LEVESON buried as government goes for Google

UPDATE: Former Labour Leader Ed Miliband (or 'Red Ed' as the right-wing red-tops would have it of this very 'centrist', at least politician who opposes Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing policies) has called for Leveson2 to happen.

Great quote on IPSO - he wasn't impressed when the Mail branded his father a traitor. He tweeted and gave media interviews to counter that rather than trying IPSO.

The Leveson inquiry must be completed. The victims of phone-hacking deserve nothing less

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/08/victims-phone-hacking-leveson-inquiry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

UPDATE2 A vote could back Impress as the compulsory regulator, and another make papers pay legal costs whether they win or lose any case.  

Government faces possible defeat on press regulation votes

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/08/government-facing-possible-defeat-in-press-regulation-votes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Nor can we take comfort from the response to Leveson part one. The press declined to set up the kind of independent regulator that both Leveson and parliament wanted to see. Instead we have Ipso, a toothless organisation that, despite bold promises, has yet to impose a single fine or deliver a single equal prominence front-page correction in a national paper. There are also significant issues around the lack of rules or redress around much of the news on social media.

Greenslade's view that the press inquiry announced by UK PM May marks the death, or at least the long-term parking (surely a Labour victory would see Leveson resurrected?) of Leveson2 seems about right.

His Guardian column is occasional rather than daily these days but always worth looking out for. As a former national newspaper editor himself he reliably skewers the realities of this cantankerous industry and it's billionaire figureheads, gladhanded as they are by regimes of a non-socialist bent.

Interesting that the press' extreme aversion to political scrutiny means it mostly failed to imbue May with lavish praise for meeting a long-term demand, an inquiry into the leeching of the new media titans of press content and finance.

This is, nonetheless, a strong sign of the press' continuing current grip over their ideologically matched right-wing Tory government. Obvious echoes here of the timid burial of Calcutt2 nearly 30 years ago when a declining Tory government took years to respond to Calcutt's demand for a new review, as agreed in his original report, when he noted that press behaviour had not substantially altered, then quietly announced there would be no such review.

Here's a snippet:

For years, they have been calling for something to be done about Google and Facebook, arguing that both steal their content while luring away their advertisers. The result has been falling profits for “old media” and consequent closures of regional and local titles accompanied by a sizeable reduction in the number of journalists, rightly described by May as “a hollowing-out of newsrooms”.

This is hardly a new story, and there has been plenty of political lobbying from publishing organisations in order to persuade the government that their industry’s decline requires attention.

These pleas for action have been couched in terms of a warning that the nation is in danger of losing its “free press”, which, to quote the Daily Mail, therefore represents an “insidious threat to British democracy”. A free press, eh? Would that be the press owned and controlled by rich men – yes, men – or profiteering conglomerates that have been propagandists for a “free market” and opposed all regulatory intervention?

Would that be the free press that has traditionally championed business competition and praised the virtue of technological innovation in other industries where jobs have been wiped out?

It was noticeable that May also ignored such ironies when contending that the decline of newspapers is “dangerous for our democracy” and that the loss of “trusted and credible news sources” makes us “vulnerable to news which is untrustworthy”.

Given that untrustworthy news has been the stock in trade of national titles like the Mail for generations it was hard not to laugh at her disingenuousness.

Guardian: Is May’s press inquiry just a way of putting Leveson 2 on the back burner?

IPSO initial review, June 2015

IPSO was launched on September 8th, 2014, following lengthy disagreement amongst the (then) three major parties on how to implement the Leveson Inquiry's Report on Press Standards. Here's how the Wiki describes it - note the scepticism ('claims'):

IPSO claims to be an independent regulator of the newspaper and magazine industry, and exists to promote and uphold the highest professional standards of journalism in the UK, and to support members of the public in seeking redress where they believe that the Editor's Code of Practice been breached. The Editors' Code deals with issues such as accuracy, invasion of privacy, intrusion into grief or shock and harassment. IPSO is able to consider concerns about editorial content in newspapers and magazines, and about the conduct of journalists.IPSO handles complaints, and conducts its own investigations into editorial standards and compliance. It also undertakes monitoring work, including by requiring publications to submit annual compliance reports. IPSO has the power, where necessary, to require the publication of prominent corrections and critical adjudications, and may ultimately fine publications in cases where failings are particularly serious and systemic.

KEY BASIC POINTS:

1989 Calcutt Committee: parallels with Leveson today

To understand Leveson you really need to grasp the lessons of history - and there are striking parallels between Leveson, which is set to lead to a new self-regulator under some threat of statutory regulation if the press doesn't clean up its act, and Calcutt, which was ... basically the same in this regard. Both were set up after public outrage over tabloid excesses, with privacy issues to the fore. Both were set up with the existing press self-regulator, then the Press Council, now the PCC (although its chairman Lord Hunt announced its intention to replace itself back in December 2011), widely seen as having failed.

Indeed, both could/should have been replaced earlier if there was political will: the 3rd Royal Commission was scathing of the PC, whilst Calcutt's 1993 review strongly recommended statutory regulation be brought in. A weak Labour government in 1977 was no more willing than a weak Conservative government in 1993 to attract the damaging hostility of most of the press (although Labour could arguably have taken the chance as most of the right-wing press was very hostile anyway).

If we roll on to 2013, we once more see a weak government, at least the majority Conservative part of it, resisting pressure from the other parties to carry out the recommendations on press regulation, calculating that this will lose them vital press support needed for the 2015 general election. Indeed, since PM Cameron came out against many of Leveson's recommendations, carried in his initial November 2012 report, he has seen negative right-wing press coverage flip, with Cameron hailed as a hero safeguarding democratic values.

Its worth noting here that you shouldn't judge an argument's merits purely by its source! There is an important principle at stake, though it is arguable that freedom of the press is only meaningful if the nature (therefore the regulations around (concentration of) ownership and proprietorial interference) of the press is fundamentally altered.

Here's some links for further reading:
Not a link: Curran and Seaton cover this!!!!
Indie article from 1993 by Maggie Brown and Michael Leapman - possibly the best of its kind, you get both the history plus searing analysis of the backdrop and relationship between press and politicians.
Guardian obit on David Calcutt.
Incisive 1990 article from Index on Censorship.
PCC Wiki, incorporates the history.

HISTORY: Press Council: Jempson+Powell 2012

I've not added sub-headings etc to this, but thought you'd want this asap, so you can access below
What we've been discussing is to try and match up 1 or more past eg with a current (ie PCC) eg within a single paragraph/major point
Here you can see clear points about general ineffecivesness, and accuracy/privacy more specifically...
Jempson and Powell 2012 on History of Weak Press Regulation

Peter Preston reflects on backdrop to PCC's creation

JUNE 2014: Its clear from reading many articles since by Peter Preston that he's a major apologist for/defender of self-regulation for the press - which makes clicking through on his name below and reading up on some of these very useful! He also makes the useful point below that consensus is difficult to reach within the UK press, with the broadsheets often contemptuous of the tabloids, and tempted to let the tabloids be hamstrung by some tighter laws

PP is a grandee of the Guardian, a former editor. The paper is an unlikely defender of the PCC (its recent editorials declare the PCC dead), but PP with this article provides some nice detail on how the PCC came into being, flagging up the industry divide between the tabs/mid market ('red tops') - who feared losing the freedom to sensationalise and invade privacy that underpinned their sales appeal - and the broadsheets - who feared losing the freedom of investigative journalism if statutory regulation were brought in.

Its a useful article then to pick out some arguments for self-regulation, as fundamentally flawed as this has long seemed to be:

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/10/pcc-dont-toss-away-freedoms

Fear the void after the PCC

I was there when self-regulation was set up: don't let's toss away the freedoms we fought for

• 
• • Peter Preston
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 July 2011 19.05 BST
  • Article history


Press Complaints Commission. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
It was the last big press crisis before the next one. In 1990 two journalists from the Sunday Sport had sneaked into the hospital bedroom of the gravely injured actor Gordon Kaye and started snapping away. Cue outrage. A government-appointed committee chaired by Sir David Calcutt wanted the old Press Council scrapped and a new Press Complaints Commission established. If it wasn't up and working effectively within 18 months, a statutory tribunal – able to license, ban and injunct – would take its place. Editing this paper, I was close to the action. My colleague in press freedom campaigning, Frank Rogers, was running the Newspaper Publishers' Association (NPA). Harry Roche, the Guardian group chief executive, had been persuaded to try to raise the millions needed to make transition to a new PCC possible. I was constantly up and down the stairs to the management floor. Which brings us, with a grimace, to what our current PM blithely calls "the industry". What's the point of self-regulation regimes? To hold on to nurse for fear of something worse – in this case, Downing Street and its associates moving, through new laws, to nobble reporters making waves. Who fears new laws against privacy most keenly? The red-tops and the middle market tabloids, who see much of their business at stake. That's why David English at the Daily Mail and – yes! – Rupert Murdoch were influential behind the scenes in pushing and prodding the PCC into life. Why on earth was the Guardian involved then? Because we understood, from often bitter experience, that there is not one law for the tabloids and another for the rest: my files were full of legalistic threats about privacy from Robert Maxwell and others. The high farce and high cost of defending the publication of Spycatcher against Margaret Thatcher was still fresh in our minds. And press freedom, all round the world, is snuffed out by government-appointed "press councils". But did "the industry" agree? One end – the Financial Times end – wasn't very enthusiastic about helping the Daily Star. The Mirror didn't like anything backed by the Sun, and vice versa. The regional press blamed the nationals. Magazine publishers moaned. Several stark voices said: forget commissions and codes and all that stuff; if the politicians want to take us on over individual cases – say the "persecution" of Jeffrey Archer – then let's fight it out. The Sunday Sport isn't a newspaper anyway. Consensus was, and remains, fragile. Frank Rogers pulled it all together. By the start of 1991 the PCC was up and running. It had no lawyers round the table, because it wanted to deal with complaints fast and cheaply. It had some editors there, because newspaper staff would heed what they decreed. It didn't have fines and penal injunctions. And, in a wholly imperfect world, it worked as well as could rationally be expected. David Cameron was defending its achievements only two months ago. Now, in a switch Robert Mugabe might envy, he pronounces it dead (for not uncovering facts in 2009 that the might of MI5 failed to mention to him before appointing Andy Coulson). Forget press freedom when No 10 panics. Will it be any easier, this time round, to decide on successor regulation? No, it will be much more difficult. The NPA is weaker. Big movers and shakers – from the Mail to Wapping – are hors de combat. The digital revolution peddling true freedom of information ploughs on. Even loftier journalists who've derided the PCC, like those who've betrayed it, haven't thought through what comes after. But, from the Caribbean to the Balkans to southern Africa, all those countries that have built press self-regulation on our model will be worrying. Is a freedom so toiled after and fought for something that can be tossed away? Watch this space: and fear the void. • To comment on this story or any other about phone hacking, visit our open thread.