Address at 12th World Media Conference, Aug. 22-26, 1992, Seoul, Korea. Copyright (c)1992 by World Media Association. This is an excerpt.

Not only can the media make a moral contribution to our culture, it "must" do so. It is, potentially, a great secular church, a system of evangelism for dispersing the darkness of ignorance, expelling error and establishing truth. I don't know whether any of you have read St. John's Gospel recently. But it could be described as a celebration of the importance of truth--the word is used again and again in all its meanings--and the need to convey it. It is the gospel of the media, and the Jesus of Nazareth presented in it might almost be called the first journalist--bringing the Good News to mankind. He spoke in the temple when he was allowed, and in wayside places if need be: anywhere he could collect a crowd. And he aimed his words at the masses, not the elites. Can anyone doubt that the man who once preached to the 5,000 would today use all the resources of the mass-circulation newspaper and, above all, TV? "I am the way, the truth and the life"--those are words of the dedicated reporter, he who brings the news which sets people free.

Earlier ages had no doubt that the media had moral purposes and duties. John Milton's great prose polemic, "Areopagitica", defending the right to print and publish, which he addressed to the Parliament of England in 1644, rings from start to finish with the poet's exalted conception of the writer's role in elevating and purifying society. The freedom to publish, Milton asserted, is the foundation of all civil liberties. As he puts it, "Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

"Areopagitica" might be called the foundation document of the right of the media to be free and its duty to arrive at the truth. But the media's function was enormously increased, and still more exalted, by the creation of the United States of America. It is impossible to conceive of the American Revolution, or the process whereby the Declaration of Independence was written, the United States Constitution agreed to and ratified, and amended by the Bill of Rights, without the interplay of Congress, newspapers and public opinion. Almost from the start, those who created America as a free society believed strongly in the natural good sense of humanity.

The people would be virtuous and take the right course so long as they were fully informed of the truth. And the truth reached them essentially through the newspapers. One of the most striking characteristics of the early United States was the rapidity with which newspapers were set up as the frontier expanded. Cincinnati got its first newspaper in 1793 when it had fewer than 500 citizens. In 1808 St. Louis got the first paper west of the Mississippi when less than 1500 people lived there. Leavenworth, Kansas, got its own paper in 1854 when the town consisted of four tents.

Noah Webster, who created the first American dictionary and might be described as the ideologist of freedom of printing in America, as Milton was in England, argued--in the first issue of the newspaper he founded--that the press was essential to the success of republican government because it was the only sure way to correct its abuses. "The best informed people," he wrote, "are the least subject to passion, intrigue and a corrupt administration."

This was the prevailing view, and government generally helped to finance newspapers by printing contracts and special postage rates. Thomas Jefferson himself, third president of the USA and the key man in the growth of its democracy, laid down, in the same year as the US Constitution was drawn up: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer [newspapers]."

Yet it was the same Thomas Jefferson who wrote, twenty years later (1807): "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." Here, neatly encapsulated in Jefferson's conflicting judgments, is the contrast between the ideal and the reality of the media. In the Garden of Eden where truth and freedom grow, the media--not as we want it to exist, but as it actually does exist--is the serpent which, introducing mankind to the tree of knowledge, bid us eat of the fruit which is evil as well as good.

Like Adam and Eve, we can't do without the media apple. We feel we must eat it, whatever the consequences. Electronic printing and global satellite communications have transformed it since Jefferson's day, but the dilemma remains: we need the media to make democracy work at all, but we rightly fear the damage and corruption its frailties inflict on our society. How do we maximize the good, and minimize the evil? The state cannot do it.

I offer no perfect solution today. Indeed, there is none. Instead, I have some hints and guidelines based on over forty years spent in the media all over the world, in newspapers, magazines, in TV and radio, in lecturing, pamphleteering and publishing. And the first necessity is the acceptance by those who work in the media, of the power they dispose of. A man or woman sitting in a cubbyhole behind a console, or in a broadcasting studio in front of a mike or camera, may not be conscious of the exercise of power--may never even set eyes on readers, listeners and viewers. But the power is there--often enormous and fearsome power, wielded through print and airwaves. With it go the duties which the exercise of power imposes.

People who work in the media are often insufficiently aware of the obligations of their position--much less so than politicians, for instance. They even see themselves as part of the entertainment industry, operating in the frivolous margins of life. That is false. More so than politics, the media stands right at the center of human activities. There are many aspects of life with which politics does not, and should not, concern itself. We live not in totalitarian societies but in democracies, where government is rightly limited. But there are very few sides of life with which the media does not deal. It is omnivorous, ubiquitous, uncircumscribed and comprehensive. There is no nook or cranny of the world, scarcely a hidden area of the human spirit which it does not seek to penetrate. And most of us want it that way because our own curiosity is infinite. But this means that the journalist--and I am using this as a generic term for all who hold responsible posts in the media--the journalist, even more than the politician, even more than the clergyman, come to think of it, needs to be a moral person, and see with moral as well as professional eyes.

Now the journalist, I need hardly say, is not regarded in this light. It is in many ways a disreputable profession or trade; more highly regarded, perhaps, in America than in Britain, more highly in Britain than in France or Italy, say; but nowhere held in particular esteem. Words we associate with it are: scribbler, hack, penny-a-liner, sensationalist, puff, blurb, boost, ballyhoo, jargon, cant , slang, rag, tabloid, foot-in-the-door, grub street, gutter press, and so on. In fact, journalists vary in moral probity more, perhaps, than in any other calling, from the high-minded and idealistic to the ineradicably grubby. But it is important to identify the characteristic weaknesses which lie behind the general condemnation, if we are to improve or eliminate them. There seem to me to be seven--what I call the Seven Deadly Sins of the Media.

The first, and in some ways the most important, is distortion. I do not say lying, because the outright publication of material known to be false is rare in journalism, though there is in France today a so-called newspaper which specializes in printing invented stories about the British royal family. Distortion, deliberate or inadvertent, is much commoner and can take many forms. The only safeguard, as that resourceful journalist Dr. Samuel Johnson pointed out, is eternal vigilance, a positive desire to convey the exact truth. Boswell records him saying: "Accustom your children constantly to this: if a thing happen at one window, and they, when relating it, say it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them: you do not know where deviation from truth will end." Mrs. Thrale thought this too harsh, saying, "Little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually watching." To which the Doctor replied: "Well, Madam, and you "ought" to be perpetually watching. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying that there is so much falsehood in the world." That is well observed, and Johnson's words ought to be posted in every newsroom and TV studio.

The second deadly sin I call "worshipping false images." It applies particularly to TV journalism, where the image captured on tape is allowed to dictate the shape and sense of the news-story, or indeed whether the story gets into the program at all. This particular form of falsity is dictated by the axiom that the viewer is easily bored and must be held by vivid, preferably violent, images: the words, the justification for the images, are a secondary consideration. Thus the tail wags the dog. We have here the commonest form of distortion on TV, and one which is cumulatively of huge importance, for it means that the imageless story, whatever its intrinsic importance, is treated as almost a non-event. Newspapers, too, worship false images when they play down stories which cannot be illustrated by photos, but also when they create stereotype images, the cliches of the news-desk. There is an almost irresistible urge, especially among the tabloids, to create an international soap opera of goodies and baddies, with the Castros and the Gaddafies, the Saddam Husseins and the Pol Pots making up the villains, and constituting a stock cast of characters who behave predictably and in type. The accretion of these images, which develop lives of their own, acts as a kind of opaque screen between the public and reality. The media must never be more than a sheet of plain glass, through which we see the truth clearly.

The third deadly sin is the theft of privacy. Intrusion into privacy is the most pernicious media sin of our time, and it seems to be growing. Every mortal man and woman has an inalienable right to some degree of privacy. However privileged, like royalty, however successful, like entertainment superstars, however powerful, like heads of government, or rich or celebrated, all require some privacy for mental and physical health. Even animals need it. Any ornithologist will tell you that some birds, if aware they are constantly watched, will pine and die. Human beings also have fragile psyches, which intrusion may maim; even holders of public office require residual privacy to function effectively. Phone tapping, "staking out," impersonation, telescopic lenses, all can be instruments of theft, as surely as a burglar's bag of tools.

Related to this is the fourth deadly sin, murder of character. The media has always been used for this unconscionable purpose. What is prevalent is the tendency of the media to assassinate the characters of public men and women from a generalized suspicion of authority.

In America, for instance, the quest for public scandal, in the aftermath of Watergate and the appointment of special prosecutors to investigate government, has become a kind of disease which is debilitating the republic and inhibiting good people from serving in it. In an important recent book, Suzanne Garment calls this the "cult of mistrust" and shows how law enforcers and journalists cooperate in creating "a self-reinforcing scandal machine." She writes: "Prosecutors use journalists to publicize criminal cases, while journalists, through their news stories, put pressure on prosecutors for still more action." The media is a loaded gun when directed with hostile intent against an individual. Those who pull the trigger must always search their conscience to ensure that they have the right target. Otherwise it is murder by media.

The fifth deadly sin is the exploitation of sex to raise ratings and circulation. Newspapers have employed salacity since the 18th century, but it has never before been so systematically, unscrupulously and shamefully flaunted as a selling-point, up-market as well as down-market. Editors and TV producers can think long and hard about whether exploitation of sex will invite sanctions from such regulations as do exist, but I doubt if one in twenty ever considers the possible corrupting effect on viewers and readers. In this area they have developed a thick-skinned moral neutrality.

That brings us to the sixth deadly sin: the soiling, one might say the poisoning, of the minds of children by what they see, hear, and read. It is in practice impossible nowadays for parents, however conscientious, to censor the reading and viewing habits of children except by excluding newspapers and television from the family home--a drastic step which deprives children of information they need. Regulatory measures, such as broadcasting "unsuitable" material only after 9 p.m., what used to be known as "the toddlers' truce," are derisory.

Hence to the seventh and last deadly sin--the abuse of the enormous power the media possesses. Ever since Macaulay termed the press "the Fourth Estate," there has been awareness of the political power the media disposes of, what might be called the "Citizen Kane Syndrome." William Randolph Hearst tried to start a war; Northcliffe tried to overthrow the Lloyd George government, and I well remember the occasion, forty years later, when his nephew, Cecil King, attempted to destroy Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The Watergate scandal was exploited by "The Washington Post, The New York Times" and other media giants to reverse the verdict of the electors and destroy a president. I sometimes get the impression that, in the United States, those who control the editorial policies of the media feel that they are the final repository of the nation's honor--rather as generals feel this in some Latin American countries--and that, if a regularly-elected government strays off the rails, they have the ultimate right to get rid of it by a media "putsch". All these are abuses of power. Less obvious, but more insidious, is the abuse of media power to alter public attitudes and behavior. Media bosses are not always conscious of the degree of power they exercise, and of its corrupting nature. For Lord Actum's dictum that all power tends to corrupt applies at lest as much to the media as to politics. Long exercise of great power produces, even in those quite immune to financial temptation, a general coarsening of the moral sensibilities, a certain careless, reckless approach to momentous decisions, which is the source of much evil. In a sense, this final deadly sin--abuse of power--subsumes all the others.

You may say: it is easy to specify and list these failings of the media. But how are they to be corrected? Can they, indeed, be corrected by any scheme of reform? And can a mere correction of error enable the media to make its proper contribution to mass culture in an era of growing global interdependence? The answer to this last question is: No. Just to list the "don'ts" is not enough. Something much more positive is required. What I would like to see is for all those who hold the levers of power in the media, publishers and TV bosses, editors, producers, writers and executives alike, to consider the vast extent of the influence they hold in the world--over the day-to-day behavior of countless millions of people, as well as the actions of governments--and, in consequence, accept the awesome responsibilities which go with it. The moment they begin to do so, the instant they perceive the magnitude of their ability to mold the future world, they must see that their duties cannot be exercised in a moral vacuum.

A moral media, making a contribution to global culture, cannot be legislated into existence, or bullied into existence, either. The most that someone like myself can do is point the way. Having described the negative side of the media--its grievous, habitual sins--let me now look at the positive qualities those who constitute it should possess. So here are my Ten Commandments--my rules of moral conduct--which apply with particular force to editors and TV producers but are addressed to all those who exercise media power and influence.

The first imperative is the overriding desire to discover and tell the truth. This is much more than a purely negative command not to lie or distort or bend. The truth is often difficult to discern, hidden, evasive, slippery, dangerous, complex and even in the end undiscoverable. What is required is huge energy in search of the truth, objectivity in recognizing it, scrupulosity in telling it and a willingness to make clear to readers and viewers that it is not always simple.

The second commandment is that journalists must always think through the consequences of what they tell. When a riot breaks out in one town, will certain forms of coverage make it certain riots will occur in other towns? What will legitimately inform, and what will needlessly inflame? What will warn--and what will corrupt? Those in charge of the media must always be totting up these moral balances, and while they may not get the answer right every time, the process of evaluating consequences must be both informed and instinctual.

That leads directly to the third commandment: truth-telling is not enough, indeed it can be positively dangerous, without an informed judgment. We all have opinions--too many of them perhaps--so I stress "informed". Journalists should be educated; more important, they should be self-educated, too--a lifetime process. They should be reading men and women, taking advantage of the unrivalled opportunities which work in the media brings to broaden and deepen their knowledge of the world and its peoples. Those who own the media must do all in their power to encourage journalists to study and think and sharpen their judgments, and to see and analyze events not merely in their immediate impact but in their long-term implications.

The fifth commandment is in some ways the most difficult one of all to follow, and the most important. Those running the media must distinguish between "public opinion" in its grand, historic sense, which creates and molds a constitutional democracy, and the transitory, volatile phenomenon of "popular opinion." James Madison, the primary author of the American constitution, argued that in a republic it must be the reasons not the passions of the public which sit in judgment.

At times, too, the media must show the willingness to lead, the sixth commandment. Power entails responsibility and responsibility means leadership. It is inescapable. A TV network must be prepared to make a moral stand and stick to it in the face of pressures and criticism. A newspaper must not only give its readers news they do not wish to hear but urge them to do things they find unpalatable. The risk of losing readers and viewers must be taken--and can, I believe, be taken with confidence. It is hard to recall any great newspaper which has been permanently damaged by taking an unpopular but principled decision. Leadership which is informed, reasoned and consistent is always respected, and it is usually followed.

The eighth commandment, indeed, is also a form of courage--the willingness to admit error. All media organizations inevitably make appalling mistakes of fact and judgment, and are egregiously reluctant to correct them except under the fiercest legal pressure. But where great power is exercised, accuracy is paramount, and judgment and taste must be refined and sensitive to criticism. A willingness to apologize is the mark of a civilized person and a contribution to a dynamic culture which is always seeking to purge its grossness and imperfections.

But admitting error is not enough. My ninth commandment enjoins something more positive--a general fair mindedness. If ever there were a moral quality, it is the ability to be habitually fair, because it involves so many others: the imagination to see other points of view, tolerance of them, temperance and restraint in expressing your own, generosity and, above all, a rooted sense of justice. Fair minded newspapers stick out a mile--because they are so rare. All TV networks make a display of their balanced approach, and hardly any display fairness when they wish to make a point. Yet fairness is one of the deepest human yearnings--it is the first moral point a small child recognizes--and lack of it the commonest complaint the public flings at the media. Conversely, nothing is more likely to build confidence in the media than the public's awareness that it prizes fair mindedness.

My last commandment is the most positive of all: respect, value, treasure and honor words. The media, even the image-media, is essentially about words, for words are inseparable from truth, the only way in which it can be conveyed. "In the beginning was the Word"--so St. John's gospel, which I commended to you earlier, opens. The media has to use words in haste and sometimes in excitement--that is its nature. But it must also and always use them with care, with respect for their precise meaning and nuance, and with reverence for their power. Words can kill, in countless different ways. They can destroy characters as well as possessions.

But words can also enlighten, comfort, uplift and inspire. They are the basic coinage of all culture, the essential units on which a civilization rests. Those who work in the media should always have a good dictionary at hand, not merely to be sure of the significance of their verbal tools, but to acquire new ones. They should amass words in the banks of their minds for future use, and spend them with judicious generosity and scrupulous regard for their value. But they should also rejoice in their richness and power--a richness which is one form of wealth available to all humanity, and a power to make that humanity better, and happier and wiser. Respect for words and love of words are two sides of the same coin; and that coin is the currency which will enable the media to make a decisive contribution to world culture in the 21st century. But it must be a moral media, conducted by people with a strong sense of their moral obligations to society. Is that too much to ask? No, it is not--and we should not hesitate to ask it.

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