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Leveson / Media Freedom / Standards / UK Press — Comments Off on How many royal charters does it take to fix press regulation? Six, at least
24
Jun 13

How many royal charters does it take to fix press regulation? Six, at least

Any time from this week, we may hear news from the government ministers assigned to solve the conundrum of press regulation. Consultation on one of the many royal charters which have been written since the Leveson Report was published more than six months ago has finished and we may hear how the government hopes to get out of the deep doo-doo it’s walked into.

Or possibly not. Lord Leveson remarks more than once in his report that press regulation is a subject about which politicians may have, or even voice, opinions. When in office, they rapidly conclude that they are determined to do as little as possible. The toughness of the present dilemmas isn’t going to change that.

Any system of press regulation which is “independent” of the state and politicians can’t, by definition, be compulsory and even if it were, news publishing groups increasingly pivoting to become global online publishers could operate from outside British legal jurisdiction. Yet a cross-party majority of MPs want, and have voted for, a tougher system of accountability than the three largest national newspaper publishers will accept.

There are now six versions of Royal Charters in play, all claiming to be to be the best balance between freedom and restraint. These six versions have all been generated despite the claim made for Royal Charters – that they protect the independence of a press regulation system from future political interference – having been strongly challenged. Six charters may just be the start.

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Leveson / Media Freedom / UK Press — Comments Off on Leveson quick read: severe narrative, law/regulation better than feared
29
Nov 12

Leveson quick read: severe narrative, law/regulation better than feared

This is a rapid gut and comment on the Leveson report executive summary released today. The complexity of his regulation-legislation solution seems to have masked the genuine severity of his audit of what some newspapers have been doing.

No report on the press would be complete without a quotation from Thomas Jefferson and Lord Justice Leveson obliges on page 4: “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” The next fifteen pages demonstrate exactly the opposite.

Leveson does not think much of the “culture” of the press (as his terms of reference called it). Indeed it seems unlikely that he would even think the word “culture” the appropriate one. He is outraged not just by bad behaviour but by what he seems to think was a lack of any moral sense: “There have been too many times when, chasing the story, parts of the press have acted as it its own code, which it wrote, simply did not exist.” Note the “which it wrote” dig at hypocrisy. (para 7)

He makes a nod to the fact that the press does hold its own powers to account, citing (para 10) both the Guardian’s investigation of the News of the World and the ITV and BBC Panorama’s investigation of Jimmy Savile. He acknowledges (para 18) that commercial changes have increased pressures on newspapers “to find different ways to add value” (without accepting this as an excuse for anything at all).

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Leveson / Political Journalism / UK Press / Wit — 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.”

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Broadcasting / Law / Media Freedom / Standards / UK Press / Uncategorized — 1 Comment
03
Nov 11

Media regulation: a new idea (and some older ones)

Almost every week in London this autumn there has been panel discussion, a lecture or a seminar on one aspect or another of regulating the media. Regulation fatigue is starting to set in.

Several dozen regulators, analysts and academics tried looking for a new ideas on regulation at City University this week. They heard a few, not least from the Irish and Australian media regulators who came to compare and contrast their own systems of self-regulation.

But the discussion never quite escaped the battles of the past. The issue of how a self-regulatory system guarantees that it covers all the major players was dramatised by the appearance of the editorial director of Northern & Shell, owners of the Daily and Sunday Express, which withdrew from the Press Complaints Commission earlier this year. One disgruntled commentator was led to wonder if the Leveson Inquiry was really worth holding if the informal debate on regulation would soon produce changes sooner.

The audience was offered one entirely new idea in the form of a book outlining a 3-tier system for the regulation of all news media by Lara Fielden, who has been both a broadcast journalist and a regulator. At first sight, Fielden’s scheme looks too complex and hard for consumers of news to grasp or use. But Fielden’s research and reflection has two great strengths: it relies heavily on incentives to voluntary submission to rules to improve journalism’s quality and it tackles the pivotal issue of producing a convergent regulatory scheme for converging media.

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UK Press — 1 Comment
13
May 11

Privacy, superinjunctions and converging regulation

Confused by the simmering froth of indignation and counter-claim about superinjunctions, Twitter and privacy? Here’s an attempt to extract what’s important.

1. Media regulation is not going away as an issue. This is not because of the sudden eruption of rows about superinjunctions. The fundamental reason for unease about laws and regulators is that they are out of date. The system of media regulation we have in Britain was designed for an analogue age in which each platform (print, radio, TV) was distinct and regulated separately. Digital “convergence”, with words, sound and video all carried by the internet, undermines that. This is very clearly on the mind of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, quoted here. Convergence has consequences for privacy, the kinds of issues dealt with under the Press Complaints Commission Code of Conduct and plurality of ownership and control (see here).

2. Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, giving the Sampson lecture this week, defended the “mixed economy” of British media regulation, which varies from tight regulation (such as for the BBC) to a “wild west” free for all in the printed press, whose self-regulation system is certainly not onerous. Rusbridger argues that this mixture both establishes a visible “gold standard” for good practice while allowing risk-taking  and controversial journalism at the same time. He was asked whether this view was tenable in an era in which print publishers were becoming broadcasters on the web, established broadcasters were becoming magazine publishers and barriers between technologies were vanishing.

3. If we look hard enough there are many issues to wrestle with in the legal framework for the news media. It’s plausible and logical to argue that they are all connected. But this approach risks making the task of improving things look impossibly large. I’d argue that privacy is the issue on which to focus: it lies at the heart of the concerns about super-injunctions, phone-hacking and the idea of self-regulation. I’ve argued elsewhere (£) that new legislation may be closer than many journalists like to think and that editors had better stake out their positions soon.

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