There is No Such Thing As a Free Press... by Mick Hume

There is No Such Thing As a Free Press... by Mick Hume

The aim of this book is to a launch a polemic for the freedom of the press against all of the attempts to police, defile and sanitise journalism today. Once the media reported the news. Now it makes it. The phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry into the "culture, practice and ethics" of the media has put the UK press under scrutiny and on trial as never before. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Press questions many of today's distorted but widely-held views of the media, and turns the assumptions underlying the current discussion on their head. The problem is not that the UK press has too much freedom to run wild, but too little liberty. The trouble is not that the UK press is too far out-of-control, but that it is far too conformist. The danger is not that press freedom is too open to abuse, but that the British media is not nearly open enough. Mick Hume draws on the lessons of history and cross-examines the evidence from the Leveson Inquiry to take on the army of conformists and regulators who would further tame press freedom.

Mick Hume is a writer and a journalist. He is currently editor-at-large of the online magazine Spiked (www.spiked-online.com). Hume has been writing about issues to do with the media, freedom of expression and a free press for many years. His previous publications include Whose War Is It Anyway? The Dangers of the Journalism of Attachment (1997), and Televictims: Emotional Correctness in the media AD (After Diana) (1998).