ABSTRACT
According to Peter Preston, government ministers desire a compliant press, and journalists want a free press. This tension has given rise to ‘70-year wars’ that go back to:
the Attlee government’s surprise at finding a feisty, combative press operating again after years of wartime censorship. Something, ministers thought, had to be done to make it as respectable, as sober-sided, as compliant as the BBC. Thus arose a profusion of commissions and inquiries, of which Leveson is only the most recent, each of them fought off by newspapers crying freedom. 1
