Peter Preston points out that while Sir Menzies Campbell (66), departed from the Lib Dem leadership because he would be too old to fight an election at 68, media people go on.

In his Observer column today he says Michael Grade (64) is bringing back Trevor McDonald (68) to present News at Ten. It might, Preston suggests make a topic for discussion on Question Time presented by David Dimbleby, 69 today.

Peter Preston, is older than any of them at 69 and five months. Long may he continue to write.

Mostly stories write themselves but sometimes there is a real choice between two different angles. The question then for the reporter and editor is whether to run with the pack or do something different.

The tale of David Cameron and Ali Miraj, the man who had hoped to be a Tory PM provides a good example. Most have followed a similar line to the Telegraph:

David Cameron ’smears’ Conservative critic
David Cameron’s summer leadership crisis intensified today when he was accused of "smearing" a Conservative activist who had spoken out against his leadership style.

The Sun has taken a different line:

Cam’s critic ‘wanted peerage’
TORY leader David Cameron hit back at his critics yesterday — and accused one of demanding a peerage to stay silent.

I listened to both Cameron and Miraj interviewed on the BBC World at One yesterday (listen again). The story is that the two men met to discuss a critical article that Miraj had written but not published. During this meeting Miraj, who had failed to get a nomination for a safe seat in the Commons, asked for a peerage. In the BBC interview Miraj brushed aside the suggestion that this was attempted blackmail.

It is Cameron’s revelation of the request for a peerage which is being described as a "smear". That is the line the lobby pack, already scenting Cameron’s blood after he went to Africa to talk about poverty rather than be photographed in wellington boots on the banks of the flooded Thames, has followed.

Not a pretty sight.

Today is one of those days when there is was so much interesting media stuff in the news section of the Observer that I barely got to the media section. Andrew Rawnsley in his political column makes a telling comment about Gordon Brown’s new ministry. He will "raise Parliament in order to put the media down," Rawnsley writes.

The argument is that increasing the role of the cabinet, Whitehall and parliament is far from a dilution of the prime ministers’s power — it is a strengthening of his power.

Rawnsley writes:

Tony Blair began his premiership thinking he could rule by spinning the media. He ended his time at Number 10 raging against the ‘feral beast’. A Prime Minister with a solid majority has much more command over and authority in Parliament than he has in the arena of the cacophonous, cynical, oppositional media.

Two pages earlier, Cristina Odone looks at Sarah Macaulay, the PR wife of Brown, who "has opted to be reserved and dignified, to steer clear of the media". It is, Odone writes, a "calculated contrast to Cherie Blair".

And opposite the Odone comment is a full-page story on Mika Brzezinski shredding her script in anger at being ordered to lead an MSNBC bulletin with another Paris Hilton story.

This transatlantic revolt against spin and trivia chimes well with the stories about the Browns. Could it really be that we are at a moment of change which will force the media to to pay more attention to ideas than to  spin, wives and girlfriends: an end to the tail WAGging the dog.

Tony Blair’s speech a week ago in which he attacked the "feral" media fills much of the media pages today with Peter Wilby commenting in the Guardian, and Steven Glover in the Independent.

Wilby says the political pack are a bunch of "pussycats" while Glover sees journalists as "lapdogs".

A more distant view is expressed in an Independent story including an interview with Bob Worcester, the pollster, who is a broad member of the Media Standards Trust, set up to encourage higher standards.

Worcester complains that Blair’s speech was "long on diagnosis and short on prescription". It was, he said, "the height of hypocrisy from the man who employed Peter Mandelson, the architect of spin and manipulation".

He said:

Instead of having benign proprietors, who believed in letting their editors have high standards, you have constant pressure from the money men. This is true not just in the media but in the City and generally in society. The accountants don’t have control but they have authority, they are given power in a way that Harry Evans, when he was editor of The Sunday Times, would not have countenanced.

From his polling background Worcester produces some figures. In 1993 a Mori poll found only 10% of respondents believed journalists told the truth but last year the figure was 19%. "I personally think it’s getting worse but the public don’t think its getting worse, though they never thought it was very good in the first place," he commented.

Worcester also points out that penetration of the internet is slowing and suggests media professionals have little idea that only six out of 10 Britons were connected to the web at the end of last year (National Statistics).

"The trajectory was much steeper. It means that it’s going to be a long time before the forecast that newspapers are dead comes true, if ever," he said.

One of the MPs who voted on Friday to exempt parliament from the Freedom of Information Act bought a quad bike on his expenses, the People reports today. David Maclean spent £3,000 of taxpayers money saying he needed the bike to get around his constituency on the Scottish borders. Hiding their expenses from the press is said to be one of the main reasons they want the exemption.

Meanwhile, the Observer says some peers are planning to put forward an amendment to the bill exempting parliament from FoI, to ensure the House of Lords was still covered.

This could be a clever approach as it could not be interpreted as the unelected Lords confronting the elected Commons but would make the Commons look even more venal than they do already.

 A D-notice, the UK’s way of censoring military information, is being considered as a way of allowing Prince Harry to be deployed to a war zone in secret, according to the Observer today.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the army, has blamed media coverage for the decision not to send the third in line to the throne to Iraq with his squadron. He has said: "This close scrutiny has exacerbated the situation and this is something I wish to avoid in the future."

Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph also mentioned D-notices saying "observers" suggested the Ministry of Defence and Clarence House had left themselves "hostages to fortune" by announcing the deployment instead of using the D-notice committee and the Press Complaints Commission to request a media blackout.

It is difficult to see how a D-notice, recommended by the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee which includes media representatives, could be effective. British media would abide by it but it has no force in the rest of the world and it does not stop militias gathering intelligence.

Someone would notice that the Prince was no longer at his base in Warminster or his favourite watering holes. The news would soon be out even if it was not in the British news.

Perhaps, the military who have got egg all over their faces, are trying to demonstrate that they are doing their best to to deploy Prince Harry but not to actually send him. Canute-like they would be able to demonstrate they were powerless.

Later: A further thought on D-notices. The whole rather gentlemanly system looks increasingly fragile in the age of the web and blogs. It depends on rather broad notices — in this case it might be a prohibition of publishing details of  and, if there is doubt, discussion between an editor and the secretary of the advisory committee.  

The probelms are recognised as this answer to a FAQ on the D-notice website illustrates:

The DA-Notice system has never been a watertight, 100% system. Not only its voluntary nature, but also the enormous diversity of the British media (including some small outlets that have never followed the DA-Notice guidance), mean that it has always been a ‘damage limitation’ system. The internet has produced some new considerations, and many unanswered questions about the future, but the very size and diversity of the net means that, just because something is on a foreign website, it does not necessarily mean that it has immediately been widely seen.

Ninety six of the the 646 members of the House of Commons voted today to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. They won with 25 voting against the back bench Freedom of Information (amendment) Bill.

David Winnick, the Labour member for Walsall North, described the Bill as a "squalid" measure. That word can equally well be used for those who voted for it.

There are still hurdles for the Bill to pass including the House of Lords which is, thank goodness, sometimes less self-interested than the elected house.

There is a report of the debate at the Guardian.

As MPs again discuss exempting themselves from the Freedom of Information Act today, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, has once more been defending government plans for further restrictions.

It looked as if this plan to impose new limits on the number of requests that could be made and the cost of answering might have been kicked into the long grass with the dicision to have more consultation. But yesterday he told a Press Gazette media law conference at Reuters: “The public have a right to know information. But why should it be in the interests of the press to determine when and how they get it?… The purpose of the FoI Act is to give the public access to information. It is not to provide the media with page leads.”

With logic like that we can only hope Lord Falconer is a victim of the reshuffle when Gordon Brown actually gets his new job.

It comes as something of a shock when an international organisation issues a statement on freedom, if you read it and realise that what it says is applicable to your own country.

But that is how a World Press Freedom Day letter from Timothy Balding, chief executive of the World Association of Newspapers, reads. Balding who hs been with WAN for more than 20 years, is British and started his career as a journalist, working both at the Oxford Mail and the Press Association.

Here is his letter in full:

Dear Reader,

Major terrorist attacks and threats against countries world-wide, particularly democracies, in recent years have led to the widespread tightening of security and surveillance measures.

The objective of these measures is laudable and compelling – the protection of citizens against threats to life and property. There is, however, a legitimate and growing concern that in too many instances such measures, whether old or newly introduced, are being used to stifle debate and the free flow of information about political decisions, or that they are being implemented with too little concern for the overriding necessity to protect individual liberties and, notably, freedom of the press.

Anti-terrorism and official secrets laws, criminalisation of speech judged to justify terrorism, criminal prosecution of journalists for disclosing classified information, surveillance of communications without judicial authorisation, restrictions on access to government data and stricter security classifications, all these measures can severely erode the capacity of journalists to investigate and report accurately and critically, and thus the ability of the press to inform.

Balancing the sometimes conflicting interests of security and freedom might indeed be difficult, but democracies have an absolute responsibility to use a rigorous set of standards to judge whether curbs on freedom can be justified by security concerns and should set them against the rights protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees freedom ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’.

This is the clear message we need to impress on governments and their agencies on World Press Freedom Day.

Timothy Balding
Chief Executive Officer
World Association of Newspapers

I trust Gordon Brown will take notice of these words.

On the eve of a Commons debate on the Government’s plans to water down the Freedom of Information Act, Roy Greenslade has a timely reminder to sign the Press Gazette’s petition. There is another petition on the Downing Street web site.

As an example of the weakness of the Act in its present form, Greenslade describes the attempts of the Western Morning News to get information about proposals for closure of rural Post Offices.