One of Rupert Murdoch’s criticisms has always been that the state subsidy of the British Broadcasting Corporation is unfair. The license fee, economists argue, is not intended as an indirect form of taxation, and is intended to support broadcasting activities which might not be found in a completely deregulated market. This is an interesting distinction from the professional legal services market, where the more profitable parts of the market might be expected to flourish (e.g. equity finance); however, in the complex world of ‘resource allocation’, one wonders how much this should be at the expense of the more unprofitable sectors of the legal industry (e.g. housing). The new legislation for the NHS, enacted by the Conservatives with the assistance of the Liberal Democrats, provides much more scope for the more unprofitable sectors of the healthcare industry to go out of business, or even allow NHS Foundation Trusts literally to fail. In a year in which there has been vigorous debate about whether the Church should be disestablished from the State, the aftermath of the Leveson Report has also turned to whether the media should be disestablished from the State, but, curiously, has not been phrased in such terms.

The BBC would, I suppose, like to claim that it is not the state broadcaster, but rather a public sector broadcaster. Balance, bias and inaccuracy, i.e. the nitty gritty of editorial ethics, was hard to investigate in the Leveson Inquiry, so quite obviously was not investigated as a result. As a state broadcaster, many, mainly on the left, have been quite startled about the complete lack of coverage of the marketisation or privatisation of the NHS, as well lack of scrutiny of the welfare reforms or legal aid reforms. Instead, the analysis has quite intensely gone on whether the State should regulate the media, despite LJ Leveson saying most clearly that he is not asking for direct regulation by the State, but asking for a statutory underpinning of an independent regulator of the State.

The General Medical Council, the Bar Standards Board, Financial Services Authority, and Solicitors Regulation Authority are not direct mechanisms of the State to regulate the activities of these professions, but provide a mechanism by which confidence in, the reputation of, and trust in these reputations can be maintained. It may be a necessary rite of passage for the journalism sector to become professionalised through having its own regulator, and in a way that the journalists are fortunate that they have not been subjected to the same degree of penalties of their colleagues in other professions. The law has a problem with causation, and it is therefore a moot point whether the media have directly caused mental distress, or even suicide, of some victims, but most, or in fact all, people concede that the status quo of the UK media cannot be maintained.

There are perhaps two significant points of note in the brief aftermath following David Cameron’s decision to overrule the main recommendation of the Leveson Inquiry, which proposed an independent regulator with statutory underpinning. Firstly, even if members of the public decided to ‘boycott’ the newspapers, the effect would be hard to separate from the declining sales of newspapers anyway. Secondly, with virtually all of the media coming out in support of David Cameron, the ultimate irony is that we have actually achieved a State-run media after all (whether or not you accept the argument that the BBC, as the state media outlet, deliberately suppressed dissent of the contentious social policy arms of this Government). All of this may not actually matter if two things happen separately, of course. First of all, the arithmetic of the Tory MPs, Liberal Democrat MPs and Labour MPs who support the establishment of an independent regulator, given misgivings about data protection, can allow legislation to be passed anyway. Secondly, it may not matter, also, if the general public don’t give a toss what comes out of the BBC or newspapers, and prefer to get their news from the ‘churnalism’ of the social media – and most ironically, because they have confidence in, trust in, and wish to maintain the reputation of the social media, which should have been the purpose of an independent regulator anyway.