Rupert Murdoch rarely says or does anything which doesn’t cause dismay somewhere. So it has been with his appearance on Twitter.

The octogenarian’s pithy provocations, unmediated by spin-doctors, have been enough to start yet more worries about the future of journalism. People were apparently in all seriousness sitting around at a seminar in the Columbia Journalism School considering the question of “sources” who “go direct” (to the audience, that is). The language itself is unintentionally revealing: how dare these people cut out the middleman and communicate directly with people? The seminar anxiously wondered if this would be “good for journalism”.

That will depend on how well journalists adapt to a transformative change. On the evidence of that discussion at Columbia, it’s going to end in tears in America. Digital communications allow people to publish to people; the oligarchic power of news publishers and broadcasters holding the technology, capital and licences has begun to dissolve. The value added by people calling themselves journalists changes and evolves every time something big changes in the way we can communicate.

In the beginning, “news” was about getting some basic information quickly to people who wanted to know it. There wasn’t much of it. As the supply increased, the value became making it reliable. Nowadays, with what was once in short supply being in glut, the value lies in extracting useful sense from the rush of data coming past you. For my money, journalists can now add value in four areas: verifying stuff, making sense of it, being eye-witnesses and in the specialist art of investigative reporting (this argument laid out more fully here).

We already knew this. This is like Groundhog Day for the future of journalism debate. Of course, “sources going direct” changes things, likely for the better. Do try to keep up.

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President Rafael Correa

When press freedom is deteriorating in a country, there’s often one unmistakable sign of that downward slide: the use by the government of criminal defamation laws.

There have been well-aired concerns about the attempts by the Hungarian and South African governments to curtail news media. Less attention has been devoted to the steadily worsening situation in Ecuador, the country which gave the world the phrase “banana republic”. They grow a lot of bananas, do not always change governments by election and now the news media are under attack.

Coups have removed and installed presidents regularly and in 2010 there was a what Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa called an attempted coup. Correa, a politician with a sense of drama, complained that he had been held prisoner in a hospital by striking policemen and had been rescued amid rioting and fighting by the army. The exact truth of the events remains disputed.

Emilio Palacio, writer on one of the country’s major dailies, El Universo, wrote a column accusing Correa of ordering soldiers to open fire on the hospital when there were patients in the building and accusing the president of lying about what had happened. Last spring, criminal defamation charges were brought against four of El Universo’s journalists. After proceeding involving peculiar delays and changes of judges, three writers were sentenced to jail terms and fined a total of $30m.For good measure, the newspaper was fined $10m. An appeal is to be heard tomorrow.

This was Correa’s second legal case against critics. He then embarked on a campaign of discrediting his opponents in the media, broadening the attack beyond one newspaper and its writers. Correa’s war against the media has made headlines in the Spanish-speaking world. Time that this unsavoury campaign received wider attention.

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There are many things the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre no doubt wants to say to the Leveson Inquiry when he appears before it on February 6th and plenty of questions lined up by the Inquiry’s lawyers. I have a small suggestion.

The elusive and much-disputed idea of the “public interest” will play an important part in Leveson’s deliberations. Public interest defences – such as exceptional justifications for intrusion, for example – are written into the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct and into several laws. Back in the middle of last year, public interest was an important issue in one of the cases which triggered several public rows and court cases over privacy injunctions.

One of these cases involved Sir Fred Goodwin, the disgraced ex-head of the Royal Bank of Scotland. While in charge of the bank, Goodwin had had an affair with a female colleague. Injunctions were granted to prevent the disclosure of the names of either party. Despite the injunction, Goodwin’s name was freely bandied about on Twitter and he was named in the House of Commons by an MP. A judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, eventually cancelled the order concealing Goodwin’s identity but kept in place the one preventing the naming of his lover.

The Daily Mail did not approve of the judge’s decision, running as many details (“the mistress on a six-figure salary”) about the woman as it thought it could get away with. Or so it appeared. A number of different court hearings were held on this case and this is the judgement covering what the Mail had said. It repays careful reading.

The Mail’s lawyer discloses that one item of information about the woman was false and known to be so when published. The woman’s lawyer said that another “fact” about her was wrong and wasn’t contradicted. Both of these pieces of information were about her job, including the claim that she had been promoted during her affair with the bank’s head. The Mail’s lawyer suggests that these falsehoods were planted to put people off the scent and make the woman’s identification less likely. Mr Justice Tugendhat wasn’t having any of this implausible nonsense: “As I remarked in court in response to that submission, another effect of the false information is that it would tend to mislead the reader into believing that it would be in the public interest for the identity of the lady to be disclosed. In other words, it laid the supposed factual basis for the public interest argument advanced by Mr Hemming…and the editorial on page 14, as well as of the headline on page 1.”

Put into plain English, the judge was accusing the Mail of lying about the facts which lay behind its argument for disclosure in the public interest. Read it for yourself, but that seems worth asking about on February 6th.

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I was going to write about the use of jokes in politics and how political reporters never cover the subject for fear of sounding trivial. But then jokes suddenly starting happening everywhere.

The leader of Britain’s parliamentary opposition, Ed Milliband, made one of those doomed “relaunch” speeches last week which no one outside the political industry much noticed. An interview that morning intended to set the stage for the speech went awry when Milliband found himself being asked if he was too ugly ever to be elected Prime Minister.

Milliband’s looks may or may not be a liability but he has bigger problems. He never seems to find anything funny and never makes any jokes anyone can remember and retell. Plenty of leading politicians are born without a sense of humour, but the smart ones have that corrected. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t naturally hilarious and had to have jokes explained to her. But she had a speechwriter (the theatre director Ronnie Millar) who was funny and who, as someone reminded me the other night, carried a small notebook everywhere in which he recorded lines that he could use.

Milliband shares this humour-deficit with the strange collection of people currently slugging it out (“mud-wrestling for dwarfs” one commentator called it) for the Republican presidential nomination in the US. John Dickerson of Slate reflects here the Great Republican Humour Crisis and on what the presence or absence of gags tells you about politicos. And his piece has jokes. My favourite is the self-deprecating story told by a now-forgotten man called Mo Udall. Canvassing, Udall walks into a barber’s shop and introduces himself as the local candidate who’s asking for their votes. “Yeah,” replies the barber, “We were just laughing about that.”

Then I was reading Jeff Jarvis on watching the taping of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and starting to understand how far a supposedly “light-hearted” “comedy” show had travelled into journalism. What Stewart has is what the analysts call “engagement” although it might be better known simply as “connection”. His origins may be in satire, but the connection is built by the audience’s recognition that under the laughs, Stewart cares about truth.

And lastly a man who doesn’t seem to care much for it. Yesterday the owner of Britain’s Daily Express gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in London. I suspect that Richard Desmond’s hour of testimony will come to be seen as the moment which captures the terminal decline of the country’s once popular daily papers. You need to watch the video to sense the full, weird misery of watching the owner of a once-admired paper explain why he doesn’t talk about ethics, trashes the reputation of people to whom one of his papers had paid more than half a million pounds in libel damages and argues that truth is anything anyone says it is.

And, yes, he did jokes as well. His plan for reform of the Press Complaints Commission involves having its members eat fewer biscuits and thinks its successor should be called “RCD”. Sorry, don’t follow you, said the judge leading the inquiry. “Richard Clive Desmond” said Desmond perkily. It was sad rather than funny.

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Here are two posts for anyone at all intrigued by what kind of income keeps journalism – and particularly journalism institutions – in business.

• Clay Shirky on payment “threshold” schemes which are becoming more and more common in the US, particularly since the New York Times porous paywall looks as if it’s delivering on at least one aim of preserving the online audience while collecting some revenue from committed online users. Whether that’s enough revenue – Shirky thinks not – is another question.
• Frederic Filloux on what we don’t yet know about the NYT scheme and on the striking price rises just announced by both the NYT and the Financial Times for their print editions. Filloux sees this, rightly I’m sure, as evidence of both titles trying to drive their readers online.

But if papers like the FT and NYT do succeed both in pushing them online and making enough money out of them (and these are big “ifs”)…how will they make enough money? The thrust of Shirky’s essay is to ask if the ways in which people will pay for online journalism will eventually change the shape of the bundles of journalism we are used to – and, by extension, alter the shape of the institutions which produce that journalism. Both Shirky and Filloux seem to think that there may be some income to support some journalism online in the future. But that one thing it won’t support is the large, general interest publication which collects together many different readerships, both niche and mass and welds them into a business model.

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The first phase of the Leveson inquiry in the British press isn’t quite finished yet, but the inquiry is entering new territory. Or at least there’s a change of mood.

The opening weeks were dominated by complaints and horror stories about red-top reporters. Straws passing on the wind tell me that this indignation is now being replaced by more sober reflection about the issues which face big-circulation papers.

Daily Mail February 1997

Here are the straws I’ve counted recently. Lord Leveson himself has from the start been keen to underline that he is not embarking on any project to “beat down” popular papers. He has also been asking each of his celebrity witnesses what they would do about the faults of which they complain and has more than once sounded a little irritated by the vagueness of the prescriptions he is offered. When editors take the stand at Leveson this month, we will be reminded that popular journalism can reveal important truths and explain complex events in ways that papers with bigger reputations and much smaller circulations can’t manage. Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, at one time a columnist for the Daily Mirror, wrote a defence of the tabloids the other day.

The conviction of two men for the 18-year-old murder of Stephen Lawrence has reminded the country that the case was kept alive by one of the more extraordinary editorial gambles of its era: a front page of the Daily Mail in 1997 which accused five men of the murder. The Mail is the paper many love to hate, but its editor Paul Dacre played a fine part in the dispiriting Lawrence saga by putting his job on the line with that campaign. (It seems improbable that the Mail had courtroom-standard proof of the mens’ guilt when it published, so if they had sued and won Dacre could not have survived in his job).

Inquiries work at multiple levels before they ever recommend anything. The mere existence of the Leveson Inquiry has forced people to think about law, regulation and press freedom in depth. It has legitimised criticism of the media which, apparently, politicians were too terrified to make. The very varied reactions to the inquiry so far are on show at this panel discussion last night at the Frontline Club (video here and shorter versions here and here).

A very good illustration of the knotty problems was given in that discussion by Ben Fenton of the Financial Times. The problems of popular paper newsrooms, he said, could be summed up in the phrase often used to reporters by editors: “make the story work”. There’s a benign use of this instruction, as in “make this work better for the reader”. But that isn’t the usual sense of “make it work”. Those words now mean: we’ve already told you what the story is – now find material which backs it up. There are a hundred different reasons why this gradual corruption of the idea of what a story is or should be has taken place, many of them to do with ferocious competition between papers. Every journalist has to balance impact against details of the truth. But in some newsrooms, “making the story work” has been at the root of a lot of distortion and dishonesty.

Ben’s example was well chosen. But can you legislate or regulate to put that right?

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This blog’s author is of a buoyant, optimistic cast of mind. I mention this only in case it isn’t already obvious. My general view of the “crisis” in journalism in Europe and the US (not, please note, the rest of the world) is that while the business model for printed daily papers may be in deep doo-doo, journalism and news will find ways not merely to survive but to flourish and improve.

But there are journalists and writers in places for whom 2011 was a year of threats, jail terms, violence and misery. They should not be forgotten This is just a quick selection of those people who deserve to be remembered at the passing of the year – and the governments who deserve to be shamed for what they have done.

• The Ethiopian government jailed two Swedish television journalists the other day for eleven years apiece on “terrorism” charges.
• Wondering why you haven’t heard much from Bahrain recently? This despatch from Reporters Without Borders, written in restrained and careful language, will tell you why. They lock up bloggers and journalists, intimidate others and exclude foreign reporters they don’t approve of. Do not forget that in April the founder of the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat, Karim Fakhrawi, was taken into custody when his paper had been shut and he died in custody a week later. His death remains unexplained and no one has been held to account.
• There are many things to worry the Chinese government nowadays, but they remain terrified of the stubborn handful of men and women who simply refuse to stop speaking their mind. The moment that the strength of the Arab Spring became clear, many of these people began being questioned and detained. Two of those who vanished into jail in the spring, Chen Xi and Chen Wei were given sentences of 10 and 9 years respectively just before Christmas.  They thought and wrote the wrong things.
• On a quite different level – because no actual curtailment of freedom of expression seems yet to have taken place – is the developing disaster for the news media in Hungary (background here, latest developments here). I’m not enough of an expert on central Europe to know why Hungarian confidence in the the ordinary, boring-but-valuable institutions of democracy is so much more fragile than in neighbouring countries which also endured long decades of suffocation under communism and the Soviet Union. But it is.
• And let’s never forget Russia, where the manipulation and threats have been normal for a long time. As ever, it’s always worst outside the big cities where the tourists go and the foreign correspondents live. One small, grim example here.

But I did read one cheerful scrap from Russia this holiday. In Dagestan, east of Chechnya there is a newspaper called Chernovik. This name translates into English as “rough draft” and is, I think, the best and most honest name for a newspaper I have heard for some time. I came across it in David Remnick’s superb New Yorker essay on Vladimir Putin and what has happened to news, information and journalism in Russia during his rule.

And to remind us that even scandals have their lighter side, I leave you with a link to the trailer for “Hacks”, a TV comedy due to air (in the UK) on New Year’s Eve. It looks to be exaggerated, crude and funny. Rather like the News of the World was in its day.

I wish all my readers an excellent 2012.

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This post just carries links to one or two pieces worth reading that I’ve missed or put to one side in the past few weeks.

• I’ve been waiting for some time for a systematic, measured study of new media’s role in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. This looks like the first such one (if you know of others I’ve missed, please tell me). It’s only about Twitter and really only about the networking aspects, when the real study needs to link and compare the use and consumption of every thing from satellite TV to Facebook and Twitter. But it’s a start and a fascinating one.
• Second up is a piece by Clay Shirky about news institutions and the “crisis”. Above all this is a plea for experiments in news and a strongly made argument that, important as newspapers are as institutions, their adaptive capabilities really aren’t keeping up with what’s happening. Shirky’s piece also contains a link to an essay by Jonathan Stray on the digital public sphere which also looks excellent.
• Last is the New York Times picture essay on 2011: a vivid way to recall what has been a truly unusual twelve months.

With that I wish my readers a happy Christmas and newsy 2012. I’ll be back soon.

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Recessions, or rumours of their return, concentrate minds. Late last week, the New York Times announced the departure of its CEO, Janet Robinson, in terms which made clear that this wasn’t her initiative and that it had something to do with the paper’s struggles to find a successful digital publishing strategy.

I suspect that Ms Robinson’s removal is a symbol of a debate not confined to the boardroom of the New York Times or, come to that, to the United States. A long period of economic uncertainty on both sides of the Atlantic is starving newspapers of both readers and advertising income. In Britain print circulation declines are accelerating and given that two of the largest year-on-year falls are for the Guardian and Financial Times, I don’t think this can be attributed to the phone-hacking scandal.

This pushes all newspapers and their publishers closer to one of the biggest decisions in their history, a momentous choice which is coming sooner than many expected. How much longer can they stay in print? When do they switch to digital?

When two British editors were asked last year how much longer they expected to be printing their papers, both said that the companies had bought their last printing presses. Since both had invested in new presses in the past few years, that gave the Sunday Times and the Guardian maximum time horizons of between twenty and thirty years as paper products. I doubt that many titles now think they have that long.

And this is a horrible dilemma. Look at this piece from the Atlantic Wire and you’ll see that the author thinks that the New York Times should appoint a master (or mistress) of the digital universe as chief executive to take the company into a digital future. If only it were that simple. The judgement required is how to navigate from one business model (advertising and circulation revenue from print) to a digital model which barely yet exists. Most British newspapers earn more than three-quarters of their income from print, several much more than that. Switching off or running down the print edition too early could be suicidal. Holding on it too long will mean crippling costs. The big decision is certainly about understanding digital, but it is also an old-fashioned business judgement of peculiar difficulty. Everything lies in the timing.

The stakes in this game have been raised. I think that’s why Ms Robinson lost her backing in the boardroom and the Grey Lady’s directors decided they need a new navigator.

Update 19/12/11: more on the American date-of-print-death debate from Roy Greenslade.

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Amid the drama of the phone-hacking inquiries, anyone could forget that the British government is undertaking a review of plurality and media ownership. I had forgotten myself. And I’d actually sent the review a contribution.

My memo to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was based on a post on this blog. But for the record it’s here (scroll down to Brock and click). By far the hardest issue is not “how much should anyone own?” but how to measure media influence in the hands of one company.

Transparent government is a splendid thing. But that hardly makes it exciting.

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Unless you look very hard you will not have seen the Leveson Inquiry session of yesterday mentioned in the news. The inquiry wasn’t taking a day off: it was hearing from seven media academics.

Our views, to put it mildly, did not make headlines. But for the record, here is the link to the video and transcripts. The best summary I’ve seen is here (others here and here).

A few quick impressions. The questioning is thorough, rigorous and well-directed, much of it conducted by Lord Leveson himself. Given that so much of the focus is coming down to the less attractive activities of red-top papers, the absence from the inquiry’s panel of “assessors” of anyone with experience of a red-top newsroom seems odder and odder. Partly because such a person could have helped diagnose the problem; partly because the inclusion of red-top experience would bolster the political defences of inquiry conclusions which turn out to be unpopular with the popular papers. Those papers editors’ will give evidence in January and at least some of them are meeting shortly to see if they can organise a common front and shared proposals for the inquiry.

Lord Leveson referred yesterday to what had gone wrong in newspapers in the past “twenty years”. That choice of timeframe reminds us that the unspoken premise of this inquiry is to discover why the suggestions made (twice) by the last judge to consider these questions, Sir David Calcutt, two decades ago did not succeed as planned. There is a clear hint of this (part 1 c and d) in the Leveson Inquiry’s terms of reference.

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Below is the text of a piece which I’ve written for the British Journalism Review and it argues a different approach to newspaper regulation than the one taken by most witnesses to the inquiry so far. The BJR’s new edition carries other advice to Lord Leveson from a clutch of other commentators including Tessa Jowell, Steve Hewlett, Geoffrey Bindman and Donald Trelford.

Balanced privacy law might be the least bad outcome

George Brock

I blame the Leveson Inquiry’s terms of reference. These ask the inquiry to recommend “a new more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press”. No sooner were these words published than editors, pundits, publishers and media lawyers plunged with joyful relish into the business of elaborating “options” for toughening the powers and operation of the existing regulator, the Press Complaints Commission. The idea that the phrasing of the terms of reference is open ended, and doesn’t necessarily imply even the continuation of any self-regulatory or independent regulation, seemed not to occur to anyone at the seminars which Leveson organised as the overture to the formal hearings.

We need to step outside the confines of a debate which starts with the status quo and tries to make it work better. Refining existing regulation is a red herring. Much of the discussion about what might be called “PCC-plus” is displacement activity enjoyed in a comfortably familiar landscape. You could add a powerful, inquiring ombudsman to the PCC system (as suggested by Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail); you could set up a better regulation forum which would escape the cost and delays of court cases (Hugh Tomlinson QC); you could give the PCC statutory powers to compel papers to subscribe to its rules (Baroness Buscombe, lately PCC chairman). All these ideas, and others like them, miss the wood for the trees.

A newspaper regulation regime more effective than the PCC is perfectly imaginable, even if it would be liable to be more complicated, more expensive and slower. Seminars take place almost every week in London to elaborate new refinements. But a system based on ideas formed in the bygone era of a (relatively) profitable and dominant printed press will, in practice, be crippled by difficulties which are being neglected or under-estimated.

Toughening the press regulator means installing statutory powers as a back-up. Baroness Buscombe believes that a better PCC needs the power of law to haul recalcitrant publishers (such as Richard Desmond) into the fold, to protect newsroom whistleblowers and to make directors of newspaper companies responsible for the ethics of their newsrooms. The Lord Chief Justice has said he does not want statutory regulation of the media. The ideas for “more effective” regulation which don’t involve some statutory powers somewhere along the line are few and far between.

The arguments in favour of separate regulation for print made sense until technology offered news publishers the opportunity to transmit news and opinion on multiple platforms and consumers the freedom to switch easily between news on paper, TV, tablet, PC or smartphone. Despite the fact that most consumers of news in the UK still get their information from mainstream media, regulation which does not recognise technological convergence will look increasingly eccentric and indefensible over the next decade. Regulation based only on newspapers will look positively eccentric as the business model for print continues its downward decline.

Restrain bad behaviour and protect good reporting

British society remains divided about whether the law should strengthen the defence of individual privacy or go with the prevailing trend of digital communications technology which reduces the scope of privacy – sometimes with the willing consent of individuals and sometimes against their will. While privacy is an important issue for the news media, it is not solely a media one. Anyone with a cameraphone, whether calling themselves a journalist or not, can publish a picture which someone else claims to be private. That begs a basic question: now that journalism and journalists can’t be identified by their technology, what defines a journalist? How does a regulator know who to regulate?

A “new more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press” must balance two conflicting aims. I think there is a better way than resuscitated regulation – a better way to restrain bad behaviour as well as to protect good reporting, shielding the editorial risk-taking that is essential to good journalism.

The main elements would be:

• The PCC dissolves as an institution, although some of its activities might live on (see below).
• A new and more detailed privacy law replaces the current “balance” between Articles 8 and 10 of the Human Rights Act. It would have to spell out in some detail – and this would trigger a public debate – the limits on claims to privacy. Those limits should be set so as not to inhibit or chill proper journalistic inquiry.
• Work continues to reform laws which affect the media, such as libel and contempt – particularly to strengthen defences available to disclosures made in the public interest.
• The penalties for breaking the Data Protection Act include prison (but the possibility of a public interest defence remains).
• News media not otherwise covered by public service broadcasting rules will have stronger defences against legal attack if they can show evidence of the integrity of their newsroom: i.e. rules of conduct and their enforcement, how complaints and inaccuracies are dealt with and publicised, training and transparency.

This package – and it could only work as a combination – avoids the almost insuperable difficulties of including all publishers in a regulation system and raising enough money to run that system. This uses incentives and tries to have them work where it matters most – in the newsroom as reporters and editors think about what they do and how they do it.

Replay recent history while imagining the legal framework outlined above in operation. The late News of the World routinely invaded people’s privacy. But the same paper also did accomplished investigative work. I’m writing this on the day a London court convicted three Pakistani cricketers for corruption of the game thanks to a NoW exposure. The paper’s editor would have to assume that he would find himself fighting legal actions from time to time, often involving libel or privacy. But if he (or she) couldn’t show a clean slate in the newsroom, the paper’s case would be weakened. In short, to protect the reporters who are getting investigative scoops, the editor has to rein in bad conduct in the rest of the newsroom. The risk calculus changes and standards have to be taken more seriously. The incentive to behave a bit better is clear and can be measured by the paper’s lawyers. Websites and papers would not be compelled to show that their reporters were kept to known rules. Declaring and keeping better standards would be a choice. It could be made by newsrooms individually or collectively. A group of publications could develop further their shared standards. They could jointly employ an ombudsman or use a mediation system for complainants or litigants, retaining the skills and techniques which made the PCC effective in that area. Again, no compulsion. The incentive to do better and be seen to do better might be a general desire to enhance a paper’s image or a wish to strengthen legal defences, or both.

The state would be kept out of any detailed surveillance of what happens in a newsroom. A “mixed economy” of regulation would still exist, combining the strict rules governing public service broadcasting with greater latitude for print and online. The argument for this mixture lies in the acknowledgement by the BBC that its journalists could not have broken the stories of MPs’ expenses (which involved payment) or of phone hacking (which would have left the BBC open to accusations of breaching impartiality rules).

Writing a privacy law entails a huge risk for the news media. But given the vast changes wrought in attitudes to privacy by technology, a wellbalanced law would be the least bad outcome. The attempts by judges to “balance” Articles 8 and 10 of the Human Rights Act (those guaranteeing rights to both privacy and to free expression) have not worked well.

The issues raised by the judges will have to be fought in wider debate. The heart of the issue is not phone hacking but the material carried on Gawker or Twitter. I would argue that the public interest does not justify any and every exposure of hypocrisy. But I’d also want the law to disappoint crooks who hope to shield their misdeed behind a new privacy statute. Why should this balance be harder to strike and operate than “co-regulation” or “statutory-lite”?

George Brock is professor and head of journalism at City University London. He worked for The Times 1981-2009.

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There are very few spectacle sadder than watching a political movement which has worked for freedom become corrupted to the point where that same movement starts closing freedom down.

Today the South African parliament, dominated by the ANC, passed by a large majority a media law which will restrict and constrain independent journalism in that country. Indeed, the law seems designed to squeeze, chill or eliminate independent reporting. The state is going to be accountable to the state.

A few years ago, I sat at a table at a conference in Cape Town with Jacob Zuma, the lunchtime speaker. At the time he was widely tipped to become president and duly did. Zuma’s speech was platitudinous and he avoided almost all the questions on the media. At the time he was taking the truly unusual step of suing a cartoonist. But despite the discretion of his words, Zuma’s loathing of the media was plain to see: his body language and flinty stare conveyed eloquent disgust for the privileges and airs of journalists. I assume that he is savouring his revenge.

There are no doubt problems in the conduct of South Africa’s media. Given what we’re hearing at the Leveson inquiry into phone-hacking, it’s hardly the moment to be throwing stones from London. But – briefly to state the obvious – the answer to misconduct or excess by reporters and editors is not licensing and control by the state. This is not an exotic, “colonial” or particularly new idea and it is well expressed by many prominent South Africans of all stripes.

There’s no sign that Zuma or the ANC cares a fig for South Africa’s international reputation, but no one in the South African parliament should be surprised when their country slips down the global freedom indexes. Those opposing the new law have included the Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu and the literature laureate Nadine Gordimer; Nelson Mandela expressed reservations. As Tutu said, it was “insulting” for South Africans to stomach such legislation. Oh, what bright hopes there once were for that country.

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I’ve been lecturing in India and was yesterday at the Goenka Institute (partners with Lancaster University in Britain) just outside Delhi. As I usually am in India, I was asked by a member of the audience how Indian and British journalism compare.

My answer was truthful but also tactful: flaws in both…but at least open and competitive media systems…best journalism in both countries pretty good. I was conscious – over-conscious as it turned out – that the last thing anyone in India had heard about British journalism was phone-hacking and that Brits in India can so easily give offence and raise hackles by sounding “colonial”.

My tact was a miscalculation. At a later meeting with three members of the faculty and around ten students, my questioner was trenchantly contemptuous about the Indian media and had hoped that I would confirm his opinion. News media in any vigorous and open society are never popular, but all the same I was surprised by the depth and breadth of feeling. This wasn’t the frequently heard complaint that the Times of India has dumbed down; it wasn’t the usual moan about the silliness of the hyperfast 24/7 satellite news channels. No Indian media escaped censure.

On the spur of the moment, I invented the “assassination test”: you hear a rumour that the Prime Minister has been assassinated. To which media do you first turn? I thought that this would reveal that my Indian friends would actually rely on the state broadcaster or national news agency to tell them what had happened. Not a bit of it. “The BBC,” someone replied and most people round the table nodded. No one was prepared to say they would turn to an Indian source.

Even given that students might be reluctant to contradict their teachers and the fact that this was a completely unscientific survey, I was struck by the depth of mistrust revealed. Asked to explain why no one could rely on Indian media, explanations differed: corruption of journalists (particularly political correspondents), activist political agendas and the influence of advertisers and companies on the selection of news.

One of the people at the table later tweeted that she’d tried the assassination test on her young nephew. “Google News Search”, he replied.

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The twittersphere sent round plenty of links to last night’s Orwell lecture by the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, so signalling its importance is hardly needed. But I’m mentioning it to urge you to read the full text.

Besides being an excellent read, the lecture is in two parts. The first is the story of the hacking story, with plenty of justified emphasis laid on how difficult it was for the Guardian to get traction for a story which others didn’t, for a long time, want to touch. The second half is Rusbridger’s first outline of how he thinks the press regulation system should be rewritten after the Leveson inquiry. I have a few reservations about some of what he proposes but putting the “public interest” issue front and centre is dead right. I’ll come back to those arguments at a later date, but for now read the whole lecture.

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