David Puttnam: What happens when the media's priority is profit?

97,961 views ・ 2014-02-10

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00:12
I'd like to start, if I may,
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with the story of the Paisley snail.
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On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928,
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May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow
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to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city,
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and there at the Wellmeadow Café,
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she had a Scots ice cream float,
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a mix of ice cream and ginger beer
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bought for her by a friend.
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The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle
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labeled "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley."
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She drank some of the ice cream float,
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but as the remaining ginger beer was poured
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into her tumbler,
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a decomposed snail
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floated to the surface of her glass.
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Three days later, she was admitted
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to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary
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and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis
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and shock.
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The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed
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set a very important legal precedent:
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Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer,
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was held to have a clear duty of care
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towards May Donoghue,
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even though there was no contract between them,
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and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink.
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One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this:
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You must take care to avoid acts or omissions
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which you can reasonably foresee
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would be likely to injure your neighbor.
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Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care,
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how many people would have had to suffer
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from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business.
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Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story,
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because it's an important principle.
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Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity
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which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy
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and encourage greater public involvement in politics
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published, alongside their annual audit
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of political engagement, an additional section
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devoted entirely to politics and the media.
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Here are a couple of rather depressing observations
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from that survey.
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Tabloid newspapers do not appear
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to advance the political citizenship of their readers,
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relative even to those
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who read no newspapers whatsoever.
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Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree
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with a negative view of politics
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than readers of no newspapers.
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They're not just less politically engaged.
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They are consuming media that reinforces
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their negative evaluation of politics,
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thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical
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attitude to democracy and their own role within it.
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Little wonder that the report concluded that
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in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids,
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appear not to be living up to the importance
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of their role in our democracy.
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Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously
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challenge that view.
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But if Hansard are right, and they usually are,
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then we've got a very serious problem on our hands,
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and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes
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focusing upon.
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Since the Paisley snail,
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and especially over the past decade or so,
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a great deal of thinking has been developed
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around the notion of a duty of care
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as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society.
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Generally a duty of care arises when one individual
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or a group of individuals undertakes an activity
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which has the potential to cause harm to another,
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either physically, mentally or economically.
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This is principally focused on obvious areas,
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such as our empathetic response to children and young people,
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to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm.
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It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments
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around the fragility of our present system of government,
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to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality
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are fundamental to the process of building
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and embedding an informed,
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participatory democracy.
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And the more you think about it,
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the stranger that is.
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A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure
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of opening a brand new school
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in the northeast of England.
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It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360.
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As I walked through their impressive,
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glass-covered atrium,
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in front of me, emblazoned on the wall
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in letters of fire
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was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction:
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If it's not true, don't say it;
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if it's not right, don't do it.
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The head teacher saw me staring at it,
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and he said, "Oh, that's our school motto."
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On the train back to London,
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I couldn't get it out of my mind.
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I kept thinking, can it really have taken us
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over 2,000 years to come to terms
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with that simple notion
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as being our minimum expectation of each other?
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Isn't it time that we develop this concept
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of a duty of care
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and extended it to include a care
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for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values?
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After all, the absence of a duty of care
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within many professions
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can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence,
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and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought
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that we're in effect being negligent
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in respect of the health of our own societies
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and the values that necessarily underpin them?
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Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence,
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that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned
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have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving
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in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen
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would be likely to undermine or even damage
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our inherently fragile democratic settlement.
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Now there will be those who will argue
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that this could all too easily drift into a form
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of censorship, albeit self-censorship,
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but I don't buy that argument.
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It has to be possible
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to balance freedom of expression
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with wider moral and social responsibilities.
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Let me explain why by taking the example
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from my own career as a filmmaker.
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Throughout that career, I never accepted
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that a filmmaker should set about putting
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their own work outside or above what he or she
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believed to be a decent set of values
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for their own life, their own family,
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and the future of the society in which we all live.
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I'd go further.
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A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work
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to a point at which it becomes less than true
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to the world they themselves wish to inhabit.
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As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers
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are all required to face up to the social expectations
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that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium
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with their well-honed professional skills.
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Obviously this is not a mandated duty,
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but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist
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or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable.
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We should always remember that our notion
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of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom,
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is comparatively new
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in the history of Western ideas,
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and for that reason, it's often undervalued
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and can be very quickly undermined.
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It's a prize easily lost,
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and once lost, once surrendered,
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it can prove very, very hard to reclaim.
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And its first line of defense
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has to be our own standards,
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not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation,
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our own standards and our own integrity.
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Our integrity as we deal with those
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with whom we work
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and our own standards as we operate within society.
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And these standards of ours
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need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda.
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They're part of a collective responsibility,
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the responsibility of the artist or the journalist
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to deal with the world as it really is,
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and this, in turn, must go hand in hand
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with the responsibility of those governing society
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to also face up to that world,
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and not to be tempted to misappropriate
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the causes of its ills.
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Yet, as has become strikingly clear
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over the last couple of years,
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such responsibility has to a very great extent
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been abrogated by large sections of the media.
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And as a consequence, across the Western world,
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the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest
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and their appeal to a largely disillusioned,
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older demographic,
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along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial
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that typifies at least some of the young,
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taken together, these and other similarly
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contemporary aberrations
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are threatening to squeeze the life
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out of active, informed debate and engagement,
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and I stress active.
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The most ardent of libertarians might argue
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that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court
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and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business
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if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it.
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But most of us, I think, accept some small role
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for the state to enforce a duty of care,
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and the key word here is reasonable.
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Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care
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and could they have reasonably foreseen
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the consequences of their actions?
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Far from signifying overbearing state power,
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it's that small common sense test of reasonableness
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that I'd like us to apply to those in the media
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who, after all, set the tone and the content
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for much of our democratic discourse.
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Democracy, in order to work, requires that
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reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate
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difficult, sometimes complex issues,
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and they do so in an atmosphere which strives
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for the type of understanding that leads to,
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if not agreement, then at least a productive
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and workable compromise.
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Politics is about choices,
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and within those choices, politics is about priorities.
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It's about reconciling conflicting preferences
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wherever and whenever possibly based on fact.
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But if the facts themselves are distorted,
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the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict,
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with all the stresses and strains on society
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that inevitably follow.
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The media have to decide:
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Do they see their role as being to inflame
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or to inform?
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Because in the end, it comes down to a combination
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of trust and leadership.
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Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy
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made two epoch-making speeches,
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the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights.
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The first led almost immediately
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to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,
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and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
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both of which represented giant leaps forward.
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Democracy, well-led and well-informed,
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can achieve very great things,
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but there's a precondition.
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We have to trust that those making those decisions
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are acting in the best interest not of themselves
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but of the whole of the people.
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We need factually-based options,
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clearly laid out,
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not those of a few powerful
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and potentially manipulative corporations
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pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas,
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but accurate, unprejudiced information
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with which to make our own judgments.
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If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives
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for our children and our children's children,
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we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible
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that duty of care for a vibrant,
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and hopefully a lasting, democracy.
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Thank you very much for listening to me.
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(Applause)
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