The Press

The press of the United Kingdom of America is the Realm’s principal machinery for finding out what public bodies are doing and saying so. It consists of three papers with genuine national circulation, a much larger number of metropolitan and provincial papers, a tabloid sector, a co-operative news agency owned by the papers themselves, and the news operations of four broadcasters.

It is not an institution of the Realm and cannot be made one. Section 22 of the American Rights Act forbids any public authority to license, register or approve a publisher, printer, broadcaster or journalist as a condition of publishing, which means that the Realm has no press regulator, no register of journalists, no accreditation that can be withdrawn, and no lawful mechanism by which any of those could be created. The press is accordingly a trade rather than a body: it has no membership, no head, and nobody entitled to speak for it.

Two facts govern the modern subject and are in tension. The first is that the American press enjoys stronger legal protection than the press of any comparable country, by a margin that foreign journalists find difficult to credit. The second is that it has been contracting for twenty years, that the contraction has fallen almost entirely on the local layer that does most of the Realm’s original reporting, and that neither the protection nor the profits of the surviving national titles have done anything to arrest it. The Realm’s own commissions have established that counties which have lost their newspaper are measurably worse governed. Parliament has not acted, and this article ends where the subject does, which is without a resolution.

The shape of the press

Three nationals and no paper of record

The Realm has three papers that circulate nationally and it has no paper of record.

The three are the Columbia Gazette of New Westminster, the New York Herald, and the Boston Chronicle. Each is old, each is serious, each is read outside its own city, and none of them is understood by anybody to be the paper whose account settles a question. Foreign correspondents ask which paper is the American paper of record with some regularity and are told, usually with more satisfaction than the question warrants, that there is not one.

The absence is not an accident of commercial history. It follows from the shape of the Realm. A country of forty-nine polities with distinct legal systems, distinct legislatures and distinct public records regimes does not generate a single national conversation for a single national paper to lead. What it generates instead is forty-nine simultaneous conversations, most of them conducted in local papers, of which the national titles report the two or three that happen to have reached the capital.

The Realm makes a virtue of this and the virtue is partly real. A press with no paper of record has no single point of capture, and the Realm’s commentators observe, correctly, that a country whose entire establishment reads one newspaper has handed somebody a lever. It is also partly a rationalisation of weakness, because the three nationals are smaller relative to their country than the great papers of Britain or France are to theirs, and they know it.

The local layer

Beneath the nationals sits the layer that does most of the work.

Every polity capital has papers that cover its legislature full time. Every substantial city has at least one paper and until recently had two. Most counties had a weekly, and a great many still do, and it is in these that the bulk of the Realm’s original reporting has always been done: the council meeting, the planning application, the coroner’s finding, the school board, the docket at the county courthouse. The national titles carry a great deal of this at second hand and would have almost nothing without it.

This is the layer that has been dying, and the fact that it is the layer that does the reporting is why the death matters more than the circulation figures suggest.

The tabloids

The Realm has a tabloid press and it is as bad as Fleet Street ever was, in a manner peculiar to the country’s law.

It is not, on the whole, inaccurate. It is scrupulously accurate and completely merciless, and the combination is the Realm’s own contribution to the genre. The reason is set out in the section on defamation below: a paper that prints something untrue about a private person in the United Kingdom of America is exposed to a civil jury with no ceiling on what it may award, and papers have been destroyed by single verdicts within living memory. What survives that pressure is a journalism that checks every fact and shows no mercy whatever in the use it makes of them.

The result is a tabloid sector that is harder to sue and worse to be written about than its foreign equivalents. A British tabloid of the worst period could be answered, eventually, because a good deal of what it printed was false. An American tabloid is generally answerable only by the argument that the material was nobody’s business, and that argument has no cause of action attached to it.

The law of the press

Sections 21 and 22

The legal position of the press rests on two sections of the American Rights Act, the second of which is addressed to the press by name.

Section 21.2 provides that no public authority shall require a licence, permission or approval as a condition of publication. Section 21.3 forbids prior restraint except on the order of a court, made on evidence, and only where the harm to be prevented is grave, certain and incapable of remedy after publication. Section 22.1 provides that the press is free and that no public authority shall license, register or approve a publisher, printer, broadcaster or journalist. Section 22.2 provides that a person shall not be compelled to disclose the source of information received in confidence for the purposes of publication, except on the order of a court satisfied that the disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice or of national security and that no lesser measure will serve.

The four provisions do different work. The first two are about publishing. The third is about existing: it is the reason the Realm has no press council, no register, no accreditation and no regulator, and the reason it will not acquire one without amending the Rights Act. The fourth is about sources, and is the only one of the four with a live exception written into it.

Why there is no press council

The Realm’s cinema built itself a production code in the 1930s so that Parliament would not build it a censorship board, and the calculation worked: no statutory censorship of film has ever been enacted in the Realm. The press never made the equivalent bargain, and the reason is section 22.

A production code was worth having because a censorship board was possible. A press council would have been worth having on the same logic only if a press regulator were possible, and it is not. The threat that produces voluntary self-regulation elsewhere cannot be made here, because the instrument that would carry it out is forbidden in terms. Proposals for a press council have accordingly been raised perhaps a dozen times since 1920 and have died every time at the same point, which is the moment somebody asks what the papers are being protected from.

The consequence is a press with no complaints mechanism at all, other than the courts and the papers’ own conscience. Whether that is a triumph or a defect is the standing argument, and the Realm has never settled it.

Sources, and the exception that has teeth

Section 22.2 is not absolute and everybody involved knows it.

A court may order disclosure where it is necessary in the interests of justice or of national security and where no lesser measure will serve. The test is demanding, applications are rare, and most of them fail. But the section has been used, journalists have gone to prison for refusing orders made under it, and the profession regards the national security limb as the weakest sentence in the whole of Part III.

The Realm’s answer is that a protection without exception would be a protection no legislature would have granted, and that a narrow written exception argued in open court is better than a broad unwritten one applied in private. The answer is a good one and it does not console anybody who has been ordered to name a source.

Defamation and the civil jury

The high bar

Suing an American newspaper is difficult and expensive and usually fails.

Truth is a complete defence. There is a public interest defence which the courts have interpreted broadly and which protects a paper that has taken proper care even where the story turns out to be wrong. The burden of establishing falsity sits with the claimant in every polity, which is the reverse of the English position and is the single greatest practical protection the press has. And because court files are open by default and public records law is broad, a paper defending itself can usually get at the documents that show it was right.

The jury, and the reason it terrifies

What makes the Realm’s law distinctive is not the difficulty of establishing liability. It is what happens after.

The Realm kept the civil jury and England did not. Damages for defamation are assessed by juries in most polities as a matter of course, entrenched by Article IX of the Charter and by polity constitutions in terms no ministry has been able to touch. There is no statutory cap. Attempts to legislate one have been introduced in four Parliaments and have never left committee, and the objection that defeats them each time is that a cap on jury awards is an instruction to a jury, which is precisely what Article IX exists to prevent.

The practical effect is a press that is rarely liable and ruinously liable when it is. A paper that has taken proper care is nearly unassailable. A paper that has not is exposed to a body of twelve people with no ceiling on their discretion, in a country where juries have historically taken a hard view of powerful institutions printing untruths about ordinary people.

Three newspapers have been closed by single verdicts since 1950. Every editor in the Realm can name them and their names are used as verbs.

What the settlement produces

The combination has shaped the character of the American press more than any other single fact about it.

It produces a press that verifies obsessively, that maintains lawyers on the newsroom floor rather than in an office elsewhere, that will hold a story for months to nail a document, and that is correspondingly slow. It produces a press that is at its best on things that can be proved and at its worst on things that cannot. And it produces the tabloid sector described above, which discovered a long time ago that the safest cruelty is the accurate kind.

The foreign criticism is that the Realm has built a press that can prove anything and understand nothing. The domestic answer is that a press which prints what it can prove is the only kind worth the protection, and that the alternative is on display abroad.

Open records

The federal act

The Realm has federal records legislation, it is old, it is broad, and it is genuinely used.

Its central provision is the one that foreign observers find least remarkable and that American journalists regard as the foundation of everything: a public body must answer a written request within a fixed period. Not eventually, not on application to a court, not at the discretion of a minister. Within a fixed period, in writing, giving reasons if it refuses.

The exemptions are real and are argued about constantly. There is a security exemption, a personal privacy exemption, an exemption for advice to ministers while a decision is live, and a commercial confidentiality exemption that the trade regards as the most abused of the four. Refusals go to an independent commissioner and from there to the courts, and the commissioner’s caseload has grown every year for two decades.

The Liberal Federal Democrats campaign for its extension, principally to bodies that deliver public services under contract without being public bodies, and that gap is the largest live complaint about the regime.

Open courts, and the docket

The second pillar is that court files are open by default.

A person may walk into a courthouse in any polity of the Realm, ask for the file in a civil case, and read it. Pleadings, exhibits, judgments and most interlocutory material are public unless a judge has ordered otherwise on the record and for stated reasons. Sealing is possible and is granted sparingly, and an application to seal is itself on the docket.

This is why every county courthouse in the Realm has somebody in it who reads the docket. It is the single most productive routine in American journalism, it requires no source and no cultivation, and it is the first thing that stops when a local paper cuts its last reporter.

Tilden’s doctrine

The theory behind the Realm’s open government was stated most clearly by the ministry of Samuel J. Tilden, which published public contracts over the objection that nobody would read them.

Tilden’s answer, which the Realm has repeated ever since, was that publication works through the few who look rather than the many who do not. Very few members of the public ever read a published contract. A small number of newspapers, competitors of the successful tenderer, and members of Parliament with a grievance read them constantly, and the knowledge that they would be read altered what officers were prepared to sign.

The doctrine is the reason the Realm’s transparency law is written to be usable by the press rather than intelligible to the public, and it is also the reason the collapse of the local paper is a constitutional problem rather than a commercial one. A regime of open records with nobody left to make the requests is a regime of open records in name. The Realm’s commissions have made this point repeatedly and in those terms.

History

The colonial press

Printing came to the American colonies in the seventeenth century and newspapers followed in the eighteenth, and the trade was political from the beginning because there was nothing else worth printing frequently.

The colonial papers carried shipping notices, advertisements, official proclamations and a quantity of argument that grew steadily through the 1760s and 1770s. They were the medium in which the case set out in the Declaration of American Grievances was made, unmade and made again, and the constitutional settlement that followed owed a great deal to a decade of printers who could not be silenced because there were too many of them in too many jurisdictions.

The Realm’s papers have made rather more of this inheritance than the record strictly supports. Several colonial printers were prosecuted, a number were ruined, and the ones who were not were frequently in the pay of one faction or another.

The partisan century

From the Charter to the Civil War the Realm had a large partisan press and made no secret of it.

Papers were founded by parties, financed by factions and staffed by men who expected office if their side won. They reprinted dispatches, speeches, rumours, poems, maps and casualty lists, and the telegraph accelerated all of it from the 1840s. A reader of the period chose a paper the way a reader chose a church, and would have found the modern expectation of neutrality unintelligible and slightly dishonest.

The system produced ferocious argument, a great deal of libel, and a public that was better informed about national controversy than any comparable population in the world. It also produced newspapers that could not be believed about anything their patrons cared about.

The commercial turn

What ended the partisan press was not reform. It was advertising.

A paper financed by a faction needs the faction. A paper financed by advertising needs everybody, and a paper that needs everybody cannot afford to tell half its potential readers that they are traitors. The shift ran from roughly the 1870s to the 1910s, it was driven by department stores and classified advertising rather than by any principle, and the neutrality it produced was a commercial product before it was a professional one.

The Realm’s press is candid about this in its own histories and less candid about it in its own leader columns. The independence the American press defends as a principle was originally a business model, and the fact that the business model has now failed is the central problem of the modern subject.

The twentieth century

The twentieth century brought consolidation, the wire, the broadcasters and the professionalisation of the trade, in that order.

Chains bought local papers from the 1890s. The Associated Press of America took its modern co-operative form in the same period. Radio arrived in the 1920s and the American Broadcasting Corporation was chartered in 1927. Commercial broadcasting was licensed in 1959. Schools of journalism spread from the 1920s and had largely displaced apprenticeship by the 1970s.

The period from 1945 to about 1995 is remembered in the trade as the long settlement: papers were profitable, the wire was universal, the ABC was trusted, and the local weekly still had three reporters. Almost nothing about that period was stable and it looked stable for fifty years, which is why its ending was not seen coming by people whose profession is seeing things coming.

The national papers

The Columbia Gazette

The Columbia Gazette is the paper of the capital and the closest thing the Realm has to a paper of government, which is not the same as a paper of record and the distinction is jealously maintained.

It was founded in the 1820s, took its name from the district, and gave its name to Gazette Row, the short street off the Charter Axis where it and its competitors set up their offices and where the Realm’s political journalism still physically sits. It has the largest press gallery staff, the best coverage of the departments, and a standing reputation for knowing what a ministry is about to do slightly before the ministry has decided.

Its weakness is the weakness of every capital paper, which is that it is written by and for people who live within two miles of Parliament House, and it is at its worst on the question of whether anything it is reporting matters to anybody outside them.

The New York Herald

The New York Herald is the largest of the three by circulation and by revenue, and is the paper foreigners read when they read one.

It is a New York paper before it is a national one, which shows. Its financial and commercial reporting is the best in the Realm by a wide margin and is the principal reason for its national circulation. Its foreign coverage is the largest maintained by any American newspaper and, as set out below, that is a smaller boast than it sounds.

The Boston Chronicle

The Boston Chronicle is older than the Realm.

It was printing before the Charter, it printed through the Four-Year War, and it has never let anybody forget either fact. It is the smallest of the three, the most self-consciously literary, and the one with the strongest tradition of long investigation. Its habit of spending a year on a single subject is admired by the trade and has more than once been the thing that kept it from being sold.

The local press

What it does

The local paper is the working instrument of the Realm’s open government, and its function is better described by a list than by a principle.

It sends somebody to the council meeting. It reads the docket at the county courthouse. It files records requests, routinely and in volume, and it is the reason the fixed-period reply is a real obligation rather than a theoretical one. It prints the planning applications, the licensing decisions, the coroner’s findings, the school board’s budget and the names of everybody who has been charged with anything. It covers the polity legislature’s delegation. It reports the high school results and the deaths.

Most of this is dull, none of it is national, and the accumulated effect of doing it week after week for a century is a form of civic supervision that nothing else in the Realm reproduces.

What it costs

It cost, historically, almost nothing, because it was paid for by classified advertising.

A county weekly carrying three columns of classifieds and a page of grocery advertising could support two reporters, an editor and a photographer, and the reporting was in a real sense a by-product. The paper’s customers were advertisers; its readers were the inventory. Nobody in the trade found this arrangement dignified and everybody understood that it worked.

The galleries in the polity capitals

Every polity capital has a press gallery, and their condition varies more than any other part of the subject.

The largest, in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and California, are substantial rooms with a dozen or more full-time correspondents and a tradition of institutional memory that governors find inconvenient. The smallest have two people in them, both of whom also cover three other subjects, and several have contracted by more than half since 2005.

The Realm’s own commissions have found what everybody expected them to find, which is that polities whose galleries have shrunk pass more legislation with less scrutiny, and that the correlation holds after controlling for everything anybody has thought to control for.

The Associated Press of America

What it is

The Associated Press of America is a news agency owned co-operatively by the newspapers it serves. It is the load-bearing institution of the Realm’s journalism and the one the Realm thinks about least.

Its members are the papers. They own it, they elect its board, they pay assessments proportionate to their circulation, and they contribute their own local reporting to the common file in exchange for the right to draw on everybody else’s. A weekly in a county of nine thousand people has, by virtue of membership, the foreign coverage of an institution with bureaux on five continents, and gives up in exchange the exclusive use of its own account of the council meeting.

It is editorially independent of every one of its owners, which is a strange thing for a co-operative to be and is the single most important fact about it. The independence is written into the instrument and is enforced by the impossibility of the alternative: a file that reflected the politics of any member would be unusable by the rest.

Why it is the load-bearing institution

The Realm has no paper of record, no national broadcaster with a monopoly on news, and no metropolitan press that reaches the whole country. What it has instead is a wire that reaches every town in it.

The consequence is that the Associated Press of America performs the function that a paper of record performs elsewhere, without any of the authority that would come with being one. When two polities disagree about what happened, the account both of them are working from is the wire’s. When a small paper reports a national story, it is reprinting the wire. When a broadcaster leads a bulletin, the copy behind it is very often the wire’s.

It is the only common factual inheritance the Realm has, and it is owned by an industry in liquidation.

Abroad

The Associated Press of America is one of the two or three wires the world reads, and its foreign operation is genuinely first class.

It maintains bureaux the Realm’s newspapers could not individually afford and has done since the 1920s. Its coverage of the Russian Republic, of the European Concert and of the Pacific is used by foreign broadcasters and foreign ministries as a matter of routine. Its file is a diplomatic instrument in a sense nobody at the agency will acknowledge, and its correspondents are treated accordingly in places where the distinction between a journalist and an agent of a Crown realm is not conceded.

The agency’s own view is that its foreign operation exists because its members individually could not sustain one and collectively could. That is true, and it is also the polite version of a less comfortable fact set out below.

The sale that keeps failing

The members are dying and the members own the agency, and the arithmetic of that has produced the standing crisis of the modern institution.

A proposal to sell the agency, or to convert it from a co-operative into a company in which the members would hold shares they could realise, has been put to the membership four times since 2011. It has failed four times. It has failed by a narrowing margin each time.

The case for selling is straightforward and is made by papers in genuine distress: the agency is the most valuable asset most of them own, they cannot eat it, and a share of the proceeds would keep some of them printing for another decade. The case against is that the thing being sold is the only reason a paper in a county of nine thousand people has any foreign coverage at all, and that a commercial owner would not maintain the file that the small members depend on and the large members subsidise.

Both cases are correct, which is why the vote keeps failing rather than settling. The agency’s board has taken no position in four ballots, on the ground that a board elected by the members should not tell them what to do with the thing they own, and this has been criticised as the abdication it probably is.

Ownership

Three models, and the argument between them

American newspapers are owned in three ways, and the argument between the three is the most consequential fight in the industry.

Families. A substantial number of the Realm’s serious papers are still controlled by the families that founded them, several into a fifth generation. The family papers are the ones with the long investigations and the foreign bureaux, because a family that regards the paper as an inheritance can accept a return that no other owner would tolerate. They are also the ones most exposed to a single death, a single divorce, or a single member of the fifth generation who would rather have the money.

Chains. From the 1890s, chains bought local papers, and from about 1995 they bought them in order to cut them. The pattern is now familiar and the Realm’s own commissions have documented it in detail: acquisition, consolidation of printing, consolidation of subeditors, consolidation of the newsroom into a regional hub, and finally the closure of the office in the town whose name is on the masthead. The chains’ defence is that the papers they bought were dying anyway and that the alternative to a thin paper was no paper, which is true of some of them and not of others.

Trusts. A number of papers have been placed in endowed trusts whose deeds put the ownership beyond sale and direct the income to the paper. The model is admired, it has preserved several titles that would certainly have gone, and it is available in practice only to papers wealthy enough to have something to endow with. The Realm’s smaller papers have observed, with some asperity, that the trust model has saved precisely the papers that were least at risk.

Why the argument matters

The three models are not merely different owners. They are different answers to the question of what a newspaper is for, and the Realm has never chosen between them.

A family paper is a possession with obligations. A chain paper is an asset with a return. A trust paper is an institution with a purpose. Each model produces a recognisably different newspaper, the differences are visible to any reader who looks, and the trade’s private view is that the country would be better off if one of the three won and cannot agree which.

Broadcast news

The ABC

The American Broadcasting Corporation is the Realm’s chartered public broadcaster, created by royal charter in 1927, funded by a founding endowment and an annual parliamentary grant, carrying no advertising within the Realm and charging nothing to the viewer.

Its news operation is the largest in the Realm and the most trusted, and the two facts are related to its funding in a way that its commercial rivals dispute annually. Its ceremonial role, its May Day observance and its constitutional position are dealt with in its own article and are not repeated here.

What matters for this subject is the relationship. The ABC does not compete with the press for revenue, because it has no advertising to compete for. It competes with the press for stories, for staff and for the public’s attention, and it has been winning the third contest for forty years.

The commercial networks

Commercial broadcasting was licensed from 1959, at the second Charter renewal, under a Broadcasting Commission independent of both the ministry and the ABC. Licensees were required to carry news, to meet minimum standards for regional production, and to accept a schedule of listed events that must remain free to air.

There are three national commercial networks. Each is named for the company that founded it, and in every case that company was a newspaper chain.

This is the fact that makes the Realm’s media landscape different from Britain’s. The chains that had spent sixty years buying local papers were, in 1959, the only businesses in the country with a sales force in every city, a transmitter’s worth of capital, and a reason to want a second advertising medium before somebody else got one. They applied, they were licensed, and the Realm’s broadcast news has been owned by its newspaper proprietors ever since.

What the tangle produces

The consequence is that the press and television are not separate estates in the Realm and have never been.

A chain that owns forty local papers and a national network can close the papers and keep the network, and several have. It can staff the network’s regional bulletins from the newsrooms of the papers it is closing, and several have done that too, which is the reason regional television news in the Realm is better than its newspapers and is itself an argument the trade finds humiliating.

It also means that the Realm’s inquiries into press ownership have always been inquiries into broadcasting ownership, that the Broadcasting Commission is the nearest thing to a press regulator the Realm possesses, and that the Commission is scrupulous about not becoming one. Its jurisdiction is over licences, licences attach to transmission, and section 22 does the rest.

The economics of the press

Who paid, and what for

The economics of the American newspaper were, for a century, a misunderstanding that everybody profited from.

Readers believed they were buying journalism. Advertisers believed they were buying attention. What actually happened was that the classified section, which is a public directory of things for sale, subsidised the reporting, which is a public good nobody had agreed to pay for. The cover price never covered the newsprint.

The classifieds went online

What killed the local paper in the Realm was the migration of classified advertising, and the Register states this plainly because the temptation to invent a more interesting cause should be resisted. Classified advertising moved to the internet in the decade after 1995. It did not move to newspapers’ own websites. It moved to businesses that had no interest in journalism, carried none, and were better at classified advertising than newspapers had ever been.

The revenue that had paid for the reporting left, the reporting had never been paid for by anything else, and the reporting stopped. There was no villain, no policy failure and no distinctively American cause. There was a subsidy that had been invisible for a hundred years and then was not there.

What the survivors run on

The national three run on digital subscription, and it works for them.

The Columbia Gazette, the New York Herald and the Boston Chronicle have between them rather more paying subscribers than they had print readers in 1995. Their newsrooms are larger than they were in 2005. They are, by any measure, in better health than at any point in forty years.

This is the fact that has made the collapse politically invisible. The papers that a member of Parliament reads are doing extremely well. The papers that covered the member’s constituency have shut, and no mechanism exists by which the first group’s health could inform the second group’s obituary.

The gallery and the lobby

Parliament House

The press gallery is in Parliament House, and the political journalism that surrounds it sits on Gazette Row, a short street off the Charter Axis in New Westminster that has held newspaper offices since the 1820s and now holds broadcasters, wire services, the ABC’s political bureau and most of the gallery’s overflow.

The lobby system that grew up around the gallery is less closed than Westminster’s and more closed than the Realm likes to admit. Briefings are attributable more often than not, which is the genuine difference from British practice and is defended as such. Ministers are quoted by name in circumstances where a British minister would be a source close to the department.

But the conventions that remain are absolute rather than negotiable, and the political press of the capital is very good at knowing things it does not print.

What the gallery is criticised for

The standing complaint against the gallery is made most sharply in the Columbia District itself, and it is that parliamentary argument has become performance for broadcast and that the gallery produces clips rather than scrutiny.

The complaint is not that the gallery is captured. It is that the gallery is bored, that it covers Parliament as a contest rather than as a legislature, and that a chamber which knows it is being covered for its best forty seconds will produce forty seconds and nothing else. The gallery’s answer is that it reports what happens and that the remedy for a Parliament performing lies with the Parliament.

Neither side has moved in thirty years.

The trade

From apprenticeship to profession

Journalism in the Realm was a trade entered by apprenticeship and is now a profession entered through a university, and a substantial part of the trade believes the change ruined it.

The old route was the local paper. A young person of seventeen or eighteen joined a weekly, spent two or three years on deaths, courts and council meetings, learned shorthand, learned the docket, learned that a name spelled wrong is a correction and a fact wrong is a writ, and moved up to a daily or did not. Schools of journalism spread from the 1920s and had largely displaced the old route by the 1970s.

The case for the change is that the trade acquired ethics, method, a literature and a defensible claim to be doing something more than gossip, and that its reporting improved. The case against is made with more feeling and rests on two arguments. The first is that a graduate route selects for money, because it requires three or four years of fees and unpaid work, and that a press recruited from people who can afford to enter it will not notice the country it is reporting on. The second is that the apprenticeship taught the docket and the schools teach the profession, and that the docket was the more useful thing.

The second argument has become considerably stronger since the papers that ran the apprenticeships closed, because the profession’s entry route now leads to newsrooms in three cities and the trade’s entry route led to newsrooms in three hundred towns.

What it pays

Badly, outside the national three and the broadcasters.

A reporter on a surviving county weekly is paid less than the teachers whose school board meetings they cover, works longer hours, and does the work that three people did in 1990. The national papers and the networks pay professional salaries. The gap between the two has widened every year since 2000 and is the mechanism by which the collapse of the local layer becomes a shortage of people who know how a county works.

What it is like

The trade’s own account of itself is unsentimental and worth recording as it gives it.

It is a job of routine punctuated by very short periods in which the routine matters enormously. Most of it is meetings, documents, telephone calls that are not returned, and the slow accumulation of small facts. The Realm’s law makes it slower than journalism elsewhere, because a story that cannot be proved cannot be printed, and reporters spend a great deal of time establishing things they already know.

It is also, by the account of everybody in it, the only job in which a person of no particular standing may put a written question to a powerful body and receive an answer within a fixed period because the law requires it. The trade regards that as the whole of its case and does not think it needs a better one.

The press and the Crown

The convention

There is a real convention protecting the sovereign’s family from the press and it holds.

Its firmest expression is at the vice-regal level and is the one every journalist in the capital can recite: an audience at Government House is never reported. What passes between the Governor-General and a Prime Minister is not briefed, is not leaked, and has not been printed in living memory, and the convention holds absolutely rather than usually.

The convention extended to the person of the heir, and since 31 October 2028 it has extended to the person of the King. George V, who acceded at fifteen, lives and studies in New Westminster, attends an ordinary public secondary school, and is not photographed there, not doorstepped there, and not written about as a schoolboy. The Household maintains an arrangement with the editors, most of the editors keep it, and the ones who do not are the tabloids described above.

Where the harm goes instead

The convention does not reduce the appetite. It relocates it.

A press that may not write about a fifteen-year-old prince, and that has readers who want to read about him, writes about the people around him. It writes about his friends. It has written repeatedly about Theo Hartigan, who is a schoolfriend and not a part of the heir’s constitutional apparatus, and who did not choose any of it. When the Household named Theo in 2027 it did not name his sister, and the press found her within a day, photographed her, described her in print as the Prince’s friend’s sister, and asked her for comment on a boy she has met perhaps a dozen times.

It has more than once printed Theo’s age beside a photograph that contradicts it, because he is fifteen and does not look it, and his mother has found this more irritating than almost anything else that has been done to her son, on the ground that a boy who is made to look older is a boy people feel entitled to expect more from.

The Register states plainly that this is a failing of the Realm’s press and not an unfortunate side effect of a good rule. The convention protects the person who has a Household, a private secretary and the constitutional standing of an heir. It does not protect the bus driver’s son, and the trade has not seriously attempted to extend it to him. The school that Theo attends has declined every approach for four years with the same sentence, which is that the school does not discuss its pupils, and the Register has noted elsewhere that the only institution in the entire account that has never made a mistake is a comprehensive school with a leaking roof.

That observation belongs in this article too, and it is not a compliment to the press.

The press and May Day

The one thing it is agreed to have got right

The coverage of the May Day Bombings of 1 May 2006 is generally agreed, including by the press’s severest critics, to be the thing the American press got right.

It did not name suspects who turned out to be innocent. It did not run the casualty rumours that circulated in the first hours. It did not broadcast the material the attackers might have wanted broadcast, and when it became clear that there was no manifesto, no claim of responsibility and no name, it reported that absence as a fact rather than filling it. The trade’s own explanation is unromantic and is probably correct: a press trained by a century of ruinous jury awards to print only what it can prove was, on the one day it mattered most, professionally incapable of speculation.

The ABC’s broadcast of that afternoon is treated separately and is a distinct achievement.

And the thing it has not done since

The credit is for a day and the criticism is for the twenty-two years afterwards.

The Realm’s post-May-Day settlement placed its weight behind the counter rather than in the concourse: there are no checkpoints, no confiscation regimes and no search rituals, and the civil liberties harm it created is accordingly not friction but invisibility. A person wrongly listed may never learn it happened and cannot challenge what they have not been told about.

The press has never made that into a story that people read. It is difficult to report, because the harmed party does not know they are the harmed party, and it is difficult to sell, because a wrong nobody can feel does not photograph. Both explanations are true and neither is a defence. The Realm built its most consequential post-May-Day machinery in a place the press has been unable to look at, and the civil liberties organisations that have documented it have done so substantially without the press’s help.

The Kittanning affair

What happened

The Kittanning affair is the case the Realm argues about when it argues about the press, and it has the shape it has because nobody was ever tried.

The Kittanning Works is a federal ordnance establishment in the Province of Pennsylvania, in operation since the First Great War. From the 1950s its solvent and propellant residues were disposed of on the site. From the 1960s they were in the groundwater, and the wells that drew on that groundwater served the works, the married quarters and part of the town.

The Ministry of Defence established the contamination in 1971, commissioned three surveys between 1971 and 1979, and closed the affected wells in 1981 without telling anybody why. It did not notify the workers. It did not notify the families in the married quarters. It did not notify the province. It made no attempt to trace the people who had left the site, and it declined, in 1983 and again in 1994, to fund a study of what had happened to them, on advice which the surveys’ own authors described at the time as a decision to avoid producing a document.

The deaths are not precisely known and that is itself part of the finding. The most conservative estimate before the courts is a little over four hundred, across four decades, chiefly cancers of a kind the surveys had predicted by name.

How it was broken

It was broken by the Kittanning Sentinel, a weekly with a circulation under eleven thousand and a newsroom of three.

A reporter there had been reading coroners’ findings for eleven years, which is the routine described earlier in this article, and had noticed a cluster the way a person notices anything they have looked at every week for a decade. The records requests were refused under the security exemption. The appeal to the commissioner failed. The appeal to the court failed.

The Sentinel then paid a clerk in the Ministry of Defence for the surveys, which is a crime in the United Kingdom of America, and published them across eleven weeks in 1998.

What followed, and what did not

The surveys were genuine. Nothing in them has ever been contradicted. The Ministry did not attempt to contradict them; it accepted the findings within a fortnight, apologised, established the tracing programme it had refused twice, and has paid compensation continuously since 2001.

Nobody was ever charged. The offence was plain, the evidence was on the public record because the paper had printed the documents and said where it got them, and four successive ministries have declined to prosecute. The reason given privately, and eventually in evidence to a committee, is that no ministry wanted the trial: a prosecution would have put a jury of Pennsylvanians in a room with the surveys, and the Realm’s law officers reached the same conclusion each time, which is that no jury in the province would convict and that the acquittal would be worse than the offence.

The clerk was not so fortunate. They were identified during the Ministry’s own internal enquiry, dismissed, stripped of pension entitlement, and never prosecuted either, which meant they never had the trial at which any of this could have been said in public. They have never been named, at their own request, and the Sentinel has never named them.

Why it is unresolved

The affair is not a settled scandal with a moral. It is a live disagreement about four things that will not reconcile.

The first is that the Realm punished nobody for concealing four hundred deaths, and punished nobody for the crime that exposed the concealment, and that a country which does neither has not decided anything.

The second is that section 22.2 protects a source but does not protect a source’s pension, and that the clerk who made the disclosure possible lost more than the newspaper, the Ministry or any official involved.

The third is the argument the trade has with itself. A paper that pays for documents has bought the right to be told what somebody wants it to know, and the Sentinel’s defence has always been that it had exhausted every lawful route first and could prove it. Editors who accept that defence and editors who do not have been arguing since 1998 and the argument has not moved.

The fourth is that the decision not to prosecute was taken by the executive, repeatedly, on the ground that it would lose. That is a considered use of prosecutorial discretion and it is also a ministry deciding that the law should not be applied to a case involving a ministry.

What it did to the Sentinel

The Kittanning Sentinel closed in 2016.

Its classified revenue had gone the way of everybody’s, its owner sold to a chain in 2009, the chain consolidated the newsroom into a regional hub sixty miles away in 2013, and the office on the main street closed three years after that. The paper’s archive is held by the province.

Nobody covers the coroner’s findings in that county now.

The collapse of the local paper

The scale

The Realm has lost more than half its local newspaper titles since 1995 and considerably more than half its local newspaper journalists.

The losses are not evenly distributed. Wealthy suburban counties have generally kept something. Rural counties, poor counties, and counties whose paper was bought by a chain in the 1990s have not. Something over three hundred counties in the Realm now have no newspaper of any kind, and a larger number have a paper that no longer sends anybody to the council meeting, which is the same thing arriving more slowly.

What the Realm knows about the consequences

The Realm has studied this properly and the findings are not in dispute.

Counties that have lost their paper have lower turnout in local elections and fewer contested seats. They borrow at higher rates, which is the finding that persuaded people who had not been persuaded by any of the others, because it puts a number on the cost. They have more uncontested planning decisions, fewer records requests, and longer intervals between a public body doing something and anybody outside it finding out.

Two royal commissions and a joint committee have reported on this. The reports are excellent, they are consistent with each other, and they have produced nothing.

Why nothing has happened

Four explanations are offered in the Realm and all four are probably true at once.

The first is that section 22 makes the obvious remedies constitutionally awkward. Public money for newspapers raises the question of who decides which newspapers, and the answer to that question is a body the Rights Act forbids.

The second is that the ABC is available as an answer that is not an answer. Ministers asked about local news have for twenty years pointed at the corporation’s regional services, which are real, which are not local in the sense that matters, and which the ABC itself has said repeatedly cannot substitute for a paper in a county town.

The third is that the constituency for action is diffuse and the constituency against it does not exist. Nobody lobbies against local newspapers. Nobody lobbies for them either, because the people who would have organised the campaign worked at the papers.

The fourth is the one this article returns to at its end, which is that the members of Parliament who would have to act read three national newspapers that are doing extremely well.

Where it stands at present

Unacted on.

There is no bill. There has been no bill. A private member’s measure to extend charitable status to non-profit local news organisations was introduced in 2021, was not opposed by anybody, and fell for want of time. The Realm’s position on the collapse of the institution that makes its open-records regime function is that it is a great pity, and that is the whole of the position.

The digital era

What replaced the local paper

Nothing, and then something worse than nothing.

The counties that lost a paper did not acquire a local news website. What filled the space was the general social feed, in which the council meeting is reported by whoever attended it and disliked it, the planning application is reported by whoever objects to it, and the coroner’s finding is not reported at all because nobody reads coroners’ findings for fun.

The resulting rumour economy has a property the Realm’s institutions were not built for: it cannot be corrected. A court can order a newspaper to print a correction with equal prominence and the newspaper will. A council can write to an editor. Neither has any purchase on a claim that has been shared forty thousand times by people who are not publishers, cannot be sued profitably, and would not print a correction if they were.

Clerks of court, county officers and school boards across the Realm now spend a measurable part of their week answering things that are not true, and there is no mechanism by which the answer travels as far as the claim.

Polarisation

The Realm is little polarised by its broadcast media, yet badly polarised online, and the gap between the two is widening.

The broadcast half of that is institutional and is the reason the two halves differ. The ABC exists, is trusted, carries no advertising and is watched by everybody. The commercial networks are licensed on terms that require them to carry news and to meet standards, and a network that abandoned those terms would be arguing with the Broadcasting Commission about its licence. There is no American equivalent of a partisan cable news channel, and the reason is a licensing settlement made in 1959 by people who were not thinking about this at all.

The online half is not different from the rest of the world’s in any respect and the Realm’s institutions have had no purchase on it whatever. The Broadcasting Commission’s jurisdiction attaches to transmission. Section 22 forbids the licensing of publishers. The Realm’s entire apparatus for the ordering of public information was built around a bottleneck that no longer exists, and the country has not begun to work out what it would do instead.

The trade’s own summary is that the Realm solved the twentieth century’s information problem unusually well and has no answer at all to the twenty-first, and that the first fact is part of why.

Failings

It is provincial about the world

The Realm’s newspapers are thin and provincial in their coverage of other countries, and the excellence of the Associated Press of America is the reason nobody notices.

The wire is world class. The papers are not. Outside the New York Herald’s financial reporting and the Boston Chronicle’s occasional long foreign investigation, the American press maintains very few correspondents abroad, closed most of the bureaux it had between 1990 and 2010, and covers the rest of the world by taking the wire’s file and cutting it to fit.

The effect is that an American reader receives foreign news of genuinely high quality through a single pipe, and receives almost no second account of anything. When the wire is right, which is usually, this is efficient. When the wire has framed a subject in a particular way, there is no domestic institution in a position to frame it differently, and the Realm’s public understanding of a foreign country can be revised only by the organisation that formed it.

A press that has outsourced its view of the world to one co-operative and then voted four times on whether to sell that co-operative has not thought carefully about what it is doing.

It did not cover its own collapse

The clearest failing, and the one the trade concedes most reluctantly, is that the American press covered the destruction of the American press worse than it would have covered the destruction of any other industry.

The chains’ acquisitions were reported as business stories. The consolidations were reported, where they were reported at all, in the papers being consolidated, by the journalists being made redundant, under the supervision of editors employed by the acquiring chain. The commissions’ findings were covered thinly and briefly and were not followed up. No national paper ran a sustained investigation into the ownership structures that were closing local newspapers, and two of the three had ownership structures of their own that such an investigation would have reached.

Had any other industry destroyed a public function this way, the press would have called it a scandal and pursued it for a decade. Its own account of why it did not is that the story was slow, diffuse, commercially awkward and about itself, which is the same account any other industry would have given and would not have been allowed.

It reported the Realm’s racial history from the wrong side

For most of a century the mainstream American press reported the Realm’s racial order from within it.

It carried the language of the period without qualification. It reported lynchings, where it reported them at all, in the passive voice and frequently from the account of the sheriff. It described the violence against Black communities of the early twentieth century, for which the Church of America enacted the Penitential Rite in 1923, in terms that placed the responsibility on the victims. It gave the Realm’s Black press almost nothing and took from it a good deal.

The papers have published their own accounts of this, several of them serious and one or two of them outstanding, and the accounts began in the 1990s and not before.

It is merciless

The last of the failings is the one described in the sections on the tabloids and on the Crown, and is stated here so that it appears in a list the article’s readers will reach.

The Realm’s press treats private people who have become briefly interesting with a thoroughness that its law permits and its conscience has not restrained. It is accurate, which is a real distinction from the foreign equivalents, and it is not a defence. A person who has been described truthfully, at length, and against their expressed wish, has not been compensated by the truthfulness.

Assessment

The American press holds the strongest legal position of any press in the developed world and has been unable to use it to save itself, and both halves of that sentence are the subject.

The protection is not nominal. A country in which no public authority may license a journalist, in which prior restraint requires a court order on evidence of grave and irremediable harm, in which sources are protected by statute, in which court files are open by default and in which every public body must answer a written request within a fixed period has built the machinery of an informed public about as well as it can be built. The Realm did this deliberately, over two centuries, at the cost of accepting a press it frequently cannot stand.

What it did not do, because nobody understood that it needed doing, was pay for any of it. The machinery was operated by an industry funded by a subsidy that was invisible for a hundred years, and when classified advertising left, the machinery stayed standing and stopped being used. The Realm’s open records regime is intact. Its courts are open. Its fixed-period reply is a legal obligation. In more than three hundred counties there is nobody left to make the request.

The press is not the hero of this account. It was provincial about the world and let a co-operative hide it. It was merciless to private people and called it the public interest. It reported the Realm’s worst injustices from the wrong side for a century and apologised late. It failed to cover its own destruction with a fraction of the rigour it would have brought to anybody else’s. And the one occasion on which it is agreed to have been at its best, the first week of May 2006, is a week in which its principal achievement was declining to speculate.

What can be said for it is narrower and is not nothing. A weekly in a Pennsylvania county town with three journalists and eleven thousand readers established that a ministry of the Crown had concealed four hundred deaths, having first exhausted every lawful route and been refused at each one. It committed a crime to do it. The Realm has never decided what it thinks about that, and this article does not decide either, because the Realm’s own institutions have declined to for thirty years and the disagreement is the honest position.

The local paper that did it closed in 2016 and nobody covers that county’s coroner’s findings now. Two royal commissions have explained what follows from that, in terms nobody has disputed, and Parliament has not acted.

Chronology

Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Printing and then newspapers reach the American colonies. The trade is political from the outset. The colonial papers carry the argument that becomes the Declaration of American Grievances.

1783. The Charter of Union. The press enters the Realm’s constitutional era with no legal protection beyond the common law and the practical difficulty of suppressing printers across many jurisdictions.

1820s. The Columbia Gazette is founded in the new capital and gives its name to Gazette Row.

1840s. The Realm has a large partisan press. The telegraph accelerates circulation from New Westminster and the major ports.

1866. The American Rights Act. Sections 21 and 22 place the freedom of the press, the prohibition on licensing and the protection of sources into statute.

1870s to 1910s. The commercial turn. Advertising displaces faction as the financing of newspapers, and neutrality arrives as a business model before it is a professional one.

1890s onward. Chains begin acquiring local papers. The Associated Press of America takes its modern co-operative form.

1920s. Schools of journalism spread. Radio arrives.

1927. The American Broadcasting Corporation is chartered.

1959. Commercial broadcasting is licensed at the second Charter renewal, under an independent Broadcasting Commission. All three national commercial networks are founded by newspaper chains.

1971 to 1981. The Ministry of Defence establishes, surveys and conceals the contamination at the Kittanning Works, and closes the affected wells without explanation.

1970s. The graduate route has largely displaced apprenticeship as the way into the trade.

1983 and 1994. The Ministry declines twice to fund a study of the Kittanning exposures.

1995 onward. Classified advertising moves to the internet. Local newspaper closures begin and do not stop.

1998. The Kittanning Sentinel pays a Ministry clerk for the surveys and publishes them across eleven weeks. The Ministry accepts the findings within a fortnight. Nobody is charged. The clerk is dismissed and loses their pension.

2001. Compensation begins and has continued since.

1 May 2006. The May Day Bombings. The coverage is generally agreed to be the thing the press got right.

2008. The American Rights Act is consolidated, Part III unchanged in substance.

2011 onward. The membership of the Associated Press of America votes four times on selling the agency and rejects it four times, by a narrowing margin each time.

2016. The Kittanning Sentinel closes.

2021. A private member’s measure to extend charitable status to non-profit local news is introduced, is opposed by nobody, and falls for want of time.

2028. More than three hundred counties have no newspaper. Two royal commissions and a joint committee have reported. There is no bill.

Trivia

See also

• The United Kingdom of America, whose press this is
• The American Rights Act, sections 21 and 22 of which are the whole legal basis
• The American Broadcasting Corporation, the chartered public broadcaster, and the other half of the Realm’s news
• New Westminster, for Gazette Row and the press gallery in Parliament House
• The May Day Bombings, the coverage of which is the one thing the press is agreed to have got right
• The ABC’s May Day broadcast, treated separately as a distinct achievement
• Theo Hartigan, whose article records what the convention protecting the heir does to the people around him
• Samuel J. Tilden, whose ministry stated the doctrine that publication works through the few who look
• Parliament, where the gallery sits
• The Liberal Federal Democrats, who campaign for the extension of the records regime

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Society & Daily Life · The Press · Institutions · Law & Rights · Media & Broadcasting