A few weeks ago, a Conservative-led government, with support from all parties, formally put an end to more than three centuries of freedom of the press in Britain. This hard-won liberty has often proved an inspiration to the world, not least to our own Founding Fathers, yet its disappearance barely made the papers on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps because we already have an informal kind of press regulation here—in the form of a media establishment empowered to enforce a broad uniformity, if not quite unanimity, of opinion on its members—it didn’t look like much of an additional step for the British to have set up a formal, legal mechanism to rein in any journalists who might be thought to be causing trouble. A New York Times editorial honorably praised “Britain’s vibrant free press” and opposed regulation on the grounds that it “would do more harm than good” in stifling independent investigation into public abuses, but it didn’t sound to me as if the paper’s heart was in it. Certainly the editorialist had a hard time summoning up even a tithe of the outrage which that page routinely evinces about cisatlantic Republicans.
Perhaps more telling was the lead of the New York Times’s news report on the matter, which read as follows:
A day after British lawmakers agreed to ground rules for a new press code, an array of newspapers protested on Tuesday against the attempt to impose stricter curbs on this country’s scoop-driven
