Posts Tagged: Leveson Inquiry

2 Comments
16
Jan 12

A Leveson question for Paul Dacre

There are many things the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre no doubt wants to say to the Leveson Inquiry when he appears before it on February 6th and plenty of questions lined up by the Inquiry’s lawyers. I have a small suggestion.

The elusive and much-disputed idea of the “public interest” will play an important part in Leveson’s deliberations. Public interest defences – such as exceptional justifications for intrusion, for example – are written into the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct and into several laws. Back in the middle of last year, public interest was an important issue in one of the cases which triggered several public rows and court cases over privacy injunctions.

One of these cases involved Sir Fred Goodwin, the disgraced ex-head of the Royal Bank of Scotland. While in charge of the bank, Goodwin had had an affair with a female colleague. Injunctions were granted to prevent the disclosure of the names of either party. Despite the injunction, Goodwin’s name was freely bandied about on Twitter and he was named in the House of Commons by an MP. A judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, eventually cancelled the order concealing Goodwin’s identity but kept in place the one preventing the naming of his lover.

The Daily Mail did not approve of the judge’s decision, running as many details (“the mistress on a six-figure salary”) about the woman as it thought it could get away with. Or so it appeared. A number of different court hearings were held on this case and this is the judgement covering what the Mail had said. It repays careful reading.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / UK press — 2 comments

Tags: , , , , ,

1 comment
13
Jan 12

Ed Milliband, Jon Stewart and Richard Clive Desmond: the humor crisis

I was going to write about the use of jokes in politics and how political reporters never cover the subject for fear of sounding trivial. But then jokes suddenly starting happening everywhere.

The leader of Britain’s parliamentary opposition, Ed Milliband, made one of those doomed “relaunch” speeches last week which no one outside the political industry much noticed. An interview that morning intended to set the stage for the speech went awry when Milliband found himself being asked if he was too ugly ever to be elected Prime Minister.

Milliband’s looks may or may not be a liability but he has bigger problems. He never seems to find anything funny and never makes any jokes anyone can remember and retell. Plenty of leading politicians are born without a sense of humour, but the smart ones have that corrected. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t naturally hilarious and had to have jokes explained to her. But she had a speechwriter (the theatre director Ronnie Millar) who was funny and who, as someone reminded me the other night, carried a small notebook everywhere in which he recorded lines that he could use.

Milliband shares this humour-deficit with the strange collection of people currently slugging it out (“mud-wrestling for dwarfs” one commentator called it) for the Republican presidential nomination in the US. John Dickerson of Slate reflects here the Great Republican Humour Crisis and on what the presence or absence of gags tells you about politicos. And his piece has jokes. My favourite is the self-deprecating story told by a now-forgotten man called Mo Udall. Canvassing, Udall walks into a barber’s shop and introduces himself as the local candidate who’s asking for their votes. “Yeah,” replies the barber, “We were just laughing about that.”

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Leveson / Political journalism / UK press / Wit — 1 comment

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,


5
Jan 12

The perplexing paradoxes of popular journalism

The first phase of the Leveson inquiry in the British press isn’t quite finished yet, but the inquiry is entering new territory. Or at least there’s a change of mood.

The opening weeks were dominated by complaints and horror stories about red-top reporters. Straws passing on the wind tell me that this indignation is now being replaced by more sober reflection about the issues which face big-circulation papers.

The perplexing paradoxes of popular journalism

Daily Mail February 1997

Here are the straws I’ve counted recently. Lord Leveson himself has from the start been keen to underline that he is not embarking on any project to “beat down” popular papers. He has also been asking each of his celebrity witnesses what they would do about the faults of which they complain and has more than once sounded a little irritated by the vagueness of the prescriptions he is offered. When editors take the stand at Leveson this month, we will be reminded that popular journalism can reveal important truths and explain complex events in ways that papers with bigger reputations and much smaller circulations can’t manage. Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, at one time a columnist for the Daily Mirror, wrote a defence of the tabloids the other day.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / Leveson / Media freedom / UK press —

Tags: , , , , , , ,

1 comment
9
Dec 11

Leveson takes academic advice

Unless you look very hard you will not have seen the Leveson Inquiry session of yesterday mentioned in the news. The inquiry wasn’t taking a day off: it was hearing from seven media academics.

Our views, to put it mildly, did not make headlines. But for the record, here is the link to the video and transcripts. The best summary I’ve seen is here (others here and here).

A few quick impressions. The questioning is thorough, rigorous and well-directed, much of it conducted by Lord Leveson himself. Given that so much of the focus is coming down to the less attractive activities of red-top papers, the absence from the inquiry’s panel of “assessors” of anyone with experience of a red-top newsroom seems odder and odder. Partly because such a person could have helped diagnose the problem; partly because the inclusion of red-top experience would bolster the political defences of inquiry conclusions which turn out to be unpopular with the popular papers. Those papers editors’ will give evidence in January and at least some of them are meeting shortly to see if they can organise a common front and shared proposals for the inquiry.

Lord Leveson referred yesterday to what had gone wrong in newspapers in the past “twenty years”. That choice of timeframe reminds us that the unspoken premise of this inquiry is to discover why the suggestions made (twice) by the last judge to consider these questions, Sir David Calcutt, two decades ago did not succeed as planned. There is a clear hint of this (part 1 c and d) in the Leveson Inquiry’s terms of reference.

ADD YOUR COMMENT
j-schools / Media freedom / standards / UK press — 1 comment

Tags: ,

5 Comments
1
Dec 11

Leveson: it’s all really about privacy (so start with that)

Below is the text of a piece which I’ve written for the British Journalism Review and it argues a different approach to newspaper regulation than the one taken by most witnesses to the inquiry so far. The BJR’s new edition carries other advice to Lord Leveson from a clutch of other commentators including Tessa Jowell, Steve Hewlett, Geoffrey Bindman and Donald Trelford.

Balanced privacy law might be the least bad outcome

George Brock

I blame the Leveson Inquiry’s terms of reference. These ask the inquiry to recommend “a new more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press”. No sooner were these words published than editors, pundits, publishers and media lawyers plunged with joyful relish into the business of elaborating “options” for toughening the powers and operation of the existing regulator, the Press Complaints Commission. The idea that the phrasing of the terms of reference is open ended, and doesn’t necessarily imply even the continuation of any self-regulatory or independent regulation, seemed not to occur to anyone at the seminars which Leveson organised as the overture to the formal hearings.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / Media freedom / standards / UK press — 5 comments

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments Off
11
Nov 11

Rusbridger’s Orwell lecture: hacking away at the truth

The twittersphere sent round plenty of links to last night’s Orwell lecture by the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, so signalling its importance is hardly needed. But I’m mentioning it to urge you to read the full text.

Besides being an excellent read, the lecture is in two parts. The first is the story of the hacking story, with plenty of justified emphasis laid on how difficult it was for the Guardian to get traction for a story which others didn’t, for a long time, want to touch. The second half is Rusbridger’s first outline of how he thinks the press regulation system should be rewritten after the Leveson inquiry. I have a few reservations about some of what he proposes but putting the “public interest” issue front and centre is dead right. I’ll come back to those arguments at a later date, but for now read the whole lecture.

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Investigative / Media freedom / UK press — Comments Off

Tags: , ,

Comments Off
15
Oct 11

Leveson and media regulation: the Dacre surprise

In the wake of the phone-hacking scandal in Britain, a judge-led inquiry is now sitting to look at a series of questions about media regulation, some of them related to hacking and some not. To allow the media industry an early opportunity to vent its feelings about the inquiry, Lord Justice Leveson organised three seminars as an overture to the inquiry’s evidence sessions.

Because the seminars were principally about letting off steam, the speakers with the strongest feelings and language naturally made the headlines. But the third seminar witnessed a retreat which has moved the goalposts.

The long-serving editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, railed against the inquiry, which he sees as no more than revenge by MPs for the exposure of the expenses scams. So far so predictable. Then, in his closing words, Dacre effectively conceded that the existing system of self-regulation was not good enough and might have to be strengthened. Quite considerably strengthened, as it turned out. Dacre’s performance was the rhetorical equivalent of an army which fires at great deal of ammunition at its enemy, creating noise and smoke. Only when the smoke clears for a moment does it become clear that the forces making all the noise have actually retreated.

Dacre announced that the Mail would be carrying a corrections column on its second page as of next week. He said that the Press Complaints Commission’s “code committee” (i.e. the rule-writers) should have lay members and not be composed solely of editors. He even suggested that this committee might take part in public consultations. He floated the idea that newspapers might need to appoint an “ombudsman” (perhaps a retired judge advised by a couple of retired editors) to inquire into “potential press scandals”. This figure should have the power to summon witnesses and to name the guilty. It might levy fines and on the “polluter pays” principle, the newspapers should carry the costs of such inquiries. Dacre implied that this newly-empowered ombudsman would exist alongside the PCC, but their exact relationship was left vague. (Complete Leveson inquiry video and transcripts here).

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / Media freedom / UK press — Comments Off

Tags: , , , ,

Comments Off
11
Oct 11

Leveson’s witnesses: asking old questions in a new era

I’ve been looking at the first two seminars held by the Leveson inquiry into press conduct and regulation before attending the third of these this week. Given that this inquiry is going to last for at least a year and (probably) set a regulatory framework for years to come, the most puzzling aspect of what the inquiry has been told so far lies in the frame of reference adopted by most speakers.

Most of those who have spoken so far have made only passing reference (if any reference at all) to the fact that “the press” is no longer only in print. The fact that journalism is gradually going digital seems to me to have large implications for the legal or regulatory context in which it happens. This suggests that the frame of reference for thinking about regulation needs shifting.

Journalism’s first era was enabled and defined by machinery: the capital-intensive technology of printing and broadcasting. Journalists were easy to identify because they used these platforms. The era we are now entering does not have that handy definition. Anyone with access to a smartphone can now publish; anyone can now claim to be a journalist. For now, the established powers of mainstream journalism dominate the media landscape and set the agenda; estimates differ, but in Britain somewhere between 7% and 10% of people get their news first and foremost from the internet. But this may well change and likely will.

It’s surely very difficult to determine ways of preventing misconduct in journalism without being clear about what journalism actually is and what it does (if anything) that makes it distinctive. News is no longer a self-defining industrial activity. Journalism is one (very important) activity on a spectrum of social communications transformed by digital technology. Journalism has decoupled from the printing technology which founded the idea in the first place. Any question of whether journalism deserves particular treatment under the law must start with what journalism actually does that makes it particular.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / Media freedom / standards / UK press — Comments Off

Tags:

← Older Entries