Following today’s announcement that the 3 main parties have agreed to a deal for regulating the press following on from the Leveson Inquiry, IoI director Claire Fox has called for journalists to emulate the ‘great heroes of modern liberty’ in refusing to bow to state regulation of the media.
Declaring Lord Justice Leveson ‘the grandee who effectively ended 300 years of press freedom,’ Fox argues that regardless of the form the legislation takes, Leveson’s ‘chilling’ impact as has made it ‘inevitable’ that journalists now face being tamed by ‘the Privy Council, an ancient body which most of us are more familiar with from reading Hilary Mantel’ than ‘a modern democracy.’
Speaking ahead of the Battle of Ideas on 19-20 October, Fox compares the challenge posed by Leveson to John Milton’s attack on Puritan censorship in the Areopagitica, arguing that we ‘must be braver…unashamedly take on our adversaries and loudly proclaim the virtues of a free press.”
The Battle of Ideas will debate the proposals on 20th October at the Barbican in the session ‘Leveson one year on: what future for press freedom?’
Performing politics: is all the world a stage?
"I was impressed by the intensity of the debate and the high level of intellectual engagement, not least by the audience. It was an invigorating, even exhilarating experience to be part of a festival based on the conviction that disagreement is good. The Battle of Ideas is a fantastic concept, may it spread epidemically to the rest of the world. I am already looking forward to next year's event."
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor of social anthropology, University of Oslo; novelist
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