I completely agree with your points about the importance of press freedom. And as you recognise, in many areas where it is vital, the press are completely failing to challenge the government or the establishment enough!
However, alongside the privilege of freedom, there should be a requirement to abide by certain standards of accuracy and legality. Atm the tabloids are free to print and complete falsify stories and use if not illegal practices to obtain them, then bordering on the illegal.
Why did the Conservative government cancel the second part of the Leveson enquiry and fail to implement many recommendations from the first? I think the answer is fairly obvious!
Privacy and accuracy laws pertaining to the press in certain EU countries are set at a higher standard and I think it does the UK no good at all to pander to the basest of tabloid practices.
In some instances, tabloids such as The Daily Mail are driving the political narrative, rather than reporting on it. I think Prince Harry has a point. Why are we allowing them such influence over our lives? A website such as the DM with more than 218 million unique visitors per month can’t be dismissed as “a bit of fun”.
We all know that the owners of these papers, Rothermere and Murdoch among them, have their own political
agendas along with a small group of financiers, speculators, bankers, businessmen and right wing politicians.
A pp said Camilla has been proven to be sound because she has undergone decades of vile abuse without complaint. Why is accepted without question that vile abuse is permitted in the first place?
The more interesting question is why she has to undergo this abuse and that is of course because the RF are enmeshed in a Faustian pact with the tabloids, one being dependent on the other. Whether we want this ridiculousness at the centre of our national life is debateable tbh. But every one of us who clicks on the DM website or buys and reads a tabloid newspaper is culpable.