What price a free press?

These are deeply troubling times for press freedom. On 7th July, the News of the World, a newspaper of some 168 years' standing, which could boast 7.5m readers on a good Sunday, was silenced. It was shut down by its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, but under pressure from a relentless Guardian investigation into phone hacking and a Twitter campaign to get big corporations to pull their ads from Murdoch's top tabloid.

The following day, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to clean up the press. Seemingly having forgotten that the media are supposed to investigate the government, rather than vice versa, he announced that he would set up an inquiry examining press standards, ethics and behaviour. He'll also look into setting up a regulatory body with "more teeth"—and therefore presumably more bite—than the Press Complaints Commission. Most ominously, he refashioned, Orwellian-style, the old media slogan about speaking truth to power. "It is vital that a free press can tell truth to power; it is equally vital that those in power can tell truth to the press," he warned.

The next day, on Saturday 9th July, the Metropolitan Police raided the offices of the Daily Star Sunday. They rifled through the files and belongings of Clive Goodman, the former News of the World royal editor who was jailed for phone-hacking and who now does shifts at the Star. Meanwhile, celebrities and respectable broadsheet journalists joined the clamour for tighter regulation of the press—or at least of the grubbier, less erudite sections of the press. Hugh Grant won rapturous applause on Question Time when he said "I'm not for regulating the proper press, the broadsheet press. But it is insane that the tabloid press is left unregulated." The Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown even suggested in a debate on BBC radio that perhaps journalists should require a licence—from the state—before they can report and write. When the issue of licensing was put to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, in a debate about tabloid phone-hacking, he would only say that the "notion of state licensing for the press" made him feel "anxious." "But I'd be interested to hear other views," he added.

A newspaper editor who only feels "anxious" about state licensing of newspapers, rather than, say, angry or outraged, might want to ask himself if he is in the right profession. Newspapers did once require a license from the authorities, but that system was abolished in the late 17th century, after coming to be seen as an abomination against freedom of the press and freedom of thought. As the poet John Milton put it in Areopagitica, an impassioned tract against official licensing of the press: "And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"

It is testament to the low esteem in which press freedom is now held that serious commentators can openly entertain the idea of resuscitating a long-dead system of government control over the press. Such has been the impact of the phone-hacking scandal, of the anti-Murdoch moral crusade pursued by respectable journalists, of the war of attrition against what is now widely referred to as “tabloid culture,” that we now have a situation where the police are raiding the homes and offices of hacks; where 168-year-old newspapers, beloved of vast numbers of people, can disappear overnight; and where demanding the regulation of, the punishment of, even the licensing of the press is more likely to win you a standing ovation than looks of horror.

There is now no question that the phone-hacking scandal will have, indeed is already having, a chilling and homogenising effect on the British press. This has gone way beyond a newspaper-cum-police investigation into various instances of phone hacking at the News of the World. It is a culture war, being pursued by one section of the media and society—the respectable side—against those who are seen as morally inferior and dumb. It has crossed the line from being a cool-headed investigation into alleged criminal antics to being a super-moralised battle between those who are good and liberal and right against those who are considered degenerate and perverse. The end result of this assault on "tabloid culture" can only be the further straitjacketing of the press, so that there comes to be only one decent and responsible way to do journalism.

The extent to which the anti-Murdoch moral crusade is now about stamping out what is perceived by decent people to be a bad way of thinking and writing can be seen in the way that the crusaders casually flit between condemning alleged crimes at the News of the World to condemning the "culture" at the News of the World, and at other low-rent newspapers.

Indeed, following the closure of the News of the World, Peter Wilby in the Guardian effectively told his readers (read crusaders) to avoid resting on their laurels and instead to turn their tabloid-hatin’ attentions to the Daily Mail—a paper which hasn’t even been revealed to be involved in large-scale phone-hacking. “The Mail, with its suburban, curtain-twitching prurience, is in some respects worse than Murdoch’s tabloids,” he declared. “It has been a consistent enemy of liberal polices… [and] it remains deeply hostile to scientists warning of global warming.”

Opposed to liberal ideas and insufficiently Green? Kill it off. Extinguish it. Send it to the same graveyard where the News of the World, the scourge of highbrows everywhere, is currently kicking up a stench. After all, as Medhi Hassan at the New Statesman put it, these are newspapers that “most of us had little to do with.” “Most of us”—what an interesting choice of phrase. He is quite clearly, and to his credit, sans shame, not referring to those millions of people who used to enjoy reading the News of the World and who still read the Daily Mail, but rather to his own tiny coterie of friends and colleagues.

When a newspaper can be demonised simply for saying something that runs counter to “liberal policies,” to the views held at the Guardian and amongst respectable, cosmopolitan society, you know that this is about more than uncovering crime. When the closure of a 168-year-old institution like the News of the World can be greeted with undisguised glee by broadsheet writers, you know that there’s more to this than exposing alleged criminal activity. This is now a naked, unforgiving moral crusade against newspapers that dare to think or behave differently to those that inhabit respectable society. The intolerance of the crusade is reaching a crescendo. In this effort to “clean up” the newspapers, to regulate the “improper press,” to squish non-liberal, un-Green publications that “most of us” don’t care about anyway, who will be the next victim?