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of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with
the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of
those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to
misappropriate the causes of its ills. Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last
couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large
sections of the media. And as a consequence, across the Western world, the oversimplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned,
older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at
least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary
aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and
engagement, and I stress active.
07:54 The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should
have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of
business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. But most of us, I think,
accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is
reasonable. Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care and could they have
reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions? Far from signifying overbearing
state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply
to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our
democratic discourse.
08:35 Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the
time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an
atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement,
then at least a productive and workable compromise. Politics is about choices, and
within those choices, politics is about priorities. It's about reconciling conflicting
preferences wherever and whenever possibly based on fact. But if the facts themselves
are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the
stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. The media have to decide: Do they
see their role as being to inflame or to inform? Because in the end, it comes down to a
combination of trust and leadership.
09:30 Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making
speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. The first led almost
immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. Democracy, well-led and wellinformed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. We have to trust that
those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the
whole of the people. We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a
few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently
narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own
judgments. If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our
children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of
care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. Thank you very much for
listening to me. (Applause)