Onora O’Neill, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University and a former President of the British Academy, has been quietly undermining much of the basis on which we thought freedom of the press stood for a decade. Is she a danger to the profession? See what you think.

Since she gave the Reith Lectures in 2002, and devoted one of the series, On Trust, to “Trust in the media”, she has interested herself more and more in the nature of communication, how truth is told and whether or not journalism can claim to be in the truth-telling business.

 She has three fundamental objections. First, that freedom of speech – enshrine e dint he Universal declaration of Human Rights, as Article 19 – is a right to express, not to communicate. It is an individual right: anyone should be free to express anything (if it does not harm others). However, it isn’t in itself a right to communicate: for a right to communicate requires someone or a group which have a duty to receive the communication – otherwise the right has no meaning.

 And though this may have worked, more or less, for small publishers and presses up to the 19^th century, and was of use in protecting those who wishes to publish dissident or awkward opinions or facts against state or church power, it doesn’t work now, when the media are usually produced by large companies. “Will,” she asked, in a 2004 lecture to the Royal Irish Academy, “the measures that protected free speech against state power also protect it from shifting constellations of market power with global reach?” And in a discussion in the same lecture, of John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty (1859), she says that Mill’s belief that freedom of publication was “inseparable” from freedom of expression made more sense in an era when the power of the press was fragile. It may then have been plausible to think that freedom of expression, freedom of the press and truth seeking were natural allies. In that long-departed world, a free press could be seen as serving individual freedom of expression, as enabling individuals to read one another’s belief, even (if Mill is right) as leading them to reflect on and test the truth of their own.

“In part the alliance seemed natural because individuals and the press faced a common enemy. Both had to contend with state power: both faced the depredations of censors; both were subject to penalties for speaking of publishing forbidden material. Unsurprisingly, the image of a free press as a forth estate, as champions both of the individual freedom of expression and of truth seeking, still resonates, especially where strong states still impose censorship or peddle propaganda.

“But today this ancient alliance between individual freedom of expression and an unrestrictedly free press has become problematic.”

 Second, she believes that Milton’s famous argument in Areopagitica (1644: www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/external/cross/areopagitica.pdf) – who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in free and open encounter? – “is implausible”, noting that most organisations which seek to establish the truth don’t stage a ding-dong between competing points of view but by regulation and amassing of evidence. Quoting Bernard Williams –

       In institutions that are expressly dedicated to finding out the truth, such as universities, research institutes and courts of law, speech in sot at all unregulated. People cannot come in from outside, speak when they feel like it, make endless irrelevant, or insulting, interventions and so on; they cannot invoke a right to do so, and no-one thinks that things would go better in the direction of truth if they could.

 These objections, couched in careful philosophical reflection, go to the heart of journalism’s deepest beliefs.