You can arrest Andy Coulson, you can sack two hundred journalists, and take the News of the World off the face of the earth, but the problem will not go away. News is in crisis, but believing that it is a crisis stemming from the lies, deceitfulness, and illegality of hacking is misplaced. Understanding the roots of the crisis requires a critical interrogation of the terms on which newspapers in operate. If you combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons it is not difficult to see how the values of professional journalism are quickly cast aside in order to indulge in sensationalism, trade in gratuitous spectacles and deal in dubious emotionalism. The net result is denigration of the professional life and integrity of news journalists, leading to a detrimental impact on the quality of news journalism and a consequent damage to our democracy. This latest scandal is shocking because it has exposed the heart of a system that is deeply flawed. Self-regulation has become the sacred mantra associated with the freedom of the press -- the only means to ensure governments cannot interfere in, dictate the terms, and thwart the practice of journalism. But this denies the influence and power of a corporate culture that wreaks its own havoc and sets its own agenda often more blatantly than any democratic government would ever dare. The question we really need to ask is, what do we want news for and how can it be delivered in the future? What is in the public interest in relation to the provision of news for democracy to thrive? How can we provide the environment that is required to enable journalists to do the job most of them want to do and to do it with integrity? Can we regulate for the relationship between news and democracy while retaining independent journalism and freedom of the press and if so, how? News is indelibly linked to the practice of democracy. When the product of news is broken, the practice of democracy suffers. The relationship between news and democracy works best when journalists are given the freedom (and resources) to do the job most journalists want to do -- to scrutinize, to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power, to facilitate and maintain deliberation. Freedom also means freedom from the constraints and limitations of a thoroughly corporate culture. The phone hacking saga shows that a marketized and corporatized media cannot be relied upon to deliver the conditions for deliberative democracy to flourish. Markets do not have democratic intent at their core. When markets fail or come under threat, or simply become too bullish, ethical journalistic practice is swept aside in pursuit of competitive and financial gain. Yes, we need a public inquiry, but what we really need is a whole new framework for news in the public interest.
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