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Submission to DCMS on press regulation
DATELINE: 20/2/07
The Culture Media and Sport select committee will be holding a one day hearing on press regulation. In response to their notice, the Campaign has put together the following submission which has been sent to the committee for their consideration. We also hope to be invited to appear before the hearing.
The Campaign For Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF)
The CPBF was established in 1979. It is the leading independent membership organisation dealing with questions of freedom, diversity and accountability in the UK media. It is membership-based, drawing its support from individuals, trade unions and community based organisations. Since it was established, it has consistently developed policies designed to encourage a more pluralistic media in the UK and has regularly intervened in the public and political debate over the future of press regulation in the United Kingdom .
Does self-regulation by the press continue to offer sufficient protection against unwarranted invasions of privacy?
1. The CPBF supports the right to privacy as laid down in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’. This right is not, of course, absolute, and has to be balanced against other rights, not least the right to freedom of expression as enshrined in Article 10 of the ECHR. It is vitally important that the media possess the right to publish material which is in the public interest, and there are certainly occasions when this right trumps the right to privacy. However, in far too many cases the right to privacy, whether of a public figure or of an ordinary member of society, has been trampled upon not in the public interest but simply on the grounds that it is of interest to certain sections of the public (which is another matter entirely) and will thus sell newspapers.
2. In point of fact, complaints regarding privacy account, on average, for just over twelve per cent of the total complaints made to the PCC in any one year, with complaints about intrusion accounting for an average of 3.66 per cent of the total. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that people do not care about press invasions of privacy; it may well be the case that they see no point in complaining to the PCC and/or have more faith in other means of redress. Ever since the courts found themselves unable to restrain the Sunday Sport from perpetrating a grotesque invasion of the actor Gordon Kaye’s privacy, judges have been gradually but determinedly developing a privacy tort out of a combination of confidentiality legislation and the ECHR. (It is, of course, this which lies behind newspapers’ strident and ill-informed campaigns against the Convention, although they lack the honesty to say so, hiding instead behind the ludicrous and threadbare pretence that they are protecting Britain from ‘foreign’ interference). In the Campaign’s view, the British press has only itself to blame for this state of affairs, one which the PCC could have largely prevented were it an effective regulator.
If the public and Parliament are to continue to rely upon self-regulation, does the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice need to be amended?
3. In the Campaign’s view, the Code itself is an unobjectionable document which needs not amending but enforcing. In order to realise how little relationship it bears to what appears in the national daily and Sunday press one has only to read it, and then read the papers themselves. The first thing that one will rapidly realise is that whilst Clause 1(iii) worthily intones that: ‘The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact’, across the press the distinction between editorial and comment has largely collapsed, with front page stories in papers such as the Sun, Express, Mail and others frequently reading as strident opinion pieces. Indeed, Britain’s papers are far better described as viewspapers rather than newspapers - and ones which offer an extremely narrow range of views at that.
4. If the Code is honoured far more in the breach than in the observance, then the situation regarding how the Commission deals with actual complaints is even more seriously flawed. First of all, a large number of complaints are rejected as falling outside the scope of the Code. That this has not led the PCC to change the Code so as to be able to address matters which are obviously of wide public concern suggests that it actually regards the Code as a useful filtering system.
5. Second, despite the number of complaints received almost doubling in fifteen years, the number adjudicated by the PCC has fallen consistently year on year. An average of 58 complaints were adjudicated each year in the Commission’s first ten years but an average of only 31 were adjudicated in each of the last six years. 2006 saw a new all-time low, with only 22 complaints being adjudicated. Of these, a mere five were upheld. The Commission, of course, argues that this is a mark of its success, as it exists primarily to effect a process of conciliation between newspapers and complainants. However, we regard such an argument as largely specious, since it ignores the crucial fact that the power relationship between a complainant and a newspaper editor is a massively unequal one, let alone the awkward matter of the ‘conciliator’ being part-financed by the paper which is the subject of the complaint! In short, the PCC’s relationship to the industry which it is supposed to regulate is exactly like that of a customer relations department to the company of which it is a part. No-one would call the latter ‘independent’ of the company, and nor can the PCC be considered so.
6. Third, the Code’s clause on discrimination seems almost explicitly designed to filter out complaints about the kind of racist and inflammatory reporting which most concerns many people, and which is so besmirching the reputation of the British press on a global level. However, as we note below that the Committee has itself already addressed this question in an earlier report, we will not elaborate further. Instead, we would like to put before the Committee a complaint which the Campaign made to the PCC about what we consider to be racist and inflammatory reporting. We deliberately avoided making this complaint under the clause on discrimination, with all its attendant difficulties, choosing instead the one on accuracy. We tell this story not out of pique, but simply as the best way of illustrating why we have not the slightest faith in the PCC as a self-regulatory body.
7. On 2 August 2005 we complained to the PCC about the front page story of the Express, 27 July 2005. Specifically, we complained that the headline 'Bombers are all spongeing [sic] asylum seekers' was inaccurate as, at the time that this was written, the identity of two of the suspected bombers was unknown. Furthermore, the headline was inaccurate even if it was taken to apply only to the two alleged bombers (Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar) who had been identified at the time of writing, since neither was an asylum seeker. Ibrahim arrived at fourteen in 1992 as a child of refugees fleeing Eritrea and was given exceptional leave to remain; he applied to become a British citizen in November 2003 and was granted a passport in September 2004. Omar, meanwhile, arrived at eleven as an unaccompanied minor from Somalia; he was also granted exceptional leave to remain, and, in May 2000, indefinite leave to remain. The inaccuracy about their being ‘asylum seekers’ was also repeated in the first line of the article, which stated that: ‘The suicide bombers who tried to murder scores of Britons were asylum seekers who raked in more than £40,000 in state handouts, it emerged yesterday’.
8. A further inaccuracy concerned the repeated failure to put the words 'alleged' or 'suspected' before each and every use of the words 'bomber' and 'killer' throughout the text - the Express, like nearly every other newspaper in Britain, committed a serious inaccuracy by simply ignoring the plain, if to them inconvenient, fact that, under British law, suspects are innocent until proven guilty.
9. We could also have added, but did not do so, believing that the charge sheet was already quite long and serious enough, that the inclusion of the highly pejorative adjective ‘spongeing’ [sic] in the headline was a clear breach of Clause 1(iii) of the PCC Code which states that: ‘The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact’.
10. On August 4 we received an acknowledgement which stated, inter alia, that: ‘The editor of the Daily Express is currently a member of the Press Complaints Commission. However, as his newspaper is the subject of your complaint he will of course not take part in any discussion or consideration of the complaint by the Commission’.
11. By 30 September, having heard nothing from the PCC, we wrote again, to be told on 4 October that: ‘The Commission is currently considering this matter and we hope to be able to send you its decision in the very near future’. This turned out to be 15 November, when we discovered that our complaint had been rejected.
12. The Commission pointed out, as it usually does when faced with complaints such as this, that the article’s subjects had not themselves objected to it. The fact that they were in absolutely no position to do so is so obvious as barely to need stating. More important, in our view, is to draw attention to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s fifth report of Session 2002-03, Privacy and Media Intrusion, whose section devoted to ‘Proactivity and Third Party Complaints’ argued, inter alia, that the acceptance of third party complaints ‘is as important in issues of prejudicial and pejorative references to minority groups as it is on privacy matters’. The Express headline about which we complained is a textbook example of just such a reference.
13. The PCC, however, produced a second excuse for inaction on our complaint. This concerned the relationship of the offending headline to the article itself. The PCC pointed out that: ‘While the Commission had previously censured newspapers for front-page headlines that have been insufficiently clarified or qualified by the following article - particularly by text that appeared within the body of the newspaper - it did not consider that that this example raised a similar breach of the code. The terms of the headline were clarified in the body of the article on the front page - that the two men had previously been “given sanctuary” by Britain and had therefore been involved in seeking asylum - and the Commission considered that readers would not have been misled as a result’. However, as noted above, the article itself, as well as the headline, claimed that the men were asylum seekers. Furthermore, the PCC’s suggestion that being ‘given sanctuary’ and seeking asylum are synonymous is both specious and, in itself, highly inaccurate. It is also remarkably hypocritical, coming as it does from a body which, in October 2003, issued a statement on refugees and asylum seekers which warned that: ‘The Commission is concerned that editors should ensure that journalists covering these issues are mindful of the problems that can occur and take care to avoid misleading or distorted terminology’. It is, however, extremely significant that this is precisely the view of the editor of the Express, Peter Hill, who, when he appeared before the Joint Committee on Human Rights on 22 January 2007, stated that: ‘The word “asylum seeker” is a bit of an odd one because what we are really talking about is the system of sanctuary - people who come to this country and are fleeing persecution and genuine threats are effectively seeking sanctuary, in the way that people once sought the sanctuary of the church’.
14. The PCC also defended the Express on the ground that it was ‘expressing a view about particular people connected with a recent news incident’, which, since the item purported to be a news story, and a front page one at that, would appear to be completely at variance with the Commission’s own Code of Practice which, as noted above, states that : ‘Newspapers, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact’.
15. That it took the PCC more than three months to come up with such sophistry is surely quite remarkable, and most certainly gives the lie to two of the components of its claim to be ‘fast, free and fair’. We reproduce without comment Roy Greenslade’s observation in the Telegraph that: ‘This is a shoddy decision and I hope reports that it follows a threat by the editor of the Daily Express, Peter Hill, to resign his membership of the PCC if its ruling went against him are untrue’. But whatever the shenanigans inside the PCC which led up to this tardy, threadbare and intellectually bankrupt judgment, the lessons for editors from this exercise in excusing the inexcusable are clear for all to see: as far as the PCC is concerned, inaccurate headlines are fine as long as the inaccuracies are repeated - not to say embroidered - in the main body of the text. And editorials masquerading as front page news get the green light too. In this context we draw attention to a headline in the Express, 3 January 2007, ‘How the liberal elite is trying to gag us on asylum racket’, which was occasioned by the above-mentioned Joint Committee having the temerity to request Hill to appear before it to discuss press coverage of asylum seekers, and which was the subject of specific criticism by committee member Lord Lester of Herne Hill.
16. In the Campaign’s view, then, the main problems with the PCC Code are that its Code contains too many self-denying ordinances such as the discrimination clause, that its procedures are opaque and thus open to abuse by editors, that it is not a neutral umpire between two sides, and that it adjudicates far too few complaints. We would argue, firstly, that measures need to be taken to make self-regulation work effectively, so that the PCC becomes a self-regulatory body which is taken as seriously by the press as is the Advertising Standards Authority by the advertising industry. Such a body would need to possess the power to impose meaningful and substantial penalties, and to involve at senior level working journalists with a genuinely reflexive, self-critical attitude to the industry. Any re-vivified PCC would also have to stipulate that journalists must have individual legal protection to enable them to refuse assignments that they believe are in breach of the PCC Code. Many journalists (including some on the Express) are as unhappy as members of the public at the kinds of stories which routinely appear in British newspapers, sometimes, indeed, under their own by-line. However, in the hyper-competitive environment of the British press it is frequently virtually impossible for journalists to withstand pressures from editors to run certain kinds of stories, editors whose first loyalty is to circulation, profit and the proprietor.
17. However, if the industry fails to make effective self-regulation work, then steps should be taken to establish a body, independent of both industry and government, which has the responsibility for overseeing press standards and protecting journalistic independence, and which has powers, under statute, to enforce its decisions where negotiation and conciliation fail.
Should existing law on unauthorised disclosure of personal information be strengthened?
18. As noted earlier, the right to privacy is being developed on several fronts at the moment, the current case involving Niema Ash’s book on Loreena McKennitt providing a good example of one such development. In this context we noted with particular interest the remark by media lawyer Mark Stephens in Press Gazette, 5 February, to the effect that: ‘Tabloids are going to have to reinvent the staple of the Sunday morning, and I think we are going to be down to vicars and choirboys again. Celebrities who can afford expensive lawyers and QCs are going to be shielded from rigorous examination, whereas Joe Public, who can’t afford lawyers, is going to be the new victim of the Sunday morning media’. The idea that papers might simply desist from publishing all such stories and concentrate on serious news is, presumably, quite unthinkable.
19. It is our view, as stated above, that the press and the Press Complaints Commission have only themselves to blame for this state of affairs. The irony is, of course, that laws developed in response to circulation-boosting, profit-driven sensationalism and prurience will undoubtedly make more difficult and put at risk serious journalistic investigation and reporting which is in the public interest.
20. Meanwhile the Department of Constitutional Affairs is seeking to increase penalties for revealing information protected by the Data Protection Act, and we have just seen News of the World associate editor Clive Goodman jailed for interception of voicemail messages, along with the resignation of his editor Andy Coulson over the same offence. At the same time, both Press Gazette and The Times have revealed what many have suspected all along, namely that this practice is endemic within the newspaper industry. In these circumstances we find it absolutely staggering that the PCC views the jailing of Goodman and the resignation of Coulson as effectively drawing a line under the matter. Thus there is to be no enquiry into the prevalence of these sorts journalistic practices at the News of the World in particular, nor any investigation into how widespread is phone tapping in, or on behalf of, the industry in general. All, in fact, that the PCC has done is to issue a fatuously anodyne letter asking newspaper and magazine editors to explain the ‘extent of internal controls aimed at preventing intrusive fishing expeditions’. This is an utterly futile and completely inadequate response, and we very much hope that the Committee will subject the PCC to rigorous questioning on this subject.
What form of regulation, if any, should apply to online news provision by newspapers and others?
21. Newspapers have of course, from the very birth of Ofcom, hotly insisted that it should not have the slightest power over online newspaper content. However, Ofcom should be severely criticised for its decision last year simply to forego any control over online versions of newspapers, and the Press Complaints Commission should surely be formally censured by this Select Committee for pre-empting its deliberations by baldly announcing on 8 February that: ‘Following industry-wide consultation it [PressBof] has agreed to extend the remit of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to include editorial audio-visual material on newspaper and magazine websites’. Apparently MPs and members of the public were not thought important enough to consult, and few, we think, will be encouraged by Sir Christopher Meyer’s bland assurance that, as regulated by the PCC, ‘editorial information in the digital age - regardless of the format in which it is delivered - will be subject to high professional standards overseen by the Commission’.
22. If there is a free for all in the area of online newspaper content, established broadcasters like the BBC will risk having their own standards driven ever lower in order to compete with the online versions of newspapers like the Sun and News of the World. The standards of public service broadcasting, and in particular the all-important requirements for impartiality and balance, could be seriously jeopardised by the effects of politically partisan broadcasting creeping in through the back door. As Marc Webber, assistant editor of The Sun Online, put it in Press Gazette, 9 February: ‘We have the ability to provide video which accompanies the agenda of the paper’. Precisely - and online content driven by newspaper agendas will, if not properly regulated, increasingly force the public service broadcasters to compete with such content on its own terms. Furthermore, Murdoch has made no secret of the fact that he would like Sky News to become like Fox News, and his newspapers’ demands for the present impartiality regulations to be relaxed (thus making this possible) will only increase with the advent of politically partisan online broadcasting by newspapers. And again, a Fox-ified Sky News would almost certainly put considerable pressure on the public service broadcasters to become more opinion-driven and politically biased.
23. Up until now, many newspaper websites have been little more than cut and paste jobs from the hard copy of the newspaper. However, many of these sites are increasingly providing video journalism as well, and it is this innovation on their part which should be of particular concern to regulators. In recent weeks video coverage obtained by the Sun and the News of the World (featuring Jade Goody, a 67-year old woman having twins thanks to IVF, and cockpit footage of the ‘friendly fire’ incident in Iraq) has actually led the established bulletins on television. In future, the video-buying power of the tabloids is going to have a tremendous impact on established broadcasters, and newspaper websites increasingly make full video coverage one of their strong selling points.
24. Nor is this development confined to the national level. For example the Hull Daily Mail has daily video news bulletins and employs thirty video journalists. On the one hand this may indeed be a real innovation, but it simply cannot be right that that site works under a totally different set of rules to a BBC local tv or radio station. What kind of fair competition can there be between a regulated and an unregulated news provider? Furthermore, if local newspapers, many of which are parts of powerful and well-resourced national and even international newspaper conglomerates, are going to be allowed to enter the local television arena in this unregulated fashion, this will without a shadow of doubt discourage and endanger the kind of local initiatives envisaged by Ofcom in its 2004 Review of Public Service Television and Broadcasting, in which it stated that: ‘Emerging digital technologies offer rich potential for the future to develop local, regional and national services that meet consumer-citizen needs considerably more effectively than the current model of provision by the main networks’.
25. In our view, online versions of newspapers should therefore come within the regulatory scope of Ofcom, but with a lighter regime than for conventional broadcasters. There may be a case for suggesting three tiers of regulation. Should this come about, however, there would need to be very clear signposting, so that members of the public could know which kind of website they were visiting, and which kind of regulatory regime was governing it. The tiers could be as follows:
* Broadcasters using public airwaves, and especially those funded by a licence fee, such as the BBC. These would need to meet the highest standards, which are already enshrined in their own guidelines. These guidelines should also apply to their websites too.
* Online versions of newspapers. These would need a greater degree of freedom than the above but cannot expect to be entirely exempt from some of the basic regulations which already apply to broadcasters, for example forbidding output which is racist, sexist or encourages religious intolerance. There should also be a requirement that online versions of newspapers should offer balanced coverage during national and local elections.
* Free standing websites and weblogs. These would be subjected to a lighter touch than online versions of newspapers. Campaigning websites, whether for pressure groups or political organisations, do need the freedom to express themselves adequately.
Last modified: Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Previous press complaints commission stories
Press Complaints Commission widens its remit
Frankenstein Unbound?
CPBF writes to PCC on editors' code of conduct
A Pathetic Judgement
Slow and shoddy should be PCC slogan
PCC rejects CPBF Express complaint
CPBF launches complaint against Express
CPBF calls on PCC to open the books
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Notices
Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
DOWNLOAD FREEPRESS NOW
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Download Freepress in PDF, ePub or mobi format. Issue 194 now available.
MEDIA FOR ALL CONFERENCE
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Papers from the Media for All Conference
MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
Press Complaints Commission
Press Complaints Commission widens its remit
Frankenstein Unbound?
CPBF writes to PCC on editors' code of conduct
A Pathetic Judgement
Slow and shoddy should be PCC slogan
PCC rejects CPBF Express complaint
CPBF launches complaint against Express
CPBF calls on PCC to open the books
