Evgeny Lebedev, chairman of the London Evening Standard and The Independent, is to deliver the inaugural lecture of the Gorbachev lecture series on press freedom this evening at Oxford University.
In his speech, "The voices of the press in an open society", he will argue that press freedom is a privilege that Britain too often takes for granted.
He is also expected to decry the proliferation of celebrity gossip in newspapers and to touch on the implications of the phone-hacking scandal.
Other speakers in the Gorbachev series in coming weeks include John Lloyd, director of the Reuters institute for the study of journalism and Luke Harding, Moscow correspondent of The Guardian.
