Regulation of the press in the UK
Dec. 1st, 2012 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrishansenhomeThere has been a goodly amount of upset in the press here in the United Kingdom over the past couple of years. The UK has a tradition of mostly responsible journalism by some titles (The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, referred to as “broadsheets”) and some scurrilous journalism by other titles (The Sun, the News of the World, the Mirror, the Mail, referred to as “tabloids” or “red tops”). This has resulted in some of the most important scoops of this generation, such as the exposé of the way the Members of Parliament were using their expenses system to claim back more than their fair share of our tax money. It has also resulted in heartbreak, terror, and indignation when people have had their mobile phones hacked, been photographed at very long distance by paparazzi, or been falsely accused of crimes that they had not committed.
A few years ago royal correspondents for News International titles (prop. Rupert Murdoch) were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for hacking into phones owned by various senior Royal Family members and using information gleaned from voice messages to write stories. News International, and the News of the World editor Andy Coulson, assured us that this was the result of rogue reporters and was a one-off. Never happened before, won’t happen again. There was some skepticism, and some public figures reported that they thought their phones had been hacked, but the police repeatedly said they had no evidence that this was happening.
Several years later things came to a head when the Guardian reported that the mobile phone of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, had been hacked after her death but before her remains had been discovered. It was suspected that journalists had not only listened to messages left on her phone by her frantic parents and friends, but had also deleted some of those messages to leave room for more to be left, thus giving her parents hope that she was still alive. This second accusation was never proven, and the Guardian later apologised for reporting it as fact.
Celebrities began to complain that they suspected that their phones had been hacked, and the Metropolitan Police, who are not only responsible for policing in London but also have responsibilities similar to the FBI in the US in some national matters, finally admitted that the evidence they had gathered during the investigation into Royal hacking named others as objects of hacking. All hell then broke loose.
The police began notifying people that they had been named in the evidence as targets of hacking. These people then promptly sued News International and mostly settled for large amounts of money. A Parliamentary committee began hearings on the matter, and Rupert and James Murdoch, among many others, were called to testify. Rupert mostly pleaded that he was old and forgetful and had let his hand slip from the tiller of the company. James said that he was too busy to read all the emails he was sent and had skimmed several that he should have read and that would have alerted him to the fact that hacking victims were being paid large amounts of money not to sue.
News International, which owns a large part of BSkyB, the predominant satellite service in the UK, wanted to buy the rest of it and the Government, influenced by its ties to NI and the Murdochs, was about to allow them to do it. After the hearings, NI withdrew its bid for the rest of BSkyB and James Murdoch retreated to the United States and left his post with NI. The president of NI, Rebekah Brooks, resigned along with several other executives. A commission under Lord Justice Brian Leveson was convened to take evidence and produce recommendations for the way forward.
The politicians all vowed to follow the recommendations of Leveson. The Prime Minister said that he would see that these recommendations were taken up in full “unless they were bonkers”. The Leveson hearings droned on theough the spring and summer, and the report was promised for November.
This report, at 2,000 pages and so big it was distributed in a box, for £250 (around US$400), landed with a thud on politicians’ and journalists’ desks this last week. It has caused a firestorm in the United Kingdom.
The recommendations boil down to a new system of regulation of the press. Up until now, a mostly toothless self-regulation system called the Press Complaints Commission has fielded complaints about unfairness and misconduct in the press. It was constituted by the press itself and included editors and various grandees from the publishing world. It wasn’t very aggressive, and complaints were often disallowed or remedied with a slap on the wrists. Those aggrieved often had to resort to the law courts to get redress.
Leveson recommended that the PCC be disbanded and that a new commission, composed of people not involved with the industry, be set up in its place. Publishers would be invited to support it financially and opt in to its jurisdiction. Its remit would be underpinned by a statute passed by Parliament giving it authority over the press. Any publisher that refused to opt in would be regulated by the same regulator as broadcasting (called Ofcom here, an analogue of the FCC in the US) and be subject to larger fines and costs. There are other recommendations to do with the relationships between the police and the press (they’ve been too cozy) and politicians and the press (ditto).
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a statement in Parliament saying that he opposed statutory regulation of the press. The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who is of a different party and in coalition with Cameron’s Tories, also made a statement saying that he thought statutory regulation was a good thing. Ed Miliband, the leader of HM’s Loyal Opposition, Labour, agreed with Clegg. That is where the situation stands at the moment.
The victims of phone hacking and stupidities committed by the press have been furious, saying that the Prime Minister is going back on his word to support Leveson’s recommendations. They have, indeed, been victims of horrible crimes and misdemeanors by newspapers. I am sympathetic to them and their cause. What happened to them should never have happened to anyone and should not happen again. Will statutory regulation of the press prevent this?
The misdemeanors of the press have mostly been committed in the service of the dead-tree press: printed newspapers and magazines. While these stories were also reported online, the majority of those who read them read them on paper, in newspapers printed here in the UK.
There are around 9 million copies of newspapers printed and read in the UK every day. This amount goes down every year. More and more, journalism is read and digested online. In some cases, the point of origin of online journalism is outside the UK: in the US, for example, where the writs of UK judges do not run and where freedom of speech and the press is almost unlimited.
As the number of dead-tree newspapers goes down, the number of people who get their news solely online goes up. In a decade or so, I suspect that actual newspapers will be read only by wrinklies like me. The new statutory regulation of the press, if it is passed, will be toothless in the face of online newspapers and magazines.
That is why statutory regulation is useless, and why the Prime Minister is right (sadly—I hold no brief for the Conservatives). Let’s take a look ten years in the future.
When the press is published mostly online, and misbehaves by, say, printing a story that is libellous, or obtained illegally, it will be impossible for Government, or the statutory regulator, to control the publisher of the story. News organisations will be based in the US or in some other country that has strong protections for free speech and the press. The only way that a country can control such publishers is to erect a firewall to keep those stories out of the country.
Who nowadays uses such firewalls? China, among other totalitarian states, that’s who. I don’t believe that the United Kingdom would care to be lumped in with the People’s Republic of China in the community of states that restrict their citizens’ access to the Internet. And as most netizens know, there are ways of defeating such firewalls and those methods are virtually impossible for governments to restrict.
The way to get responsible journalism is for news publishers to be responsible. If a journalist breaks the law, s/he should be punished. Some journalists here have been wining, dining, and overtly bribing police officers and civil servants. These activities are illegal. If a publication prints or circulates something provably libellous, it should be taken to court and the book thrown at it. If a publication prints long-lens pictures of royal couples cavorting in various stages of undress in their own back gardens, where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the publication should be sued to within an inch of its life. The publications that swore up and down that they would not use paparazzi pictures of celebrities after Princess Diana’s death should be held to that promise. A reformulated independent PCC should be enabled, by agreement among publishers, to punish journalists and publications that commit offenses. The power to levy heavy fines, to be paid to victims, will assist in this effort.
Proper investigative journalism would not be harmed by this. A reporter going undercover and exposing abuse in a children’s home or a nursing home should be fêted, not arrested. A whistleblower who gets a story of industrial crime into the news should be protected from prosecution.
Statutory regulation will not bring the press to heel. It will actually accelerate the movement of information-provision from dead trees to the Internet, where governmental regulation is weak and where weeping and gnashing of teeth will be heard more and more.
A few years ago royal correspondents for News International titles (prop. Rupert Murdoch) were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for hacking into phones owned by various senior Royal Family members and using information gleaned from voice messages to write stories. News International, and the News of the World editor Andy Coulson, assured us that this was the result of rogue reporters and was a one-off. Never happened before, won’t happen again. There was some skepticism, and some public figures reported that they thought their phones had been hacked, but the police repeatedly said they had no evidence that this was happening.
Several years later things came to a head when the Guardian reported that the mobile phone of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, had been hacked after her death but before her remains had been discovered. It was suspected that journalists had not only listened to messages left on her phone by her frantic parents and friends, but had also deleted some of those messages to leave room for more to be left, thus giving her parents hope that she was still alive. This second accusation was never proven, and the Guardian later apologised for reporting it as fact.
Celebrities began to complain that they suspected that their phones had been hacked, and the Metropolitan Police, who are not only responsible for policing in London but also have responsibilities similar to the FBI in the US in some national matters, finally admitted that the evidence they had gathered during the investigation into Royal hacking named others as objects of hacking. All hell then broke loose.
The police began notifying people that they had been named in the evidence as targets of hacking. These people then promptly sued News International and mostly settled for large amounts of money. A Parliamentary committee began hearings on the matter, and Rupert and James Murdoch, among many others, were called to testify. Rupert mostly pleaded that he was old and forgetful and had let his hand slip from the tiller of the company. James said that he was too busy to read all the emails he was sent and had skimmed several that he should have read and that would have alerted him to the fact that hacking victims were being paid large amounts of money not to sue.
News International, which owns a large part of BSkyB, the predominant satellite service in the UK, wanted to buy the rest of it and the Government, influenced by its ties to NI and the Murdochs, was about to allow them to do it. After the hearings, NI withdrew its bid for the rest of BSkyB and James Murdoch retreated to the United States and left his post with NI. The president of NI, Rebekah Brooks, resigned along with several other executives. A commission under Lord Justice Brian Leveson was convened to take evidence and produce recommendations for the way forward.
The politicians all vowed to follow the recommendations of Leveson. The Prime Minister said that he would see that these recommendations were taken up in full “unless they were bonkers”. The Leveson hearings droned on theough the spring and summer, and the report was promised for November.
This report, at 2,000 pages and so big it was distributed in a box, for £250 (around US$400), landed with a thud on politicians’ and journalists’ desks this last week. It has caused a firestorm in the United Kingdom.
The recommendations boil down to a new system of regulation of the press. Up until now, a mostly toothless self-regulation system called the Press Complaints Commission has fielded complaints about unfairness and misconduct in the press. It was constituted by the press itself and included editors and various grandees from the publishing world. It wasn’t very aggressive, and complaints were often disallowed or remedied with a slap on the wrists. Those aggrieved often had to resort to the law courts to get redress.
Leveson recommended that the PCC be disbanded and that a new commission, composed of people not involved with the industry, be set up in its place. Publishers would be invited to support it financially and opt in to its jurisdiction. Its remit would be underpinned by a statute passed by Parliament giving it authority over the press. Any publisher that refused to opt in would be regulated by the same regulator as broadcasting (called Ofcom here, an analogue of the FCC in the US) and be subject to larger fines and costs. There are other recommendations to do with the relationships between the police and the press (they’ve been too cozy) and politicians and the press (ditto).
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a statement in Parliament saying that he opposed statutory regulation of the press. The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who is of a different party and in coalition with Cameron’s Tories, also made a statement saying that he thought statutory regulation was a good thing. Ed Miliband, the leader of HM’s Loyal Opposition, Labour, agreed with Clegg. That is where the situation stands at the moment.
The victims of phone hacking and stupidities committed by the press have been furious, saying that the Prime Minister is going back on his word to support Leveson’s recommendations. They have, indeed, been victims of horrible crimes and misdemeanors by newspapers. I am sympathetic to them and their cause. What happened to them should never have happened to anyone and should not happen again. Will statutory regulation of the press prevent this?
The misdemeanors of the press have mostly been committed in the service of the dead-tree press: printed newspapers and magazines. While these stories were also reported online, the majority of those who read them read them on paper, in newspapers printed here in the UK.
There are around 9 million copies of newspapers printed and read in the UK every day. This amount goes down every year. More and more, journalism is read and digested online. In some cases, the point of origin of online journalism is outside the UK: in the US, for example, where the writs of UK judges do not run and where freedom of speech and the press is almost unlimited.
As the number of dead-tree newspapers goes down, the number of people who get their news solely online goes up. In a decade or so, I suspect that actual newspapers will be read only by wrinklies like me. The new statutory regulation of the press, if it is passed, will be toothless in the face of online newspapers and magazines.
That is why statutory regulation is useless, and why the Prime Minister is right (sadly—I hold no brief for the Conservatives). Let’s take a look ten years in the future.
When the press is published mostly online, and misbehaves by, say, printing a story that is libellous, or obtained illegally, it will be impossible for Government, or the statutory regulator, to control the publisher of the story. News organisations will be based in the US or in some other country that has strong protections for free speech and the press. The only way that a country can control such publishers is to erect a firewall to keep those stories out of the country.
Who nowadays uses such firewalls? China, among other totalitarian states, that’s who. I don’t believe that the United Kingdom would care to be lumped in with the People’s Republic of China in the community of states that restrict their citizens’ access to the Internet. And as most netizens know, there are ways of defeating such firewalls and those methods are virtually impossible for governments to restrict.
The way to get responsible journalism is for news publishers to be responsible. If a journalist breaks the law, s/he should be punished. Some journalists here have been wining, dining, and overtly bribing police officers and civil servants. These activities are illegal. If a publication prints or circulates something provably libellous, it should be taken to court and the book thrown at it. If a publication prints long-lens pictures of royal couples cavorting in various stages of undress in their own back gardens, where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the publication should be sued to within an inch of its life. The publications that swore up and down that they would not use paparazzi pictures of celebrities after Princess Diana’s death should be held to that promise. A reformulated independent PCC should be enabled, by agreement among publishers, to punish journalists and publications that commit offenses. The power to levy heavy fines, to be paid to victims, will assist in this effort.
Proper investigative journalism would not be harmed by this. A reporter going undercover and exposing abuse in a children’s home or a nursing home should be fêted, not arrested. A whistleblower who gets a story of industrial crime into the news should be protected from prosecution.
Statutory regulation will not bring the press to heel. It will actually accelerate the movement of information-provision from dead trees to the Internet, where governmental regulation is weak and where weeping and gnashing of teeth will be heard more and more.
