Archbishop delivers major address on media

In a major lecture to be delivered to an audience of media professionals, politicians, and Church leaders at Lambeth Palace this evening (1830 BST Wednesday 15 June), Dr Williams will highlight the central task of the media in helping to nourish the common good of a society. He will praise the courage and commitment journalists have shown in promoting "moral change and vision."

But he also argues that: "If the profession is to perform its necessary job, some aspects of current practice are lethally damaging to it, and contribute to the embarrassingly low level of trust in the profession (especially in the UK) shown in most opinion polls."

Dr Williams says media claims about what is in "the public interest" need much closer scrutiny: "There is a difference between exposing deceptions that sustain injustice and attacking confidentialities or privacies that in some sense protect the vulnerable...high levels of adversarial and suspicious probing send the clear message that any kind of concealment is guilty until proved innocent. That is a case that needs more than just assumptions to be morally persuasive."

He adds: "There are undoubtedly facts which would be of huge interest to a certain sort of public, but are not by any stretch of the imagination matters of public interest in the sense that not knowing them creates or prolongs a seriously unjust situation."

Dr Williams will also argue that the way most news is packaged and marketed tends to work against real engagement and deeper public understanding, and creates "a parallel universe" remote from most people's real experience.

He comments: "There is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what other sources can't, information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the same time, it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers and the information it purveys as a commodity."

At the same time, Dr Williams describes "a healthy, morally flourishing media" as vital and a "necessity for mature democracy". He also rejects attempts to make the media "a scapegoat. The relation with the wider society is mutual; societies to some extent have the media they deserve and license."