Freedom of expression does not mean the right to escape criticism, but the right to meet criticism with words. No politician, editor or institution shall have the power to define a lawful opponent out of the public sphere.
Leader of the Worker’s Youth League (AUF) Gaute Børstad Skjervø is concerned about confidence in the Norwegian press. Therefore the AUF leader attacks a medium he dislikes, disputes its legitimacy as journalism and calls for state broadcaster NRK and newspapers like VG, Dagbladet and Aftenposten to “take a greater confrontation” with it.
It is a remarkable understanding of democracy.
For what is the problem Skjervø is actually trying to solve?
Document is an editorially controlled medium. Its editor-in-chief Hans Rustad is a member of the Norwegian Editors’ Association. Document is covered by the Press Complaints Commission’s self-regulation scheme and can be – and has been – found against under the Code of Ethics of the Norwegian Press. The Norwegian Editors’ Association has previously dealt with precisely the demand to expel Rustad and replied in principle that membership does not cease because a medium is found against in the PFU. The Association also pointed out that it would weaken the self-regulation scheme if editors were excluded on this ground.
The Norwegian Media Authority has moreover assessed Document according to the ordinary criteria for production grants and concluded that the publication fulfilled the conditions. The purpose of the scheme is precisely to promote media diversity and support media that represent alternatives to leading media.
Skjervø’s problem is thus not that Document finds itself outside the press-ethical system.
His problem is that Document finds itself inside the system and yet holds a different view from him.
There the statement becomes interesting.
Who is to be allowed to call themselves a journalist?
The Code of Ethics of the Norwegian Press does not begin with a demand for political propriety as defined by AUF. It begins with the statement that freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom of the press are fundamental to democracy, that a free and independent press is among democracy’s most important institutions, and that the press has a particular responsibility for ensuring that different views find expression.
Skjervø turns the principle on its head.
He does not ask how more viewpoints can come forward.
He asks why some of them are allowed in.
He does not react primarily to concrete press-ethical transgressions and refer them to the PFU. That would have been the institutionally orderly procedure. He attacks the very legitimacy: Why are these people allowed to “pass themselves off as journalists”? Why are they allowed to be members of the Editors’ Association? Why should they receive press support? Why do the major editors not take a “confrontation” with them?
This is not primarily press ethics.
It is border control of the public sphere.
And the democratic problem arises the moment a leading politician begins to hold that politically undesired journalism ought to lose its institutional legitimacy.
John Stuart Mill would have recognised the error
Skjervø’s model moves in the opposite direction:
We have the serious media.
We have responsible journalism.
We have the acceptable boundaries.
And outside stand those who ought not really to be allowed to call themselves journalists.
But who is to draw this boundary?
AUF?
NRK?
VG?
The state that distributes the money?
A panel of people who already find themselves inside the public sphere they are to protect against competitors?
It is precisely here that democracy’s old question presents itself:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who guards the guardians?
Milton met Skjervø’s argument already in 1644
John Milton wrote “Areopagitica” against the English system of prior licensing of printed matter. The justification for the censorship was of course not either that the authorities hated the truth.
The censorship was to protect society against bad, harmful and misleading writings.
It is always thus that censorship presents itself.
No censorship authority in history has introduced itself with the words:
“We fear that people will think for themselves.”
It says:
We protect the truth.
We protect the community.
We protect vulnerable people.
We protect confidence.
We protect democracy.
What is interesting is therefore not what the gatekeeper says he is protecting.
What is interesting is whom he wishes the right to shut out.
Intellectually, Skjervø’s argument therefore descends less from Mill than from the old licensing mentality against which Milton rebelled: the notion that the public sphere needs authorised gatekeepers who distinguish legitimate speech from illegitimate speech before the citizen himself is allowed to make the assessment.
Technology changes.
The reflex does not.
Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority
Alexis de Tocqueville saw another danger in democracy.
The suppression need not come from the king.
It can come from the socially and politically respectable majority.
A society may have full freedom of expression on paper and yet develop a climate in which certain opinions entail such great social and professional costs that they slowly disappear from the public space.
Then one need not censor the newspaper.
It is enough to render it disrespectable.
One need not ban the journalist.
It is enough to deprive him of the designation journalist.
One need not ban the opinion.
It is enough to define it as harassment, extremism, disinformation or something else that moves the question from:
“Is this true?”
to:
“Why do we allow this to be said?”
And precisely this transition is democratically dangerous.
When the argument is no longer to be met with argument, but with questions about the opponent’s right to be present on the arena, one has abandoned the open conversation and begun to discuss the admission tickets.
Orwell would have seen the language
George Orwell taught us to look for what political language does to thought.
Note therefore the formulation “pass themselves off as journalists”.
It is rhetorically effective.
In one sentence the opponent is deprived of his profession.
Thereafter it becomes easier to pose the next question:
Why should they be members of the Editors’ Association?
Then the next:
Why should they receive support?
And finally:
Why should the established media treat them as legitimate participants?
First one changes the designation.
Thereafter the status is changed.
Then the treatment can be changed.
Language precedes power.
Therefore, free societies must be particularly sceptical when politicians begin to define who are “genuine” journalists. There already exists a press-ethical arrangement for judging journalistic transgressions. The PFU is established precisely to assess complaints against Norwegian media, and the complaints are dealt with under the Code of Ethics of the Norwegian Press.
Skjervø need not invent a political tribunal alongside it.
Havel would have posed a different question
Václav Havel would scarcely first have asked whether Document is sympathetic.
He would have asked what kind of society we obtain if power is allowed to define which oppositional voices are respectable.
That constitutes an important difference.
Freedom of expression does not exist first and foremost for opinions that Gaute Skjervø likes.
They need no protection.
Freedom of expression shows its value first when it protects the voice that makes the politician clench his jaw.
It is also therefore that the argument “harassment of Muslims” must be handled concretely. If Document publishes something that breaks the law, the courts exist. If the medium breaks press ethics, the PFU exists. If an article contains factual errors, one documents the errors. If the arguments are poor, one refutes them.
That is how a democratic person meets a newspaper he dislikes.
One argues.
One documents.
One complains.
One writes back.
One starts a better newspaper.
What one does not do is to stand on Norway’s largest broadcasting arena and ask why the unpleasant competitor is allowed to wear the journalist’s mantle.
The truly revealing moment
The most interesting aspect of Skjervø’s intervention is perhaps that the programme presenter pointed out the obvious objection: If the state decides who deserves media support in this manner, the state may end up rewarding some media and punishing others.
Skjervø’s reply was:
“Nonsense.”
But it is not nonsense.
It is the very problem.
The production grant is distributed according to criteria administered by the Media Authority. If these criteria are replaced or supplemented by politicians’ assessment of who conducts “serious” journalism, who conducts a “campaign” against a particular policy, or which groups experience themselves as exposed to “harassment”, the support is no longer merely a media-policy arrangement.
Then it may become a political instrument of discipline.
That does not mean that every medium has some God-given right to state support.
It means that the criteria must be general, predictable and politically neutral.
The difference is fundamental.
The state may establish rules for the support scheme. The state ought not to establish boundaries of opinion for it.
The paradoxical AUF
Here there is also a historical irony.
AUF belongs to a political tradition that readily tells the story of the labour movement as the struggle against concentration of power, authorities and society’s established gatekeepers.
The labour press arose precisely because the established public sphere did not represent everyone.
One built one’s own newspapers.
One’s own organisations.
One’s own meeting places.
One’s own channels around the gatekeepers of power.
Imagine if the political and economic elite of the time had replied:
Why is Arbeiderbladet allowed to pass itself off as journalism?
Why do the serious newspapers not take a confrontation with these campaign journalists?
Why should a medium that attacks society’s fundamental economic order be treated as legitimate press?
Skjervø ought to recognise the argument.
It was merely the other side that used it.
The democrat’s test
Skjervø’s statement does not make him a fascist, communist or dictator. Such historical labels would be intellectually lazy.
But his argument belongs to an old authoritarian tradition.
It is the gatekeeper’s tradition.
The licensor’s tradition.
The paternalistic notion that someone must protect the public sphere against the wrong people, the wrong media and the wrong thoughts.
Milton warned against it.
Mill stripped it bare.
Tocqueville showed how it could arise also in democracy.
Orwell showed how language prepares it.
Havel showed why the citizen must refuse to subordinate himself to it.
And the democratic test is in reality very simple:
Do you also defend the right to speak of the one you consider completely wrong?
If the answer is no, you are not defending freedom of expression.
You are defending the right to agree with you.
Gaute Skjervø is of course free to hold that Document is a wretched newspaper. He may criticise every single article it publishes. He may document errors, write replies and urge people not to read it.
That is called democracy.
But the moment a leading politician begins to ask why the newspaper is allowed to call itself journalism, why the editor is allowed to be a member of the press organisation and why the established media do not join together in a “confrontation”, the warning lights ought to flash.
For democracy is not characterised by the right people being allowed to speak.
It is characterised by the fact that Gaute Skjervø is not allowed to decide who the right people are.
