David Puttnam

Does the media have a "duty of care"?

I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. On the evening of the 26th
of August, 1928, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley,
seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Caf, she had a Scots ice
cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. The ginger
beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley." She
drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her
tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. Three days later, she
was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis
and shock.
00:57 The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal
precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty
of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and,
indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it
like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably
foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. Indeed, one wonders that without a duty
of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before
Stevenson eventually went out of business.
01:32 Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle.
Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen
parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics
published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section
devoted entirely to politics and the media. Here are a couple of rather depressing
observations from that survey. Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the
political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers
whatsoever. Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of
politics than readers of no newspapers. They're not just less politically engaged. They
are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby
contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within
it. Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the
tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy.
02:39 Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously challenge that view. But if
Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our
hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes focusing upon.
02:52 Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of
thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number
of aspects of civil society. Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a
group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to

another, either physically, mentally or economically. This is principally focused on

obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our
service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally
important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the
notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building
and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. And the more you think about it,
the stranger that is.
03:43 A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of opening a brand new school in the
northeast of England. It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360. As I walked
through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall
in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if
it's not right, don't do it. The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, "Oh, that's
our school motto." On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept
thinking, can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple
notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? Isn't it time that we develop
this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but
increasingly endangered democratic values? After all, the absence of a duty of care
within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that
being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being
negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily
underpin them? Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media
which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in
ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even
damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement.
05:10 Now there will be those who will argue that this could all too easily drift into a
form of censorship, albeit self-censorship, but I don't buy that argument. It has to be
possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities.
05:25 Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker.
Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their
own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their
own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. I'd go
further. A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it
becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. As I see it,
filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social
expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their
well-honed professional skills. Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted
filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly
inescapable.
06:17 We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner,
creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that
reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. It's a prize easily
lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. And its
first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or
legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. Our integrity as we deal with those
with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. And these
standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. They're part

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)