do applaud what you are trying to move to there. and i would emphasize when i talk about the press complaints commission that without an investigative arm it cannot be successful. and the one thing you go to the press complaints commission to get is a judgment on whether something is accurate or not. and when they reply to you, they say we cannot make a judgment on the accuracy of these statements and, therefore, the one thing you asked them for they cannot do because they've got no investigative arm. but that's one thing. but encouraging quality journalism, i think, is something that i hope that in your next set of evidence you might be able to consider. >> i'll take that point be very, very much onboard. >> i may say i think there's quite a lot to learn from america where there is a live debate. sorry, i moved from the initial point of your question about self-regulation.

>> not at all. mr. brown, the prime minister, as you know, said the relationship between press and politicians need to be reset. what, if anything, would you recommend in that regard? >> there's got to be greater openness and transparency as i've said. and i just repeat that. i don't think, i do want to answer your previous question about regulation because i think it's important. i've never been one, and can this may sound surprising to people despite my discomfort with the press, i've never been one that has favored heavy regulation or even regulation of the press. i've always looked for solutions that would avoid the idea that there was some form of interference in the press by politicians. and i've always been very careful when we've talked about the bb to make sure -- the bbc to make sure we safeguard the independence of the bbc. i said before it was a religious upbring, but the idea that the individual conscience is respected, free from state power is very important to me.

now, what do you do in circumstances where you have a recalcitrant newspaper that will not join the press complaint commission? and this is a problem i know you face. what do you do in circumstances when you have a press complaint commission that actually is not able to deal and has proved itself unable to deal with these big issues? in ireland, australia and new zealand they've found a way to do, i think in one case they call it statutory underpinning is recognized in legislation but not -- >> that's the irish -- >> -- not decreed by legislation. so i think there is a way. but i think we've got less to fear from the proposals that you're talking about, about a statutory and underpinning people think. and certainly if there are recals trapt members of the press that are not prepared to join, i think your case is strengthened. but i share your views this has

got to be incompetent of the politicians -- independent of the politicians, but also of newspaper editors. and it's got to be genuinely looked to and trusted as a source of fair and balanced investigations and judgments. >> well, mr. brown, those are all the questions i had. >> mr. brown, thank you very much. it's all very easy to say, rather more difficult to seek to achieve it. but thank you very much for your assistance. >> i don't want envy your job, but i know you're doing a great job. >> thank you. one moment, mr. brown. yes, yes. >> [inaudible] between mr. brown and mr. murdoch. and you may recall that lord mandelson gave evidence about that. mr. brown hasn't addressed that, and i think he ought to be given the opportunity, or at least we would like to know what he says

about it. >> do you want to put what lord happened lson said? have you got it at hand? >> yes, i have. >> then by all -- let mr. be brown respond. [laughter] >> anybody else who wants their questions as well? i don't know. >> no, no. [laughter] >> the position is, mr. brown, that the system permits core apartments to put -- participants to put questions through counsel and mr. jay, i think several times, has said i've been asked to ask this question. and that's how he's dope it. but if he declines to put a question, then the core participants are entitled to ask me for permission to ask the question. and i think, as i know what's coming, i don't think this is going to be -- i don't know what's coming, but i'm happy to take the question. >> mr. brown, my name's roger davis. i appear for news international. >> yeah. >> i think you're probably familiar with this, it's behind

tab 3 of your bundle. -- tab 8 of your bundle. if you'd like to go to it -- >> tab 8 of my bundle, the new bundle or the old bundle? >> that's a transcript of the evidence of that lord mandelson gave. >> uh-huh. and what day is it referring to, please? >> it's the 23st of may. >> no, but what day -- >> day 74. >> no, what day is mr. mandelson referring to? >> he was asked about whether or not there was a call between you and mr. murdoch shortly after "the sun" had announced it was no longer going to sport the labour -- support the labour party on the 30th of september. and this is day 74 in the afternoon -- >> i find this very difficult to read because the light type here. perhaps you can read out the section that's relevant. >> i will do that. >> i'm grateful.

>> and the questions are from mr. jay. the allegation are or rather the evidence was that mr. brown said or uttered the words declare war on news international or words from that effect. can you assist us a as to whether there was such a call. answer: well, i wasn't on the call. i hadn't been patched into the call. question: no, of course not. answer: i assume that there was the call because i seem to remember the prime minister telling me that rupert murdoch was not at all happy with the method and timing of james and rebecca's angst. action. question: what did the prime minister tell you, lord mandelson, about the call. did he communicate to you that's what he told mr. murdoch? answer: no, he didn't say that. he told me what mr. murdoch had said to him. question: so there was nothing what mr. brown said to mr. murdoch s that your evidence? answer: yes, it is. i cannot remember being told by

mr. brown what he said, and i have no way of knowing. but i know, but i know what he said to me about rupert murdoch's reaction which was to say, basically, i don't like how it's being dope, and i think it's a bad day to do it, and i wouldn't have done it this way myself, gnaw's life, and we have to get on wit. question: mr. murdoch's reaction to what, lord hand ellison? answer: to switch to the labour party which was james and rebecca's decision, not the editor's, incidentally. >> first of all, there was only one call with mr. murdoch, and it was on november the 10th, and that was a call that was related to afghanistan. and you've got five letters that are a after kates from people who were on that call, four of them on the call, one who had to report to the press what happened afterwards, and they make it absolutely clear that that call was about afghanistan. and whatever you are reading out and whether you're referring to that call or not, i don't know. but the november the 10th call is the only call i had in a year

with mr. murdoch. and i don't know if you're in a position to confirm that that is the case on behalf of news international or not. as for what happened on september the 20 30th when the conservative party was given the information, if you like, of "the sun," there was no call. there was no discussion. there was no text. there was no conversation with mr. murdoch at all. and i don't know how -- i notice that questions are coming from core participants, and the suggestion is that somehow there was a mobile call that hasn't been registered in downing street. i really think news international is doing itself a great deal of harm by trying to suggest that a telephone call took place which never happened and trying to suggest that comments were made on that call that never were made and trying to suggest, also, that the attitude of the perp on the call -- the person on the call was on balance when there was no call at all. so you must tell me whether you

want to refer to a call that was made on november the 10th or a call that you are claiming was made after september the 20th which never happened. >> mr. brown, the only question i want to ask you is this: did you have the conversation with lord mandelson that he said that you had in the evidence i've just read to you? >> i don't remember a conversation with mr. mandelson about this peckically, but if conversation took place, it would have been about a call on november the 10th, and it was nothing to do with the support of the conservative party. the about support for afghanistan. there was no call on september the 30th. you are allowing me the chance to make this absolutely clear, and news international have produced not one shred of evidence that a call took place, not one date for the call or time for the call. you're not able to tell us what happened except you have these statements from mr. murdoch that happened, and i do find it very strange that we're being asked to debate about a call that never took place of which you have no information about when

it took place and who was, also, on the call. >> thank you very much, mr. brown. >> right. thank you. mr. brown, thank you very much, indeed. >> all rise. [inaudible conversations] >> be about a one hour break now as we hear the testimony of former british prime minister gordon brown in the british investigation into politicians and the media. we are expecting more from mr. brown after the break. later today, chancellor of the exchequer george osborn will answer questions, and we'll return to live coverage at the time. actually this afternoon we will hear from the chancellor of the exchequer george osborne himself and not from prime minister tbor done brown. -- gordon brown. a little later this week a number of political figures are expected at the table, including

john major, labour party leader ed millibland and -- miliband and ed clegg. we'll have live coverage of that all this week here on c-span2. as this break continues, opening remarks from earlier today with former prime minister gordon brown. >> may i call this morning's witness, the right honorable gordon brown, please? >> thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] >> i swear by almighty god that the evidence i shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. thank you. >> mr. brown, your full name, please. >> james gordon brown. >> you kindly provided us with a witness statement which is dated the 30th of may, 2012. it has the standard statement of

truth, and you've signed it. is this your formal evidence to our inquiry? >> yes, it is. >> mr. brown, thank you very much. for the work that's, obviously, gone into the inquiry. i'm sorry that our start this morning's been delayed. >> it's fine by me, thank you very much. >> mr. brown, may we start your general comments which i'm going to ask you to elaborate, if i may? on the bottom of the third page of your statement which is our page 14207, you refer to securing the right balance between the freedoms of the media and the privacy of the citizen. now, implicit in that is the premise that there is an imbalance at present. but how would you rectify the imbalance without impersonal injurying on the freedoms of the media? >> well, i think the starting point of all this has been the complaint that has been made by a family like the dowler family,

and they would support, i've no doubt, the freedom of the press. but they're worried about the threat that was made to their privacy as individuals. and i think lord justice leveson put it, who will guard the guardians was a question that he wanted to address. i will say who will defend the defenseless, and we've got to provide answers in a situation where we have two freedoms that are competing with each other. now, perhaps i've had some time to reflect on these matters. you might call it a period of enforced reflection courtesy of the british people. but i've had a chance to look at some of these issues. and i would still hold to the view that really came from my religious upbringing, that the media are one of those institutions in society that have not only a right, but a duty to speak truth to power, that they should continue to shine a torch on those dark, secret recesses of unaccountable

power and that, for example, in the great sunday times campaign was proven to be the right thing to do. i would say that at its best the media in this country is, indeed, also the best in the world. and i would defend the right of the media to exercise their freedom even when there is a political bias. ii was -- phoned up by a prime minister during the period when i was at number 10. he was having trouble with his other colleagues around europe, and i said is there anything i can do to help, and he said, yes, there is. and the next day the editor of the best-selling daily newspaper in this country arrived wanting an interview about how this man was the greatest statesman in the world. so that is not, i think, the best way that the press exercises its freedom. i would defend the right of the

press also, each when it get thing -- even when it gets things wrong as it does on occasions and in circumstances. i remember when i started off as a member of parliament, i was plagued for the first two years with a story in the times that was then in every one of the cutting that said i had been, i was a new mp, of course. i was only in my early 30s. it said i'd been born in 1946, it said i was a veteran, a stalwart, and then i was getting letters from pension companies saying you had entered a new job late in life and would i want to make provision for that? and the times going to the house commons with me at the age of 19 and said that i was 57 years old. now, that was an honest mistake. where i think we've got a problem is in two respects, that the freedom that the press has has got to be exercised with responsibility, the rights in our society can only come with responsibilities attached to them. and in two very specific areas

in this britain today, we have a problem. the first is the conflation of fact and opinion which goes totally against the press/come guidelines, and i think we ought to explore that, how standards in the journalism could be upheld in a situation where this was a tendency -- there was a tendency for newspapers in particular to editorialize outside their editorial content. and the second thing is the question the dowlers put to us, and that is how can we defend a privacy of family that at a time when they're at their most vulnerable have their privacy invaded in the press in a way that splits the family apart and makes everybody in that family suspicious of each other and particularly so since it's been dope by unlawful means which include telephone tapping? now, you can teal with the legal issues -- deal with the legal issues by enforcing the law. i don't think the complaint system has worked properly, so i

don't think the dowlers could have expected to get redress from a complaint system. and this is where i suppose i part company with some of the statements made to the inquiry, it's not just about how you discipline and sanction where mistakes are made that are injurious to family life. i think we've got to have some means by which we incentivize the good as well. in other words, if the standard of journalism declines, and i think there is an issue in the internet age about the decline of standards, we must have a means by which we incentivize the good. >> thank you. you mentioned freedom with responsibility. you mentioned it in your witness statement as well. how does one instill or ferment the necessary cultural change in the press to create that responsibility? >> i think in the first case it is a matter of the press. i think it's a matter of upholding standards of journalism. i was, funny enough, when i was

very young editor of my student university, and we had director at that time one of the greatest journalists, i think, of that period. and i used to debate with him this issue about the responsibility of the press. and i'd rely on him because he influenced my judgment very much on this issue. and he said very clearly that the press had to exercise its judgment about what it published, how it framed its coverage, but also how it conflated fact and opinion or avoided doing so with responsibility. i don't think we do enough to encourage the good. and if i can say what i think the problem is, and it may be that we're dealing in some cases with the problems of yesterday and not the problems of tomorrow. we're now in an internet age.

there's a massive flow of information available to everyone. i think it's true that in the 1930s, the bbc used to have its news coverage, and some days they would say there is no news to report today. now, can you imagine a situation in 2012, in a 24-hour news, seven-day-a-week news media when something like that could ever be said? we're about to see a flood of information onto the internet. we're moving from the ordinary web to the semantic web. the web of linked data. so the amount of information on the internet is going to increase expo 9/11 cially. the amount of information about you and me, about people is going to increase exponentially. there's a zero cost for publication in the internet. i can become a publisher overnight at almost zero cost. there is a new citizen journalism that is developing. we have all these things that are happening, and that is putting pressure on the quality of ordinary journalism because the advertising and business model of today's newspapers, today's print media is being

shot through as advertising gravitates from the ordinary news media to the internet. and the question arises then, who is going to sponsor, who is going to pay for, who is going to be the person that underpins quality journalism? and i believe, therefore, that we've got to look not only at mechanisms by which we deal with abuses in the press, we've got to look at mechanisms by which we can enhance and incentivize good standards. now, the bbc found a way to do it, of course, in the 1940s when they introduced the license fee. perhaps that should be available for the internet and publications that go beyond broadcasting. but you cannot ignore the fact that the whole for the coverage of news now is intimately related to the development of the internet. and if standards are not there on the interbe net, then the print media can rightfully say they're being asked to observe standards that in no

circumstances are being applied to the internet. so the issue, i think, is a new one, and it's one that we've got to deal with the transformation of the technology that is now available to us and the information flow that is just absolutely massive for the ordinary member of the public. >> okay. you refer to the conflation of news and comment. and you aptly refer to clause one of the code which directly addresses that. but how in practical terms would you wish to segregate news and comments so that they fall into clear come part compartments? >> we've gone into the practice of editorializing outside the ordinary editorial. we used to talk about the editorial as a chance for a newspaper to reflect it views. perhaps i could illustrate this best by giving you an example of what, what happened during the period of government. and program it's good -- you'll take a number of examples, but

perhaps i could take one that is controversial, the coverage of afghanistan. during the period i was prime minister, we had an -- we had incredibly difficult decisions to make. this is a country of 35 million people. 135,000 troops at the maximum. you've got nothing like the coverage that you've got, for example, in kosovo, east timor where you had 1 in 15, a peacemaker for every 50 people in kosovo. and, therefore, you're dealing with a very complex set of circumstances in a country that has never been subject to effective law and order. and at a time when an army of occupation that started as an army of liberation is becoming an army of occupation. and you're making very difficult and complex decisions about how you deal with these, these problems. and so we increased the number of troops, i think, from 4,900 to 9,500. we increased the amount of money spent on afghanistan sixfold,

which even the defense staff said these were the most effective defense forces we had ever had given the resources we were putting into them. now, you could have an honest debate about whether we made policy mistakes. you can have, in fact, a very effective debate about what was the right judgment about troop numbers and everything else. we happened to have the biggest troop numbers of any country apart from america. but what i think one newspaper in particular decided to do, and i think this is my point by way of illustration, is it didn't want to take on the difficult issues, so it reduced their opinion that we were doing something wrong to a view that was an editorializing position that we simply didn't ware. so the whole weight of their coverage was not what we had done and whether we had done the right thing, but it was that i personally did not care about our troops in afghanistan. and that's where you conflate fact and opinion. and when you descend into sensationalism, you actually make it not an issue about

honest mistakes or matters of judgment, but about evil intentions. and so you can laugh about it now, and i do laugh about it sometimes. if you pick up a newspaper and you find that you've failed to bow at the senator, that is an example of how he doesn't care about our troops in afghanistan. first of all, the story wasn't true and, secondly, that's not the conclusion that should have been drawn. you have then a story before that, you fell asleep at the -- [inaudible] you're actually praying and bowing your head, and one newspaper decides this is an example of someone falling asleep and dishonoring the troops. again, you don't care. you then have a letter you send to someone which is a mark of respect to someone who's deceased, and you are told that you have 25 misprints in that, and then a handwriting expert appears and says this shows a lack of empathy. and it goes on and on and on. and that is the idea. so here is a difficult issue

that the press really in the interests of the british public have got to treat seriously. there are very few war correspondents in afghanistan actually reporting what is happening on the ground. all the reporting in the these newspapers is being done from westminster. and the issue is not the facts of what is happening or even an honest disagreement. that is the tragedy of all. the issue is reduced to this person doesn't care. now, that is where i find -- you see, if the media only had a political view and said we are conservatives, you could accept that because that's in their editorials, and that's part of freedom of speech. but to use the political view to them, con conflate fact and opinion and at the same time to sensationalize, to trivialize and in a sense to demonize, it's what professor o'neill who, i think, gave the lectures in the early years of this century on trust talked about as a license to deceive. and i think that is where the

danger arises. it's too easy following, of course, the citizen journalism of the internet where there is unresearched items, where people put their views very fiercely, where you have right-wing and left-wig bloggers, then to sensationalize in the print media to distort fact and opinion and mix them together and then, ofg, to make it an issue not of policy difference, but an issue of motive, an issue of intentions, an issue of character, an issue of personality, an issue of evil practice, i think that's where the press has failed our uncan. and i think on this particular issue of afghanistan, i could give you an example from the economic crisis, but this conflation of fact and opinion and the way it is done is very damaging, i think, to the reputation of the media. and i find it done differently in other countries. >> okay. mr. blair's speech, mr. brown, which was, i think, on the 12th of june, 2007, the day before he

left and you took over, did you agree with the sentiments he expressed in that speech? >> i think tony was saying exactly what i'm saying today, that this issue of fact conflated with opinion, i've never used these words, nor would i use these words, and i think my sentiment about the importance of the press has been expressed in my earlier remarks to you, that we both need and should support and try to defend and uphold the best of standards in a free press. but i think his remarks were exactly what i'm saying. that if you set out to editorialize beyond your editorial column, if you conflate fact and opinion and put it on the front page of your newspaper, if you then sensationalize it by alleging that the opinion is not about the policy that you're supposed to be discuss, but about the person that you are now attacking, then that's not a healthy sign for a democracy. and i do note in afghanistan that -- and this is what makes

me very sad, indeed. i'm afraid that half the country is falling into the hands of the taliban. i'm afraid as we reduce troops, we're just happening over power not to the afghan army, but to the taliban. but the very newspaper that wanted to make the issue were we doing enough for our troops have been virtually silent since the day of the general election in 2010, and i have to conclude as mr. blair concluded that these or were not campaigns that were related to objective journalism exposing the facts, these, unfortunately, were campaigns that were designed to cause discomfort to political, to people who were politically unacceptable. >> okay. what's your analysis, mr. brown, for the failure to address this issue, the fusion of fact and comment, as you put it, as one world? between 1997 and 2010? >> tony gave evidence a few day ago, and he rightly said that a decision was made, that there would be no manifesto commitment

to reform of the media. when i came in in 2007, we have no mandate in our manifesto to propose reform of the media. i did want to make a change, and i did try to move away from what i thought was the excessive dominance of what is called the lobby system. and what really has led to these allegations of spin. by the way, spin assumes that you've got success in getting your message across each if it's superficial, and i don't think anybody could accuse me in having a great deal of success in getting my message across. but i tried to move away from that. and one we moved from having a political chief of communications to having a civil servant doing the job. that was to send the message that we were not trying to politicize government information, we were trying to give the information that was necessary for