World View/Paul Gillespie: Compared to doctors, teachers and television news presenters, politicians and press journalists are trusted very little in the United Kingdom. Television news scores far ahead of newspapers as a source of reliable and impartial news there.
A study of British broadcasting published last year by the Cardiff School of Journalism found there was a very high level of trust in the BBC and ITV television news, with around 90 per cent of the survey sample saying they were trustworthy, compared to 8 per cent saying they were not.
Compared to that, the Sun was trusted by 11 per cent and mistrusted by 42 per cent, while for the Guardian the figures were 28 per cent and 15 per cent respectively. Trevor McDonald of ITV was the most trusted public figure, Tony Blair one of the least.
Strictly comparable figures for Ireland are not available, but what surveys have been done show similar, if not so drastically polarised, trends. Thus a TNS mrbi poll for RTÉ last August found the following rank order of "very important" for a number of professions, as to "how important you feel their services are to the community in general": doctors 90 per cent, teachers 81, gardaí 78, priests 47, solicitors 35, politicians 22, journalists 21.
Journalists and politicians top the list of those considered "fairly important" at 36 and 32 per cent respectively.
Giving some of the UK figures to a seminar organised by the Guardian on reporting Europe last week, Richard Tait, a former editor-in-chief at ITN, said he believed they were related to the presence and absence of regulation.
Television news is governed by government regulation which lays down standards of impartiality and fairness, and surveys show the public believe these are for the most part effective. In contrast the printed media are unregulated, highly competitive, partisan and largely mistrusted by a sceptical British public.
Tait deplored prospective further moves to deregulate television, including possible ones to privatise the BBC, saying deregulation had already largely killed off current affairs television. Entertainment values dominated, making it more and more difficult to give EU issues such as enlargement the time and attention they deserve, given the impact they will have on British citizens.
Berlusconi's Italy and much of US television show the dangers for media pluralism. Researchers had found that while some 30 per cent of the US public was unhappy with the Iraq war, out of 840 experts interviewed by major channels during it only four were opposed to the war.
The ideological intensity of this competitive partisanship is taken for granted by Guardian journalists, especially as it affects their reporting on Europe and the EU. It is assumed to influence the choice of stories by news desks, the slanting of comment and analysis and the press's overall agenda-setting role.
This makes it difficult for a "pro-European" paper like the Guardian to maintain its own, relatively positive, narrative on these subjects in the face of relentless Eurosceptic competition and slanting of the news. For readers such partisanship raises questions about the reliability, objectivity and trustworthiness of the information and opinion they receive.
And while the newspapers may well reflect divisions in British public opinion on the EU, a continuous refrain is how their ownership and control, much of it foreign, play into this game. Swathes of its press are owned by foreign-based media barons and conglomerates, which is likely to continue despite the current troubles of Conrad Black and the Hollinger group, the Canadian owners of the Telegraph and the Spectator.
A recent editorial in the Guardian brilliantly mocked "an extraordinary audience" given by Rupert Murdoch to the BBC, in which he used the word " 'we' - in the sense of what view we - British citizens - should take of such matters as Europe and national sovereignty. But, of course, Rupert Murdoch is no more British than George W. Bush . . . He does not live in this country, and it is not clear that he is entitled to use 'we' in any meaningful sense of shared endeavour."
The second sense in which Murdoch used the royal "we" was in suggesting how he would use his block vote at the next general election: " 'We' are apparently impressed by Michael Howard and wearying slightly of Tony Blair - though 'we' continue to back him on war in Iraq. 'We' would never stand for the euro and 'we' insist on a referendum on anything to do with Europe."
Murdoch took up US citizenship to get around a US regulation about foreign ownership of television stations. Pointing this out in a stimulating contribution to the debate on press freedom in Dublin this week, the Cambridge philosopher Onora O'Neill told the Royal Irish Academy that the subject must be re-examined in the light of transformations in communications technologies and the emergence of such global media conglomerates.
The three traditional arguments for freedom of the press - to establish and test the truth, to support individual freedom of expression and to support the robust debate required in any democracy - were put forward when the press was relatively weak and controlled.
Speaking truth to political power looks quite different now that market power is so strong and, as Garret FitzGerald said in response to her lecture, political leaders are loath to take on such monopolies, whether foreign-owned as in the UK or domestically so, as in Ireland.
O'Neill argued that false and unreliable reporting, the failure to identify sources, growing partisanship based on proprietorial interests, and the pervasive assumption that all political representatives are corrupt disables democracy and deprives citizens of the information they need.
A new ethics of communication would include regulations to ensure good professional practice, including stronger tests for assessability, intelligibility and accountability of the news provided to relevant audiences.