bien-pensant/ half house

イングランドの新聞各社では、政治による報道規制の話題で賑わっております。規制について反対の意見をとっている新聞・雑誌がほとんどで、どのメディアも独自の路線で批判をしています。そこで、今回は保守派雑誌のThe Spectatorの記事を扱いたいと思います。寄稿者は、Daily Mailの記者のStephen Glover氏です。

気になる表現がいくつかありました。まず、記事にあるbien-pensantです。これはフランス語からの借用語で意味は“right-thinking; conservative; orthodox”という意味です(OED)。The Guardianは、リベラル立場の新聞という認識でした。ここで言及されているのは、Roy Greenslade氏の保守的な政治観というよりは、新聞などの報道機関に関わる者としての保守性、すなわち報道規制について反対している立場という意味であるように思えます。

次いで、halfway houseですが、元は「２つの街の間にある家」という意味ですが、“That is midway between two states or conditions; half one thing and half another. ”すなわち「妥協点；妥協策」という比喩的な意味で用いられています(OED)。

また、このニュースを理解するためには、ニュースの背景として、例のハッキング事件の背景や関係者、新聞各社の発言、歴史など様々なものを知らないといけないと反省しました。(Othello)

Save our speech | The Spectator

In 1644 John Milton appealed to parliament in the Areopagitica to rescind its order to bring publishing under government control by creating official censors. I wonder what he would make of Lord Justice Leveson’s report, due to be published next week, which is expected to re-introduce statutory control of the press into English law after a lapse of centuries.
中略
So while the stories of press misbehaviour may have weighed on Lord Justice Leveson, he has heard little which should have surprised him. What really changed his thinking? I suspect it was not so much the horrific nature of the evidence as the brilliant lobbying of pro-statutory control groups, including the leading lights of the notably well-funded Hacked Off and leftish media academics, all of whom have been circling the Leveson inquiry as determinedly as a pack of coyotes eyeing up a promising carcass.
中略
… His Lordship’s small court has been comprised of people who mostly share a similar political outlook, and have very little knowledge of the popular press, and probably even less sympathy with it. This hardly seems just or equitable.
中略
When last Friday’s Daily Mail unleashed a broadside against Sir David it was instantly dismissed by bien-pensant observers such as my old friend Professor Roy Campbell-Greenslade of the Guardian as conspiracy-obsessed and verging on the lunatic.
中略
I fear the Mail’s disclosures came too late to affect Lord Justice Leveson’s thinking.
中略
But he can’t sashay out of this one — presuming that Lord Justice Leveson does propose statutory regulation. There is no halfway house. The choice is between self-regulation with much sharper teeth than before, or any form of statutory control with parliament ultimately in charge. Of course no one imagines the sort of censors against whom John Milton inveighed. Statutory regulation might well be light-handed and benign for the foreseeable future. But it would have been established that the legislature, which really means the executive, regulates and authorises the press, and none of us can know whether this novel principle might not one dark day be used to muzzle it.