The Press Complaints Commission today published its Governance Review. The report was produced by an independent panel commissioned last year by the PCC’s new chairman, Baroness Peta Buscombe. It was designed to rebuild public confidence in the press regulator. The panel, led by Vivien Hepworth makes a number of recommendations including:
- Clarifying the purpose of the PCC.
- Increasing the influence of lay members.
- Making the commission more proactive on issues of public concern.
- Providing greater clarity and transparency on complaints including clearer reporting of statistics.
- Being more open about funding.
- Ensuring apologies are more prominent.
- And toughening punishment by creating a “ladder of sanctions” with six “rungs” of possible penalties.
The report was welcomed by the Media Standards Trust as a substantive response to the trust’s submission to the panel and to their 2009 report A More Accountable Press, which called for urgent reform to the self-regulation system.
Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust said he was pleasantly surprised by today’s report describing it as:
[A] good start. There are substantive recommendations here to ensure some real change — provided the PCC and the industry accept them and make them happen.
He went on to say:
It is now for the industry to decide how much support to give to real change. Without real change the gap between self-regulation and the courts will continue to grow, and the current system will look increasingly anachronistic in a converged media world.
Roy Greenslade in the Evening Standard noted that:
The words transparency and accountability crop up 12 times each in the report, while effectiveness occurs 20 times. There is also an accent on ‘clarity of purpose’. The clear aim is to tell the PCC’s story to the public and to those troublesome opinion-formers.
He seems to doubt the PCC will ever win over its critics. The “lawyers, politicians, academics and even some journalists rule the media space by asserting that the PCC regulates with too light a touch. “
