on media Raymond Snoddy warns against well-intentioned campaigns


Beware, the freedom of the press is at stake


W


e live in a world of instant pop-up campaigns and daily petitions floating to prominence on the


rising tide of social media. Some are useful, others deeply


damaging – from the best of intentions.


Stop Funding Hate, which targets


newspapers it does not like such as the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Daily Express, was launched less than 18 months ago. Online crowd-funding produced a war chest of more than £100,000 and a launch video was viewed no less than 6 million times. As a result a powerful campaign to persuade major companies to pull their advertising from the “offending” newspapers was born. The campaign has drawn initial blood. Paperchase has issued a grovelling apology for running a promotion with the Daily Mail and Stop Funding Hate has apparently influenced the advertising policies of companies such as Specsavers, Lego, Plusnet and The Body Shop. The initial temptation is to give Stop Funding Hate two cheers for their attempts to hit the soft advertising underbelly of such resolutely right- wing papers.


After all the Daily Mail called senior judges Enemies of the People and more recently 15 Conservative MPs who oppose writing an EU departure date into law were denounced as “collaborators.” And all three titles have been guilty of running dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of anti- immigrant stories over the years. Increasingly it looks as if the three targeted titles, all of them cheerleaders


for departure from the EU, helped persuade their readers to vote against their own financial interests. It would therefore be tempting to


support the aims of Stop Funding Hate – tempting but profoundly mistaken. If important principles are at stake – and they clearly are – then those principles include the rule of law, the survival of representative democracy and the freedom of the press, a freedom that allows for a raucous and tasteless press within that law. There should also be an associated freedom that advertisers should be able to advertise, or not, in publications of their choice without being hectored. The Stop Funding Hate founder


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Richard Wilson let the cat out of the bag on Newsnight when he declared: “I think the end point for us is a media that does the job we want it to.” Wilson did continue that the


Stop Funding Hate has apparently influenced the advertising policies of companies such as Specsavers, Lego, Plusnet and The Body Shop


“job” was to work in the public interest and treat people fairly. The problem is that Wilson is not only self-appointed but it is not clear why his definitions of the public interest or fairness should be accepted as universal. Wilson has started his


attack with three papers. Is that the end of it or should the Daily Telegraph be added to the list for describing the 15 Tory MPs as “mutineers”, an approach that former minister Anna Soubry believed provoked 13 death threats. Historically, with few


exceptions, advertisers have accepted the difference between editorial and advertising and that it is a distinction that should be


maintained. It should also apply to companies’ right to advertise in chosen papers irrespective of editorial content. Luckily the newspaper and


advertising industries have united against this plausible but pernicious attack. As John Lewis, one of the targeted companies put it: “Withdrawing advertising on the basis of editorial coverage would be inconsistent with our democratic principles which include freedom of speech and remaining apolitical.” Stop Funding Hate should re- direct its efforts to improve editorial standards rather than trying to undermine press viability, which already faces challenges aplenty.


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