Can journalism serve national security without losing its independence?
By
When the Director General of MI5 stood up at Thames House on 13 October to deliver his annual threat update, most of the attention that followed went, understandably, to Iran, Russia and artificial intelligence. Tucked into the speech, however, was something that deserves rather more scrutiny from those of us who teach and study journalism. Sir Ken McCallum announced that MI5 had elevated a third core mission, which it calls Protect, to sit alongside countering terrorism and countering state threats, and within it he described societal resilience as a matter of national defence. ‘The cohesion and confidence of our communities,’ he said, ‘has become a national security front line.’
Journalists made a brief appearance in this new landscape. Among the people whose quiet courage helps keep the country safe, McCallum listed those who discreetly assist MI5 with covert operations, the teachers and mental health workers who rescue radicalised teenagers, and ‘journalists committed to factual reporting, amidst the tides of misinformation.’ News audiences, meanwhile, were advised to think about what they are willing to believe, from whom, and why.
It would be churlish to object to a security chief saying something warm about factual reporting. Yet the company journalists are placed in matters. To be listed beside the people who help the security service mount covert operations is to be recast, however gently, as an auxiliary of the state’s protective apparatus, and that is a role journalism has spent a long time trying to refuse. This process might be described as the securitisation of journalism, the tendency to understand what journalism does for society through the lens of national security, and the MI5 speech is perhaps the clearest example yet of that tendency being voiced by the security establishment itself.
The appeal of the framing is simple. Democratic arguments for funding journalism have been losing ground for years, while security arguments find a ready audience in a government that has cut overseas aid to pay for defence. The BBC World Service has learned to speak this language fluently. In its evidence to Parliament, it presented itself as crucial to Britain’s defence strategy, and last autumn it was reported to be seeking money from the defence budget itself.
When the Foreign Office announced an additional £33million across three years in March, the government justified the decision in terms of Britain’s interests and its security. For an organisation whose budget had fallen by around a fifth in four years, the argument worked.
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The problem is that the reasons used to justify funding inevitably shape how that funding is judged. If journalism is funded on the grounds that it serves national security, sooner or later its value will be measured by how well it serves that purpose. And those making that judgement are unlikely to be editors.
Deciding what counts as factual reporting amid tides of misinformation sounds like a technical exercise, but it is a deeply political one, because the line between misinformation and inconvenient reporting is rarely drawn by those being reported on. Reporting on intelligence failures or arms exports has often been described by officials as damaging to the national interest, and journalism that has absorbed the idea that its purpose is to promote cohesion may become less willing to pursue such stories.
None of this is hypothetical in Britain. The same state whose security service now praises journalists for their role in national resilience also passed the National Security Act 2023. In a report published this summer, Reporters Without Borders warned that the law could expose journalists to tougher penalties for working with whistleblowers. The report also documents how governments around the world have used increasingly broad definitions of national security to prosecute reporters. Britain is far from the worst offender, but the reassuring words of a single speech are no substitute for legal protections for journalists’ sources or a public interest defence.
There is also the quieter danger of self-censorship. Kate Wright, writing with Martin Scott and Mel Bunce on Voice of America, showed how quickly a broadcaster with legal guarantees of independence could be politicised, and how much of that damage was done by staff anticipating what was wanted rather than being instructed. Security framing invites exactly that kind of anticipation.
To be fair to McCallum, he was careful to note that MI5 exists, under the Security Service Act, to defend parliamentary democracy, ‘at the heart of which is free and open debate’. That principle is the right place to begin.
If journalism contributes to national security, it does so precisely because it remains independent of the state and can hold the government, including its intelligence services, to account. That independence is something the state cannot commission for itself. Those of us who argue for better support for journalism should be wary of adopting a vocabulary that wins funding in the short term at the cost of the independence that made journalism worth funding in the first place.
Ultimately, the challenge is to accept support while ensuring that the law protects journalism’s independence and duty to serve the public interest, rather than the government’s national security priorities.
