Speech at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association conference

‘Responsibility is the price of freedom’, in the words of the American writer Elbert Hubbard 100 years ago.

We heard them again last year, in the same breath as those infamous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

So they are every bit as true today as they were then, and they had been true for centuries and millennia before.

Responsibility and freedom - this time, in the media - are my themes today.

Because I believe absolutely in a free media, as holding up a mirror to society, and as one of the fundamental pillars of democracy.

It was another American, Thomas Jefferson, who said ‘were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I shouldn’t hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter’ – this may have been a throw-away line in the late 1700’s, but you grasp the intent.

A vibrant media is the reflection of a vibrant democracy.

A media that can work freely in the dissemination of information will benefit everyone – from individuals to governments and corporations – because it puts them in a better place to make informed decisions.

And the facts make this abundantly clear: I direct you to some first class research done recently at the World Bank by Daniel Kaufmann, which shows, yet again, the clear correlation between democracy, a free media, and economic growth.

The poorest and most unstable countries dig their graves ever deeper by restricting their press – why muzzle the media, unless you have something to hide?

Now I confess that there have been enough times when – as a senior Government Minister and as Commonwealth Secretary-General – I’d have gladly shut down the entire media when things were attributed to me that I’ve never said.

I have learned to take a deep breath, count to 10, and fight another day.

Not all Governments do the same, though…

Time and again, the Commonwealth has spoken about the close links between democracy and a free yet responsible media.

Our recent report, Civil Paths to Peace, also stressed the importance and the potential of the media in preserving and strengthening ethnic, religious, linguistic diversity – and with it, democracy.

Our Commonwealth observer groups at elections always report on the performance of the media and how well, or not, it enables full public participation in the democratic process.

We have mechanisms to monitor the media, and particularly the instances where it inflames, or where it is willfully divisive.

Let me repeat what we published last week on the recent Kenyan elections, where we found the Media Council of Kenya setting standards which were in general observed in good, unbiased reporting.

The problem lay with the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation itself, which did not comply with the 1997 Kenya Broadcasting Corporation Act in providing equal coverage of parties’ campaign activities.

The problem also lies with a ban on live broadcasts in Kenya, which ought to be raised right now.

And where the vestige of a problem remains - in some of the dangerous imbalances of conflict reporting - I can announce that, only last week, I was approached with a request to provide Commonwealth training to Kenyan journalists.

But this freedom, which lies at the heart of democracy, does indeed come at a price.

It has to be believed in, and worked at.

And that price is responsibility.

In addressing you on the theme of media and governance today, I want to look at how the media itself should commit to be responsible and accountable – and how governments should allow it to be that.

All too often we find governments bending the rules: they too, have to be responsible in the pursuit of freedom.

I warmly thank the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, Elizabeth Smith and her colleagues for bringing together such talent, vision and variety here in Nassau.

I also thank the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas for hosting us here.

The CBA is one of nearly 90 professional organisations worldwide which bear the Commonwealth name, and which play so huge a part in fostering the links and the shared thoughts and actions that make the Commonwealth the special family of nations that it is.

With its roots in the years after World War II and with over 100 broadcasting members across the Commonwealth, the CBA is one of our most treasured and respected organizations.

It has two close and equally important cousins in the Commonwealth family: the Commonwealth Press Union under the leadership of Lindsay Ross, to be 100 next year; and the Commonwealth Journalists Association under Bryan Cantley, which is much younger at only 30.

Their work is excellent – as much in its advocacy as in its training and capacity-building.

They sit alongside the Commonwealth Media Development Fund run by the Commonwealth Secretariat, which in its 12 years to date has trained over 5,000 journalists.

The Fund has trained partly in impartial and independent journalism as an ingredient of democracy, and partly in the topics – like health, education, and the environment – that will be critical to our reaching the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

The fact that so many Commonwealth media people are here today is tribute to the CBA and its cousins, and also to the vibrancy of Commonwealth media.

How the world of the broadcast and print media has been turned on its head, not just in my lifetime but in the last 10 years, 5 years, even 1 year.

Sometimes, I still find those who spent some of their media career on London’s Fleet Street, where more than a few of the journalists did much of their work in El Vino’s, and wore their fingers out on old-fashioned typewriters.

Technological innovation, competition and – I would say – the march of freedom, has transformed the amount of media we consume, and the ways it reaches us.

We rightly view the media as one of the defining instruments of globalization: information is power, and you people bring access to information.

But we are just as aware that you, the media, are even now under threat from what we call ‘viral communications’ – the communications that spreads like a virus, over which you have no control.

I’m thinking of the power of things like the mobile phone text message (which our Commonwealth observers saw recently in the violence following the Kenyan elections) and of the blog.

Matt Drudge, the US blogger, gets quoted all over the US and international media.

Harold Evans wrote recently that ‘opinion, not fact, is the commonest traffic in cyberspace’.

I even did a bit of blogging myself at the last CHOGM in Kampala.

I had an audience around the globe that read without any filters other than those which I myself imposed.

There may be quantity not quality, but the fact is that – for all its power – the media faces increasing competition from within the media, and from without.

Before I go on to talk about media and governance – and my themes of responsibility and freedom – I want to state the very obvious fact that my prime interest in the role of the media is its role in furthering the cause of the two pillars of the modern Commonwealth: Democracy and Development.

The media promotes Democracy, in ventilating debate about the issues of concern in people’s lives, and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote.

From hundreds and thousands of examples, let me just share a non-Commonwealth story I remember from Afghanistan, 3 years ago, when candidates opposing Hamid Karzai stood down just days before the presidential elections, sensing they couldn’t and wouldn’t win.

A tide of derision on radio phone-in programmes (a radio, remember, that would have been strictly policed under the Taliban…) changed all that, and the candidates changed their minds and agreed to stand.

Democracy, through the media, had won the day.

And the media promotes Development.

It promotes economic development; and above all it promotes human development.

Many of you will know how creative, educational programmes like the detective series Jasoos Vijay in India inform and educate – and entertain – on the subject of HIV/AIDS.

150 million people watch every episode of that programme: imagine the reach!

I think, too, of the way a series of six short films on maternal health – made by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the World Health Organisation – were screened on BBC World over a 3-month period in 2005, to an estimated audience of 160 million people.

So there are thousands of people who devote their professional lives to using the media as a tool to deepen democracy and dynamise development.

I salute them all: their power and their potential is enormous.

We are agreed: the media has enormous power and potential.

So this is where we need to introduce the themes of freedom and responsibility: there must be responsibility on the part of both media and government to exercise that power with freedom – and wisdom.

That’s what governance is all about.

I raise the question – how free and how responsible is Commonwealth media?

I mean, of course, the broadcast media, but I also mean the print media.

I hardly need to say that we are anything but perfect, and not just in the countries of most concern to us at the moment.

The CBA, the CPU, the CJA have spoken at length about some of the abuses of government control over the media in the Commonwealth.

15 journalists were killed in the Commonwealth last year, the highest figure of recent years.

When the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group met on 12^th November, in the wake of the State of Emergency declared in Pakistan, one of the five requests it made of that country was that there should be ‘the immediate removal of all curbs on private media broadcasts and restrictions on the press’, in time for CMAG’s next meeting on 22^nd November.

CMAG’s requests weren’t fully met, and Pakistan, as you know, was suspended once again from the councils of the Commonwealth.

Our task now is to work with Pakistan and help it back on the road to democracy.

Incidentally, I was pleased to see that GEO TV has now been allowed back on the air, as of last week.

‘Media freedom’ is an expression often glibly used.

There is the principle, and then there is all sorts of practice.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states that, I quote: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The Human Rights Unit at the Commonwealth Secretariat has produced a very good booklet on just that: Freedom of Expression, Assembly and Association.

And yet governments do seek to interfere with the media, and business does too.

Both would admit that there is inter-dependence: the government needs the media, and vice-versa.

Meanwhile from cinema to reality, from Citizen Kane to Citizen Murdoch, the media magnates are hardly seen as kindly captains of the industry.

And if government and business do stand back, then up step the individuals with the capacity to assert their own ethos, most obviously with that best-selling formula of sex, scandal and sports.

What emerges here is perhaps that freedom can come to seem like a relative thing when power is involved – something which, of course, goes to the very root of human nature.

But the Commonwealth is not just about problems and challenges.

It’s also about solutions.

So is everyone in this room – all of you, one way or another, want a free and responsible media.

Most now agree that state-owned media is not the way to guarantee that.

I note that here in this country you are discussing making the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas a public service broadcaster.

So what are our Commonwealth prescriptions – such as they are, and as far as they go – for the way that media should regulate itself, and how it should be regulated by government?

Deep within every journalist’s heart should be a quest for truth and the properly informed decisions that come from it.

A Code of Ethics should be by his or her side, with the words ‘fairness’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘integrity’ etched on the cover.

But on top of that, we do also need Rules and Regulations.

On the side of self-regulation, I look no further than the work of the CBA, for instance, with its Editorial Guidelines.

On the side of Government regulation, we turn to the types of legislation which have the difficult task of allowing freedom of expression while preserving security and, in some cases, secrets.

We alert our member governments to the need to look closely at the laws of treason, defamation, contempt and privacy, to ensure that they are not used to stifle the flow of information.

We also alert them to the down-side of Anti-Terror Laws, Official Secrets Acts and Internal Security Acts, which can so easily be abused in order to suppress media freedom.

Similarly, we tell them how easily licensing and ownership laws can be flawed in spirit and letter, and how Freedom of Information Acts can be made meaningless by the small print and the caveats.

We advise them about their own potential misuse of the funds they award to newspapers in which they advertise their jobs and their procurement contracts. Government advertising is fine, but using it for political pressure is not.

We believe in government, in democracy and in media freedom – all three.

And yes, from time to time we raise these issues of censorship with Heads of Government.

It’s is done discreetly, often as part of my Good Offices function where I send special envoys into situations of political tension.

Our privileged Commonwealth access makes us a trusted partner, and it’s from that position that we can raise these very sensitive issues.

The CBA, the CPU and the CJA make a noise about it; but the Commonwealth as an inter-governmental organization marches to a different beat.

We also look to promote the independent regulators – in other words, not the media themselves, nor the government – like OfCom in the UK.

Again, the CBA has produced excellent guidelines on this, not least in recognizing that no one size of regulator fits all, and in stressing the need for as little regulation as possible, but enough to allow for freedom of expression and, with it, democracy.

Some of my staff in London have recently been following the work of the independent regulator in Trinidad and Tobago, and its extensive period of consultation about a new National Broadcasting Code.

The fact that that document has gone back and forth a number of times is a very good sign.

It paid me well to read it last week.

I was inspired by its vision, ‘that the nation’s airwaves are a public trust and broadcasters operate as public trustees’.

And I was inspired by the individual clauses in the draft Code on areas like harm and offence, crime, race, elections, privacy, right of reply, advertising, religion, and - very importantly - ‘due impartiality and due accuracy, and undue prominence of views and opinions’.

What we in the Commonwealth offer is the technical power of the CBA, the CPU, the CJA and the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the convening power of our Heads of Government and their Ministers.

Perhaps, too, the media-related Commonwealth bodies – CPU, CBA and CJA in particular -- can commit to joining hands on a more regular basis, to achieve their common objectives.

Within the Commonwealth Secretariat, meanwhile, an issue like media freedom is legitimately the preserve of the Political Affairs Division, the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Division, the Human Rights Unit, and the Governance and Institutional Development Division, to say nothing of the Communications and Public Affairs Division.

So it makes sense for us all to meet, and agree, and take action together where we can.

These are ideas in which I believe, and which I can mention to my successor who assumes office on 1^st April.

So I end where I began, with the responsibility that comes with freedom.

You media people are as pervasive as you are persuasive.

You are an enormous force for potential good – and bad.

You have to see yourself as guardians of truth – you’re the watchdogs, not the lapdogs.

How many hundreds of times have I sat in front of you, the media, and been interrogated as to my understanding of that truth?

Today, I have a chance to stand before you and exhort you to your own truth.

A free media can be good or bad, but without freedom the media will never be anything but bad, and society will be the worse for it..

Thank you and good luck.