Journalists’ priest counters Archbishop

The vicar of Fleet Street Canon David Meara has stuck up for journalists after his boss mounted an attack on the press.

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury warned journalists agains “lethally damaging” practices.

He said: “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.

“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.”

But writing in the News of the World Canon Meara,
rector of St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, said: “You have to only look
beyond these shores to countries where the papers are of second-rate
quality or where there is no freedom of the press to realise how lucky
we are in the UK.

“The archbishop said that good journalism is like
the art of good conversation, and that is just what happens at local
and national level within newspapers.

“There is in this country a vibrant, varied and
provocative newspaper industry which stimulates a level of debate that
is unparalleled anywhere else.”