Leveson – what the papers say

30 Nov 12 | Leveson Inquiry, Uncategorized

Friday’s newspapers gave an interesting glimpse into how the next few months of negotiation on the future of press regulation will go.

The Telegraph’s leader headline said everything you needed to know: “Let us implement the Leveson Report, without a press law.”

The Times (£) was in conciliatory mode, complimenting Lord Justice Leveson’s report as an “impressive achievement”. Importantly, the paper, target of some scorn as part of Rupert Murdoch’s News International group, noted that it was up to the press to quickly move towards independently implementing some of Leveson’s recommendations, thus avoiding a new law on the press:

The industry now needs to come together quickly to agree how independent regulation will work. It also needs to consider how to guarantee its independence…

With a flourish at the end of his press conference Sir Brian announced that “the ball moves back into the politicians’ court”. In fact it is the press that needs to act. The judge has made it painfully clear that the status quo has failed. The press, not Parliament, must act.

Stablemate the Sun was similarly supine:

MUCH of Lord Leveson’s report on the Press makes sense.
The Sun does not argue with his call for a sharper independent regulation of newspapers and many of the proposals within it.
The onus is now on the newspaper industry to come up with robust and muscular proposals for the independent regulation that can prove there is no need for the new law recommended by Lord Leveson.
The Sun is convinced this can be achieved. We have already pledged complete co-operation with a new independent watchdog that would have vastly stronger powers than the discredited Press Complaints Commission.

The Mail, while remaining quite gentlemanly about Sir Brian (“has approached his impossibly wide brief in a fine spirit of public service, firmly got behind David Cameron, who told parliament that he was not convinced by, or comfortable with, calls for a press statute:

To his enormous credit, however, David Cameron sees this report for what it is — a mortal threat to the British people’s historic right to know.
If he prevails in protecting that right, with the help of like-minded freedom lovers in the Commons and Lords, he will earn a place of honour in our history.

(It’s not entirely clear whether the “our” in whose history Cameron shall be revered is the nation or the Mail newsroom.)

The left-leaning Mirror took on Labour leader Ed Miliband’s support for statutory regulation, saying: “The Mirror is Labour’s friend,” it says, “but we refuse to swallow the party line.”

The Guardian, meanwhile, published a long and intricate editorial that did not make it entirely clear where it stood on statutory regulation. But pressed on the BBC this morning, editor Alan Rusbridger suggested that if statute was the only way of gaining the “particularly fantastic” carrots offered by Lord Justice Leveson (such as alternative dispute resolution).

Interestingly, the Daily Express, which had opted out of the PCC, pledged to get behind an independent regulator, without statute:

As David Cameron admitted yesterday, to pass a press law making newspapers ultimately accountable to Parliament for what they print would be to cross a Rubicon.

His challenge to the newspaper industry to devise its own regulatory system that complies fully with the tough principles set out by Lord Leveson, delivers fair play and yet does not require legislation is therefore one we are happy to take up.

How they’ll all figure out how to work together will make a fascinating few month’s viewing.

Leveson: What's on the line?

27 Nov 12 | Uncategorized

Lord Justice Leveson has been dealt a bad hand. On Thursday he’ll fulfil his task of recommending a new regulatory system for the British press — that vague bunch whose boundaries and levels of entry shift with each technological innovation.

It’s possible Sir Brian’s report will have a brief life in the age of the internet: A world where we are all publishers, where citizen journalists and reporters on national papers curate and cover the same stories, where traditional models of journalism are chipped away. But Leveson is determined to recommend something that works for the public, the public who were disgusted (rightly so) at the phone hacking scandal.

So what’s on the table? The industry and the newly-formed Free Speech Network is flying the flag for improved self-regulation. Index has called for a model of tough, independent regulation free from government interference. Campaign group Hacked Off is pushing for statutory underpinning of a new independent regulator, a model the National Union of Journalists and several Tory MPs and peers defended earlier this month.

Hacked Off and its camp argue that only a dab of statute is needed for the press to get its house in order and serve the public. A new regulator would be created by parliamentary statute, but would not play a role in day-to-day operations, sitting instead at arm’s length from Westminster.

But would statute even keep up with the pace of change in the digital age? Would we see statutory definitions of privacy and the public interest as well?

Either this country has a press entirely free from government interference, or it doesn’t, quoting the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson. A new regulator might not play a part in daily operations, but, as Nelson writes, “as soon as the device of political control is created, it can be ratcheted up later.”

It is now our country’s journalists who risk paying the price for the actions not only of a few reporters but also of power-seeking politicians and police. Ordinary journalists who are, let’s not forget, already hemmed in by England’s chilling libel laws and the plethora of other criminal legislation, several areas of which do not carry a public interest defence for reporters.

And, to muddy the waters a little more, we are all journalists now, to use author Nick Cohen’s words. That’s why the hand Leveson’s been dealt is a tough one: his recommendations may not just affect the press, they could affect all of us who blog, tweet our views or share our sentiments on Facebook.

Those of us who obsess about press freedom  might well have concerns about bringing statute into the game. And why shouldn’t we? Hard-won freedoms that are chipped away at, however well-intentioned, can be hard to replace.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index on Censorship. She tweets at @martaruco