Does the media have a "duty of care"?

In this thoughtful talk, David Puttnam asks a big question about the media: Does it have a moral imperative to create informed citizens, or is it free to pursue profit by any means, just like any other business? His solution for balancing profit and responsibility is bold … and you might not agree. (Filmed at TEDxHousesofParliament.)

I'd like to start, if I may,

with the story of the Paisley snail.

On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928,

May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow

to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city,

and there at the Wellmeadow Café,

she had a Scots ice cream float,

a mix of ice cream and ginger beer

bought for her by a friend.

The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle

labeled "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley."

She drank some of the ice cream float,

but as the remaining ginger beer was poured

into her tumbler,

a decomposed snail

floated to the surface of her glass.

Three days later, she was admitted

to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary

and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis

and shock.

The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed

set a very important legal precedent:

Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer,

was held to have a clear duty of care

towards May Donoghue,

even though there was no contract between them,

and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink.

One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this:

You must take care to avoid acts or omissions

which you can reasonably foresee

would be likely to injure your neighbor.

Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care,

how many people would have had to suffer

from gastroenteritis before Stevenson
eventually went out of business.

Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story,

because it's an important principle.

Last year, the Hansard Society,
a nonpartisan charity

which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy

and encourage greater public involvement in politics

published, alongside their annual audit

of political engagement, an additional section

devoted entirely to politics and the media.

Here are a couple of rather depressing observations

from that survey.

Tabloid newspapers do not appear

to advance the political citizenship of their readers,

relative even to those

who read no newspapers whatsoever.

Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree

with a negative view of politics

than readers of no newspapers.

They're not just less politically engaged.

They are consuming media that reinforces

their negative evaluation of politics,

thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical

attitude to democracy and their own role within it.

Little wonder that the report concluded that

in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids,

appear not to be living up to the importance

of their role in our democracy.

Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously

challenge that view.

But if Hansard are right, and they usually are,

then we've got a very serious problem on our hands,

and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes

focusing upon.

Since the Paisley snail,

and especially over the past decade or so,

a great deal of thinking has been developed

around the notion of a duty of care

as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society.

Generally a duty of care arises when one individual

or a group of individuals undertakes an activity

which has the potential to cause harm to another,

either physically, mentally or economically.

This is principally focused on obvious areas,

such as our empathetic response
to children and young people,

to our service personnel, and
to the elderly and infirm.

It is seldom, if ever, extended
to equally important arguments

around the fragility of our
present system of government,

to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality

are fundamental to the process of building

and embedding an informed,

participatory democracy.

And the more you think about it,

the stranger that is.

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure

of opening a brand new school

in the northeast of England.

It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360.

As I walked through their impressive,

glass-covered atrium,

in front of me, emblazoned on the wall

in letters of fire

was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction:

If it's not true, don't say it;

if it's not right, don't do it.

The head teacher saw me staring at it,

and he said, "Oh, that's our school motto."

On the train back to London,

I couldn't get it out of my mind.

I kept thinking, can it really have taken us

over 2,000 years to come to terms

with that simple notion

as being our minimum expectation of each other?

Isn't it time that we develop this concept

of a duty of care

and extended it to include a care

for our shared but increasingly
endangered democratic values?

After all, the absence of a duty of care

within many professions

can all too easily amount to
accusations of negligence,

and that being the case, can we be
really comfortable with the thought

that we're in effect being negligent

in respect of the health of our own societies

and the values that necessarily underpin them?

Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence,

that the same media which
Hansard so roundly condemned

have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving

in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen

would be likely to undermine or even damage

our inherently fragile democratic settlement.

Now there will be those who will argue

that this could all too easily drift into a form

of censorship, albeit self-censorship,

but I don't buy that argument.

It has to be possible

to balance freedom of expression

with wider moral and social responsibilities.

Let me explain why by taking the example

from my own career as a filmmaker.

Throughout that career, I never accepted

that a filmmaker should set about putting

their own work outside or above what he or she

believed to be a decent set of values

for their own life, their own family,

and the future of the society in which we all live.

I'd go further.

A responsible filmmaker should
never devalue their work

to a point at which it becomes less than true

to the world they themselves wish to inhabit.

As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers

are all required to face up to the social expectations

that come with combining the
intrinsic power of their medium

with their well-honed professional skills.

Obviously this is not a mandated duty,

but for the gifted filmmaker
and the responsible journalist

or even blogger, it strikes me
as being utterly inescapable.

We should always remember that our notion

of individual freedom and
its partner, creative freedom,

is comparatively new

in the history of Western ideas,

and for that reason, it's often undervalued

and can be very quickly undermined.

It's a prize easily lost,

and once lost, once surrendered,

it can prove very, very hard to reclaim.

And its first line of defense

has to be our own standards,

not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation,

our own standards and our own integrity.

Our integrity as we deal with those

with whom we work

and our own standards as we operate within society.

And these standards of ours

need to be all of a piece with
a sustainable social agenda.

They're part of a collective responsibility,

the responsibility of the artist or the journalist

to deal with the world as it really is,

and this, in turn, must go hand in hand

with the responsibility of those governing society

to also face up to that world,

and not to be tempted to misappropriate

the causes of its ills.

Yet, as has become strikingly clear

over the last couple of years,

such responsibility has to a very great extent

been abrogated by large sections of the media.

And as a consequence, across the Western world,

the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest

and their appeal to a largely disillusioned,

older demographic,

along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial

that typifies at least some of the young,

taken together, these and other similarly

contemporary aberrations

are threatening to squeeze the life

out of active, informed debate and engagement,

and I stress active.

The most ardent of libertarians might argue

that Donoghue v. Stevenson should
have been thrown out of court

and that Stevenson would eventually
have gone out of business

if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it.

But most of us, I think, accept some small role

for the state to enforce a duty of care,

and the key word here is reasonable.

Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care

and could they have reasonably foreseen

the consequences of their actions?

Far from signifying overbearing state power,

it's that small common sense test of reasonableness

that I'd like us to apply to those in the media

who, after all, set the tone and the content

for much of our democratic discourse.

Democracy, in order to work, requires that

reasonable men and women take
the time to understand and debate

difficult, sometimes complex issues,

and they do so in an atmosphere which strives

for the type of understanding that leads to,

if not agreement, then at least a productive

and workable compromise.

Politics is about choices,

and within those choices, politics is about priorities.

It's about reconciling conflicting preferences

wherever and whenever possibly based on fact.

But if the facts themselves are distorted,

the resolutions are likely only
to create further conflict,

with all the stresses and strains on society

that inevitably follow.

The media have to decide:

Do they see their role as being to inflame

or to inform?

Because in the end, it comes down to a combination

of trust and leadership.

Fifty years ago this week,
President John F. Kennedy

made two epoch-making speeches,

the first on disarmament
and the second on civil rights.

The first led almost immediately

to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,

and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act,

both of which represented giant leaps forward.

Democracy, well-led and well-informed,

can achieve very great things,

but there's a precondition.

We have to trust that those making those decisions

are acting in the best interest not of themselves

but of the whole of the people.

We need factually-based options,

clearly laid out,

not those of a few powerful

and potentially manipulative corporations

pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas,

but accurate, unprejudiced information

with which to make our own judgments.

If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives

for our children and our children's children,

we need to exercise to the
very greatest degree possible

that duty of care for a vibrant,

and hopefully a lasting, democracy.

Thank you very much for listening to me.

(Applause)