What's the connection between a journalist and Gandhi? You may well ask...

A good theory can come in handy in a tight corner

Theory? Don't talk to me about no steenking theory. I'm a British hack and I just do a professional job. Not like those head-up- their-arse Americans and their Professors of Journalism sounding off in the Columbia Journalism Review...

Shame, really. A good theory can come in handy in a tight corner.

Like, for example, when argument turns to journalism and respect for the law.

Mild-mannered Bill Goodwin, who defended his sources all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, told me at the time that colleagues had challenged him over breaking the law. "Are you setting yourself up as above the law, or what?"

That was nothing to the orgy of introspection triggered by the Daily Mail's action in naming three unconvicted racists as murderers. Leader-writers, by a large majority, approved. Not one that I read, though, seemed to be able to say quite why. "I would have done the same if I'd thought of it" is not a sufficient argument for defending the profession in public, let alone defending it against hostile law-makers. That's the sort of time a good theory is really useful.

There is, in fact, a relatively well-worked-out theory of political action which covers exactly, as far as I can see, the questions raised by good journalism, obedience to the law, and the occasions when the two come into conflict. It has the powerful advantage that it annoys the hell out of ideologues of left and right alike and even gives many anarchists fits. It's the concept of civil disobedience as expounded by Mohandas K. Gandhi ("Mahatma" to his admirers).

If an issue -- press freedom, say -- is important enough to you, you may break the law as a protest. Crucially, you take personal responsibility for your protest. If going to jail is the result, then it becomes, if it has any merit, the more powerful.

This is no more than what journalists have done in response to censorship since there have been people such as us, from Tom Paine and John Wilkes onwards. (Do you feel embarrassed thinking of yourself in the same category as those to whom we owe what liberties we have? Has the employers' attempt to reduce us to mere fillers of space between adverts been that successful?)

The law which is broken need not be the issue at hand. The Civil Rights protesters who were arrested while trying to register to vote in the Mississippi of the 1960s had little quarrel with laws against riot -- though they'd rather the law were applied to the Klan too. The issues we take up as journalists, though, will almost always concern specific laws. So, to descend from the sublime civil disobedience of Civil Rights to the ridiculous: we are spared the embarrassment of sometime Tory Minister Peter Bottomley, who once risked arrest for closing a highway in the course of demanding that a highway be opened. (He spoiled things by smugly declaring that he did nothing illegal -- surely a matter for the magistrates?)

If as journalists we could bear to take journalism just a little more seriously, we could say when necessary that if the price of ethical journalism is jail then it is worth paying. We would then have a very solid answer to all accusations that The Meeja are somehow setting ourselves up above the democratically approved law. No, we're not: we're taking stands of personal conscience.

Someone who commits civil disobedience in a cause which has no popular resonance, though, is likely to rot in jail. Those who are right -- if perhaps a little in advance of the democratic process -- eventually become heroes.

The Daily Express recently ran a remarkable commentary extolling the virtues of civil disobedience in safely historical cases like Civil Rights and the suffrage movement. Its purpose in doing so was to excoriate the women who had destroyed a Hawk jet destined for the genocide in East Timor, for not taking proper responsibility for their action by suffering in jail. (Inconveniently, a jury had decided that their action was perfectly legal crime prevention.) Had the Express been around in the 18th century it would presumably have chided Wilkes for not demanding to be gibbeted.

But when and how is it right to commit civil disobedience? The Indian Independence and Civil Rights campaigners, in particular, came up with three further useful rules.

First: Exhaust the legal means for political change before resorting to civil disobedience. Few problem for journalists there, since forming a Free Speech Party is rarely a viable legal means to getting the news out in the face of attempted censorship.

Second: Openness (about one's own actions) is vital. Skulduggery and evasiveness lower the high moral tone, for one thing.

Third: The means determine the ends. To a card-carrying unarmed- and-dangerous peacenik, this is to observe that the claim "the ends justify the means" is refuted by the statement "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" (attributed, probably apocryphally, but what the hell, to the US Army in Vietnam.)

It's all right, though, you don't have to put flowers in your hair and skip off to levitate the Pentagon to use this rule. No more than common sense is needed. If you aim, for example, for some reason to propose that people in public life have a right to a private life, and the means you use are to recount all the nasty, nasty revelations made about their private lives -- then the end you arrive at is going to be the opposite of what you wanted.

What, journalism with an agenda? We don't do that, do we? (Not unless the alternative is the sack for annoying the proprietor?) But that's another theory.

An edited version of this piece appeared in the May or July edition of the Journalist, magazine of the National Union of Journalists. This version is © copyright 1997 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

Mike Holderness started his legal career, alongside Journalist editor Tim Gopsill, the Union itself and nine others, in front of the Lord Chief Justice in 1978 for contempt in naming the late Colonel B as Hugh Anthony Johnstone. The Colonel was to have been an expert witness in the trial of two journalists and a soldier under the Official Secrets Act. The B Eleven were cleared on appeal to the House of Lords.