Onora O’Neill, professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and former President of the British Academy, occupies a distinguished niche in the debates on the media, even since she gave, in 2002, the BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, including one on trust and the media. Her reasoning is close and detailed: but if the main point can be reduced to a sentence, it is that news media have acquired great power, that they claim to provide a democratically necessary version of the truth – but don’t, or don’t regularly. In contrast to other professions and trades where truth telling is subject to various disciplines and protocols, and where sanctions can be severe for deliberately failing to tell the truth, O’Neill pointed out that media publish or broadcast versions of events which are often wildly at variance with any reasonable version.

Central to her argument – and she reformulated it last week in Oxford, at a seminar on Journalism and Responsibility I run with Nigel Biggar, Professor of Moral Theology – is that the classic definition of freedom of speech in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty doesn’t make sense when applied to powerful ,media organisations. The right to express oneself as an individual makes little sense when claimed by News International, or Mediaset, or even the BBC. They did apply to the small-enterprise printing presses in the 18^th and 19^th centuries – but (as she put it in a lecture to the Royal Irish Academy in 2004) – “are they adequate for a world in which media conglomerates publish and broadcast, using a battery of new communications technologies and in which states have declining powers to control what citizens read, hear or see? Will the measures that protected free speech against state power also protect it against shifting constellations of market power with global reach? Or do we need to review and revise classical accounts and justifications of free speech?”

This last question is of the greatest importance to our current media turmoils and crises. More later.