts a similar but much more restrictive law, then he says well you know I'm just doing what they're doing in in Germany I'm doing what they're doing in in Brussels I'm doing what they're doing with the online safety bill in London, even though obviously it's much it's much more draconian than what is going on here and I think it's important for for democracies to have you know to be in a world and and and to so that you can show that this fundamental distance and difference between open democracies and the liberal authoritarian states. Yeah, I mean, I think that the point that Jacob made about whether or not we were at war with Russia is an important one I think that if we were at war that I think that there is perhaps legitimate case be made to prevent enemy propaganda across lines but I think that we're not at war whilst, as has already been mentioned that there is rightfully a grotesque condemnation of the grotesque invasion that actually we should make sure that we don't compromise on our liberal ideals and I think a station that has Russia Russia today in its title I think that we can perhaps assume that people would know that there is a slant to that and hopefully trust people to be able to make up their own mind but I also think that there is a price to freedom and I do think that that is important that while and we have to weigh up or we weigh up that actually the price is worth paying so similar with freedom of speech that that might mean that people are offended or freedom of the press that might mean that sometimes information gets read or interpreted and that information may be wrong or may lead people to make the wrong conclusion but the overall benefit for having a free press or having freedom of speech is an open society where we are able to come to our own conclusions and we are able to pursue truth in a much freer way so I do think that I don't want to diminish the fact that there is a price of freedom but that price is worth paying for a free society. Well, I thank you for that, although Jacob you quote demosonies is believing that free speech leads to truth. It's very hard to say that social media today leads to truth. I mean given given the amount of disinformation given the amount of ill intent that is behind a lot of what is disseminated on social media. So it's pretty it's a pretty difficult case to make isn't it. I actually, you know, if you look at studies of disinformation and misinformation, you will see that compared to the media coverage of it. So it is it is much it's a much smaller share of the overall information and actually those who are most prone to Paul pray to information are sort of partisans ideologue so so those who would fall for sort of propaganda would be those who were already, you know, part of the of the marker choir if you if you like. So so so in fact I think that ordinary people are less prone to be a gullible sheep than than they're being given credit for but and and and what is interesting here is that we are actually seeing sort of a reenactment of a very conflict between an egalitarian conception of free speech with originating in Athens and a more elitist top down approach that originated in in in Republican Rome where in Republican Rome, it was well educated elites that that that enjoyed free speech and they were very suspicious of sort of along the unwashed mob to have a voice in public affairs the way that the Athenians that had and you've you see that throughout history you see that very strongly in this country actually even into the into the first half of the 19th century where where where you know people who call for for universal suffrage who call for religious toleration who want to give the poor and property less a voice in public affairs are being punished with draconian punishments on the sedition laws and where very clearly the government says that you know the reason why people are being punished publishers who sell the words of Tom Payne to the lower classes is because you know the lower classes have to be protected from these dangerous ideas which will make them question the social and political order and and and I think you know so that dynamic is with it throughout throughout history and and I think we all you know tend to to think of ourselves as particularly enlightened that our principles today are a sort of the pinnacle of truth and and and and morality but chances are that when we when new generations look back at at some of our dogmas in in 50 or 100 years today or how on earth could they believe that and why would they try to protect such ideas from from being questioned well they might and they might also be concerned in in this country at least with the concentration of media ownership. There are those who argue that that press freedom in Britain really only exists for those who are rich enough to own a newspaper and and there are a lot of newspapers are owned by very just a few rich people many of whom don't live in this country, many of whom don't want to pay tax in this country. Is that Mark, would you would you consider the ownership structure of the British press, it conducive to a plausible notion of press freedom or is it, is it a one of those hidden factors. The right to be heard and actually social media means that the means of production and distribution of your views is trivia. I mean, it's needed, you need a need a phone. So you're right to express yourself. The issue is, do you also have a right as it were to be published everywhere. And I'm not sure that's a writing quite the same, quite the same way you know that I think we've all got the right to have our novel, you know, print a million copies printed and given to everyone because we're geniuses. We've always understood that you can shout in the marketplace but frankly other people may not be that interested in what you've got to say. Having said that, obviously, although I think it's slightly different from freedom expression. Open societies thrive when there's reasonable plurality of perspectives and views. And I think it's entirely reasonable that governments and others should have a care to the kind of the ecology of the press and make sure that you don't get excessive concentrations of ownership. Most countries in theory have, you know, some level of oversight or regulation on this and in practice often governments are prey to various kinds of special pleading and close relationships with some media owners and the reality never quite lives up to the ideal. In much of the world, as you said, I'm co-chairing this new international fund for public interest media as an international fund to try and protect journalists around the world. In many countries the political censorship and economic control absolutely go hand in hand and there are many countries for example in Latin America where advertising, public advertising is used as a weapon to concentrate revenue towards friendly mouthpieces and close kind of members of the elite who own very big newspaper and TV interests and away from awkward customers who do investigative journalism or write embarrassing things about political leadership. So I definitely think that in the practical matter of not just can you theoretically say what you want, but can a whole shade of opinion, a whole set of ideas be presented to a very broad section of the public. That a lot of that is, is I think is under threat in much of the world and at least potentially in the threat in many European countries. So I have to say in America though most countries have either got reasonably effective commercial plurality argue the United States does have that. Or they've got institutions like the public broadcasters, the BBC channel for ITV in the UK, which are in fact a very strong counterbalance to, to the concentration of newspaper interests. They are, but I think you don't have to read many newspapers at the moment to understand that they're under threat that both the threat of privatising channel for the threat of removing the license fee from the BBC and the attacks on public broadcasting from private interests are quite strong. I completely agree with that. And I would say that there's a perversity, of course, in in public policy in the UK and many other countries that the very moment when commercial provision of journalism, particularly at a local and regional level is under such economic threat, essentially for other reasons to do with digital disruption. At a time when actually the commercial models for providing well reported news about what's going on the world is under threat, but far from strengthening as it were, you know, collectively funded public provision of these things. The politics mean that the public broadcasters have been kind of, they're trying to squash them down at the same time so I agree it's completely perverse public policy. Inaya, when you look at the structure of ownership of the of the press in in Britain, and we have many, many testimonials to the editorial interference from the proprietor, you know, from Harry Evans that Sunday Times and the Times talking about Rupert Murdoch to, you know, the Barclay brothers, you know, insistence on various kind of economic and tax policies. What do you think that says about the state of press freedom in this country? I think the important question is plurality. So I think that, for example, we don't have it. Well, I think having a public funded broadcaster, but then also having privately owned media and now with the rise of social media, there is a democratisation of information where there is also an increase in people utilizing new media platforms and even self publishing platforms, such as substack medium, and so on. And even those, they have their own set of challenges. So, for example, you know, they often don't have editorial oversight, they can often create their own echo chambers and people often just publish things that they know will drive clicks. But I think the importance really is plurality. And I think that oftentimes now what we are seeing is the traditional media responding to the changes, for example, within the media and trying and having a conversation between them. And therefore, I think as long as there is that plurality, then I do think that's important. But I do agree that I think that the challenges to the license fee and questions around the future of Channel 4 do potentially threaten that plurality. But there is also an argument to say that in the free market as well that if they should be able to survive if they are creating content, other people are arguing that they should be competing with other international platforms. I don't think that just because it is going private that that necessarily means that that threatens them. But I think the important thing, as we do have, I think broadly speaking in the UK is that plurality. The biggest threat I would say is from the closing down or the lack of funds from often local media, which I think is a really big problem. And I think that local media and regional media closing down would be a big threat to journalism as a whole. Well, what's happening mostly with local media in Britain at least is a concentration of power again, rather than closing down. So you're getting big monopolies that own most of the local media and are stripping out the local news content. So that's an example of the market working. But do you think that the market and the public interest are always aligned in terms of press freedom and the ability of the media to deliver what is in the public interest? Well, I don't necessarily think that that is always aligned. But I think that it goes back to the earlier point that I think that if we live in a society that values a culture of freedom and certain liberal ideals within a democracy, we would be striving for that. But I think right now we are living in a culture of tribalism and polarisation. And therefore oftentimes the incentive structures are optimised for content that effectively exacerbates that polarisation. So I think that the questions have to come as a society as a whole about what we choose to value and whether or not these liberal ideals still hold cultural authority and how we rearticulate them for that to be the starting point rather than another starting point. I think it's a cultural and democratic question about how we rebuild those trusts within liberal ideals for those questions to be answered. Jacob, that question of the ability of ambitious men to sway the assembly with seductive rhetoric, again going back to ancient Greece. Do you think that there is any other guardrails that we can erect without compromising on the freedoms that you argue for so passionately to protect the public interest from demagoguery, from the kind of exploitation of fear or the exploitation of emotion that can have such bad, which gives the social and political results that Anaya has just highlighted. We're living in tribal societies where the tribes are fiercely at war. That's been in many ways created by this free-for-all in information and misinformation, surely. I think it starts early on, really. What kind of education do we want to give our children? Do we want to emphasize the importance of looking at problems from different sides to emphasize the importance of getting different perspectives to emphasize that disagreement is not a bad thing that should not be seen as a threat, but should be seen as valuable that when people have different perspectives, they're not necessarily a threat or a harm. So that is something I think we need to stress in our education that underpins the culture of free speech. I also think there's a lot we can do with the design of social media platforms. So it's less about regulating content. One of the things that I hope to see is a more decentralized social media environment, which I think might create a healthier ecosystem of information than we have today. But ultimately, I don't think we'll ever live in a society which is at the same time free and without heated disagreements that is sort of built in to the whole concept. And sometimes those disagreements will boil over and will lead to real harms that is unfortunately unavoidable. That is simply part of the price that we pay. But I think in the societies that we live in today, because in consolidated democracies, few of us have really faced sort of old fashioned authoritarian censorship. We tend to take all the benefits of free speech for granted and sort of obsess about the harms real and perceived. So the fact that we can have this discussion now today and you can say very critical things about the government in this place and in other places, is certainly not something that we could have done in large parts of human history, yet we don't think of it. I think most of us who are on this panel now, we don't think of it as exercising our right to free speech. It's just something that we take for granted. It might even be sort of a mundane part of our professional lives to engage in these debates. But it's incredibly valuable, not because we're geniuses, but the fact that we can have these discussions, but yet we take them for granted. Well, perhaps we shouldn't be quite so convinced that we can take it for granted. There's a case after all, which is a long running case in this country against the founder of WikiLeaks, the publisher of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who has been in prison waiting a decision on an extradition request from the United States, where were he to be extradited. He would face 17 charges, I believe it is, which would add up where he convicted to more than 170 years in prison. A number of free speech organisations and press organisations have written to the Home Secretary on whose desk this case now rests, pointing out that there is no public interest defence for one of the charges that he would face, which they would argue, they do argue, is a serious threat to free speech and they urge her not to grant the extradition. I just wonder if you consider there are any circumstances after all what Assange did was to publish leaked government documents, large numbers of leaked government documents. Are governments entitled to keep secrets? Are governments entitled to punish those who leak their secrets? Are governments entitled to punish those who publish those leaked secrets under any circumstances? Inaya, perhaps you could start. Yeah, no, I think that that is a difficult question. I do think that there are clearly, you know, some circumstances for very serious security reasons for geopolitical reasons that where governments do have that right and ability to, and we know when it comes to issues of counterterrorism and so on. But we also recognise the importance of whistleblowers and those that if they do think that there is something that crosses that boundary to the extent where wrongdoing is going on, particularly under the assumption within society that that is going on. And if people had known about that, they would not have been supportive of it. Then we have a situation where people come forward as whistleblowers in order to reveal information. And I think that it is fundamentally important that those people are protected even though it may pose a risk security or otherwise to other people or society if that information came out. And I think it is right for these organisations to take a stand against what's happening to Julian Assange. What he essentially did, at least in my view, was publish information that was true, but it effectively just embarrassed the US government. And I also think it really reveals the hypocrisy of how, when we rely on government solely to be the arbiters of acceptability when it comes to freedom, what happens. We have this government that is trying to regulate social media under the guise of freedom, trying to regulate universities under the guise of protecting free speech and so on. And now a government that positions itself as a defender of freedom, effectively putting freedom of the press on trial by accepting the extradition of a journalist who did something that many journalists do all the time. So I do think that I do think under certain circumstances for security reasons, counter-terrorism and so on, it may be justified, but I do think protecting whistleblowers and those that expose wrongdoing is just as essential. Mark. Well, I agree with that completely. And I think governments, I think, are entitled to keep secrets, but one good place to start is to actually keep them, in other words, to make sure that you keep them secure, which is in this case they obviously failed to do. The reason that so many organizations like Reporters Without Frontiers, but also many of the really big journalistic organizations I know are so exercised is because of the indictment under an archaic and hardly ever used law, the 1917 Espionage Act in the US, is really straightforwardly itemizing and indicting Assange for journalistic activity. You can debate whether Julian Assange himself is a journalist or not, but the activities which this seeks to define as criminal are things that at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Guardian and the Times of London Reserve journalists do all the time. Now, ultimately, you know, potentially this could, if it all happened, this could end up in the Supreme Court and the testing of the Espionage Act against the First Amendment to the Constitution could happen, but it's obviously repressive, and we know that national security, almost everyone would accept some level of cut out on freedom of expression for national security, for all sorts of obvious reasons, national safety is itself in the right to be kept safe from war. But it's where that line is drawn, surely, because the national security is invoked by every rogue regime there is. Exactly, and the Espionage Act in 1917 is not an attempt to narrowly define it. Now, I have to say, I would actually, I've got a ringside seat for parts of the Edward Snowden story and actually I thought the way actually that played out what was interesting Snowden had been very measured in how he wanted the material he got to be released. And not in the UK where there's a lot of, you know, the relations between government and intelligence services and journalists are not really, they're better than they were, but they're still not great. In the US, there is a tried and tested way in which newspapers like New York Times will literally talk a story through with the CIA or the FBI NSA, whoever it is, and literally ask for, is there anything in this story which you can argue to me now is going to put a life of an agent or the life of some individual at risk or in some other fundamental way damaged American national security, tell us and we will bear that in mind before we decide on publication. And so there's a process of kind of a kind of vetting whether the right to publish is held by the newspaper, and they go ahead and publish if they choose to, but at least they make sure they've listened to the case for, now that strikes me as an adult way through this, where the criminal sanction kept as narrow as humanly possible. But the government should be able to have secrets. They need to do a very good job better and better because it's getting harder and harder in keeping the secrets. But this particular persecution of Julia Sarge, I don't say it's with any particular personal sympathy for Julia Sarge, that's irrelevant, and the number of years you might serve is irrelevant. Runs the risk of criminalising journalism. I should have encouraged the audience to send some questions and some some questions have come in do please send us your questions, we love to hear from you. I just want to pick up on one from Stuart Mitchell which goes back to this question of the emergence of internet news media and new media. And he asks if we think that represents a healthy extension of free speech and news gathering, or whether it brings with it unique and dangerous pitfalls in our your very much in that world. Do you see pitfalls, do you see it as an untrammeled extension of free speech, or are there dangers that such as we've touched on in the discussion. I think that there are benefits and there are drawbacks. I mean, some of the drawbacks has been, for example, the debate that happened a few months ago around Joe Rogan, and his podcast has millions of listeners and subscribers, but he doesn't consider himself a journalist. So what editorial standards or otherwise do we hold people that set up a platform are doing some might argue journalistic work by interviewing significant figures and asking them questions that may well change the public mind about how they might act in the world. And what what standards do they can they be held to how do we hold them accountable, and so on and I do think when people are self publishers and have a platform where they are as just an individual the entire platform that does raise massive questions and difficulties and challenges when their platform becomes very very very big. And also, I think there is a danger in new echo chambers, I think some of the reasons why I think some people believe that the new media is the platform that they chose to do journalistic work is because they felt that they, it was too stringent or to to conform this under certain institutions, but do we want to create new echo chambers, rather than actually ensure that the major institutions that speak to the public as a whole, not just a minority of people. We make sure that there's diversity of opinion within those institutions so I do think it's great to have a plurality. And I think when we do have situations like Brexit or Trump where people wanted to hear different perspectives it's good that they can find them but we do know that during the pandemic. It is the mainstream media that will be asking the Prime Minister questions. It's often, if rarely, is never going to be people that are on YouTube generally speaking. So I do think the mainstream institutions are just as important and still central and important to actually holding the powerful to account. But on the question of echo chambers, you did touch earlier on the ability of Facebook, I think in particular, to determine what people see or to skew what people see. And a whole sort of myriad algorithms determine that your experience on Facebook might be different from my experience on Facebook based on what we have looked at before. Surely that whole thing creates echo chambers and the evidence is that people are led to particular points of view and they're then reinforced by the algorithms and rhythms. Is that something you would like to see regulated? It's not a regulation of free speech, but it is a regulation of how people are exposed to a body of opinion. Would you like to see those algorithms subject to regulation? Not really because I do think that there's some benefits to. But they're creating exactly the echo chambers you say you don't like. Well, I think there's also some benefits, for example, having created content personalised to you if you are interested in certain subjects, if you're interested in certain ideas. You can do that as an individual who's making the choices that we've all been arguing for with the sophistication that we've been assuming in the consumption of information. Why can't an individual net user be trusted to find his or her own content? Why does an unseen hand have to serve it up? Well, I don't think people are prevented necessarily from still looking into other content if they want to. But I do think it goes back to what I said earlier is that I think that we start to demand a kind of regulation when there is a sense of a kind of lack of control and a breakdown of perhaps trust in certain foundational ideals. And I do think that if there was more confidence as a society in mainstream institutions as well, then a sense that there was a sense of cohesion around certain foundational principles that I think we would be less nervous if someone on Facebook was seeing content from an algorithm. I think it's because we've had this polarisation that we're much more anxious about what people are seeing because we don't trust one another anymore. So I do think we've got to sort out the first problem without thinking that just regulating what people see is going to be the solution. And we've seen that happen already. For example, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram now oftentimes they have pop-ups when it comes to certain kinds of information and that they regard as not trustful and oftentimes it isn't. But oftentimes those people that are looking at that content also feel less trusting when they see that a social media company is telling them that this information is not trustworthy. I don't think there's a simple solution and I think the assumption that regulation will be this kind of silver bullet. I don't, it doesn't seem to bear out with what we've seen over the last couple of years. Mark, another question has picked up on your comment as a threat to press freedom comes from governments and points out that attacks on journalists online and in life are really a substantial problem. According to reporters without borders, the number of journalists murdered for doing their job doesn't give a year, but over a thousand journalists. The question is then are governments also implicated in this figure and what do you think should be done about it? Yes, I mean, not uniquely in all societies, but very substantially, most of the journalists who are being murdered, we're now in the Duteri regime in the Philippines, for example, it's something like 25, 26, 27, maybe more now, journalists murdered, are being murdered in the context of a regime, which is actively, actively, and indeed, in the president's mouth, publicly calling for violence against journalists. And that business of governments condoning and conniving at the harassment and in some cases the murder of journalists is very widespread around the world. And even in our democracies, Mr Trump, when he was president, his demonisation of journalists as the enemies of the people, also creates an environment which can and arguably in a few cases, not many to be fair in America, in a few cases did lead to violence. Governments don't tell the whole story. I mean, there is a whole world of politics and majorities and minorities with very strong views, and we know that journalists have also been under pressure, for example, from people who have very, very strong religious views and so on. So there are many dimensions, there are many people, the list of enemies of journalism is not exhausted just by governments. The point is, governments have the kind of systematic controls and powers they can apply to stop journalists say what they do. One, if I can say very briefly, listening to an eye, and your question to her, the thing is, a new technology for media, plus kind of deep anxiety anyway about media often leads to kind of a period of real panic, Hobbes in Milton's time, thinks the civil war, the English civil war in the 17th century, is significantly sparked by pamphleting. And his basic answer is, you know, basically hang the people who write the pamphlets and then you have peace. George Orwell becomes obsessed with the dangers of radio. And in particular, particularly things of the BBC's radio service, which is now Radio 4, is a sinister force. Now, it's regarded as kind of, you know, apple pie and all the rest of it. But then in the 30s, these insidious voices in the corner of the room are regarded as, so I think the idea of kind of a period of normalisation in this case of social media and other forms of digital media, where we kind of, we all make sense of it and calm down about it. Pamphlets in the 17th century started civil war in the 18th century. People are using to wipe their bottoms and the idea of another political pamphlet, and you don't take it that seriously anymore. The fact that it's printed doesn't mean it's true, but it takes time to absorb new media technologies and part of I think what we're living through is a transition where we don't fully at a kind of human level. We haven't entirely kind of digested what this new media and how unimportant it is in some respects. Well, on that subject, Jacob, Layla Bolton comments on the threatened takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. And of course, one of Twitter's more noted moves was to ban Donald Trump. If Elon Musk were to take over Twitter and implement his vision of freedom of speech by lifting the ban on Donald Trump, the question is, is that a plus or a backward step for free speech? She goes on to ask if unlimited freedom to spout falsehoods is part of free speech or a mortal threat to it. I suspect I know what you're going to answer to that one. Well, I thought actually that at the time when Trump was banned for not calling back his supporters, I thought it was a reasonable decision because there was a clear and present danger to the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy. And that obviously is not something to be taken lightly, but I think that sort of the indefinite suspension and some of the platforms that banned him did it without any real basis in their terms of service, I think was problematic. And you know, if you go through the whole list of world leaders who are on Twitter, I promise you you can find world leaders on Twitter who have said much more outrageous things than Trump and also inside the violence against minorities and sit on top of autocracies and so on. So that if Trump is deemed uniquely dangerous, I think that had more to do with sort of specific dynamics in the West and in particular in the US. Now I think that Elon Musk, I think he will find it very difficult to return Twitter to its position. It once called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party and then, you know, I think it was in 2017, they were summoned before the British parliament and they sort of gave up their John Stuart Mill philosophy, I think one of the executives said. And that's just because, you know, take the, you know, if you want to operate in the European Union after the Digital Services Act is implemented, you will have to remove so called illegal content and that will create huge incentives. For platforms to use automated content moderation to remove lots of lots of content. And, you know, if he pays a gazillion dollars for the to own Twitter, I think he will also quickly realize that once he opens up the floodgates of content, there will be pressure from advertisers and a lot of users might threaten to walk away and then we'll see just how principled he is. And then just that there is that fact that content moderation at scale is just it's impossible to do to do well. There will always be you always draw the line somewhere where some constituency things you're doing it wrong, which is one of the reasons why I'd like to see a more decentralized social media environment and also one where users have more control over over content rather than sort of this movement towards more centralized top down ecosystem of information on these huge platforms. But you do think that there is such a thing as undesirable content or content that shouldn't. I mean, I'm sure we've all had, but I've never found that Twitter responded at all they said looked at them and said well they don't breach our guidelines which is interesting. And but and again, it's, it's, you know, because context matters so much, you know, when is it when is a death threat credible. So so these, you know, and these companies, I expected to make decisions within hours or days. You know my organization, we looked at how five European countries how long did it take for a hate speech case to reach a decision in the first instance. And on average, I think it was more than a sub 700 days then go to the German law and that I mentioned before, and they give them 24 hours, you know, to make a similar decision on on hate speech. So that, you know, just just shows how difficult it is. Sometimes I think, you know, we all criticize the social media platforms and often with good reason but often we also just, I think, are unaware of how impossible a situation it is to to to moderate content at scale when you have platforms with 2.7 billion people. And, you know, hundreds of different languages and you have to take into account, you know, context humor and so on. Very, very difficult job. One of the things I learned last night is that the British Library is also collecting digital content so perhaps we can look forward to an exhibition based on digital content when when anyone figures out how to do that. Just because we were coming very close to the end of this very rich discussion and we have been talking on the basis of an exhibition that has explored this very long and fascinating history of press freedom, or the struggle for press freedom. So I just want to ask each of you, if you were to, you know, look in the next decade, say, do you feel confident on current trends that press freedom is relatively safe? Do you see it as a as a declining or or a or a rising asset in I? Are you, are you feeling good about press freedom for the next decade? I think it depends where from which country. I think I think from the UK, possibly I think I was a bit worried when GB news was launching and there was a campaign, you know, stop funding hate to try and get it, get rid of it before it was even launched but actually since then, you know, even in the next few days a new broadcasting station is launching talk TV so I do think that there seems to be a more demand for for more conversations, more investigations, more plurality and with the new with the internet we've seen lots of new online publications that are launching. Are you feel it's in safe hands for now at least. Mark, are you confident? Firstly, internationally globally is one of the reasons that Maria and I are involved in the international fund to try and at least support the economics of journalism around the world. Internationally, I think that the trajectory is very negative, and we have, we know we all hope in different ways to do something to help reverse it and maybe they'll be changing the wind and it'll reverse itself but at the moment globally I think the situation is is is the bleakest of my lifetime actually probably into at home. I don't know, I mean, just after he got elected Donald Trump came to lunch rather bizarrely than your times and I asked him on the record, whether he was going to defend the First Amendment, given what he said about about the media. And he said, I think you'll be all right. And actually my view about America and the UK is the institutional safeguards are quite deep and strong. And although it always feels like it's it's under grave threat, actually, I think actually in in in Western Europe and America, I think it will be all right probably. Jake, am I going to have to ask for a yes or a no. Are you confident, just because we're running out of time. Maybe. That's a bit of a professorial response. We seem to be feeling fairly good about it. My warm thanks to all of you to Anaya to Mark to Jacob to all of you online and to the British Library for hosting us for this for this great discussion and for the wonderful exhibition. Thank you all for watching and good night.