PCC to close + relaunch new body

Extraordinary news - and, arguably, extraordinary cynicism: seems the PCC is set to shut itself down ... but, like the News of the World, re-emerge under a new badge. This could happen around April/May - well before your exam, so will be a key event to look out for.
You're asked to be able to intelligently speculate on the future of media regulation, so the key question here is will this gambit work? Will the largely right-wing press be able to effectively escape the tougher regulation that Leveson will surely recommend - and that a right-wing government might be reluctant to implement? The history of press regulation in the post-war era has been of critical reports but very limited implementation of recommendations from these, down to a combination of ideological bias (why would right-wing governments shackle a right-wing press?) and fear of press retribution (all 3 major parties clearly fear the consequences of making enemies of a powerful press; both Labour and the Tories have gone to great lengths to court Murdoch/News International).
Read more in this excellent Indie article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/press-complaints-commission-to-close-itself-down-in-fasttracked-programme-7544474.html.
The Indie doesn't have such an extensive tagging system as The Grauniad (common nickname for the Gdn), but here's its page for Hackgate (including Leveson) stories: http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/PhoneHacking
While the Gdn is centre-left, the Indie is seen as more centrist in its ideological perspective.

FUTURE: Devolution

If Scotland does achieve independence that poses a tricky problem for TV co's not least the BBC; here's Polly Toynbee speculating on this.

Sun's FreePress defence + Akers

When teaching this year there was already an intimidatingly long list of names to grasp, to which we can now add yet another: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. Her testimony to Leveson on 27.2.12 quite directly dealt with a co-ordinated fightback from The S*n (followed up by stablemate The Times plus the Mail) which had cried foul: in a leading article senior political editor Trevor Kavanagh, who goes back a long way with Murdoch, claimed police tactics were excessive and undermining the free press. Specifically, he dismissed payments by S*n journos as small amounts for stories in the public interest.
Nick Davies, Guardian crime correspondent generally seen as the person whose work broke this Hackgate scandal, argues that Akers' response, and the refusal of the Met to back down (which it had done so many times, so suspiciously, in the past) this time, denotes a significant decline in the fiercesome power of the press to bully and dictate to our public services including the law.
Kavanagh and others' arguments, flawed as they are, are useful material for prepping essay arguments about free press theories - and Davies, below, is excellent on picking this apart.
Keep delving into this material, keeping a particular eye on Roy Greenslade's column.

Davies article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/27/leveson-witnesses-power-nick-davies

Leveson witnesses halt the tabloid power grab

Akers provided a riposte to the Sun's recent fist-waving, while questions about the police response to phone hacking mount

• 
• • Nick Davies
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 February 2012 19.25 GMT

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers challenged the assumption on which recent attacks on Scotland Yard were founded. Photograph: Guardian

The phone-hacking scandal never was simply a story about journalists behaving badly: it was and is about power.
On Monday, in an outbreak of peculiarly destructive evidence, Lord Justice Leveson's courtroom became a battlefield for two parts of a defining power struggle.
The first was short term. In the past few weeks, those who lost some of their power last summer, when the facts of the scandal finally erupted, have been trying to reclaim it. In 20 minutes of deftly understated evidence, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers sent them packing.
Rupert Murdoch's Sun had led the attempted coup with an outburst of the kind of tabloid fist-waving which has itself been part of the distortion of power. The paper's associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh, reacted to the arrest of 10 of his colleagues by launching a ferocious attack on Scotland Yard. It was full of the rhetorical flourish of great reporting but almost devoid of facts.
Crucially, Kavanagh's claim that the Yard was engaged in a witch-hunt against legitimate journalism was based on a bold assumption that, in the Sun's history of paying sources for stories, "there is nothing disreputable and, as far as we know at this point, nothing illegal". Never pausing to question that assumption, the Daily Mail joined in, reporting the arrests under the headline "Operation Overkill" and running a column by Richard Littlejohn which compared the police to the Stasi engaging in "a sinister assault on a free press".

PCC: ACCURACY: Guardian breaks Code

Interesting article/PCC ruling: The Guardian broke the PCC's Editors' Code BUT as they comprehensively addressed the grievance of the complainant (the Met Police/IPCC) the complaint was NOT upheld. See full article below.

PCC rules Guardian's Mark Duggan headline was misleading

However, press complaints body finds paper's apology and correction were sufficient

Read the PCC's adjudication in full
Read the Guardian readers' editor's column

 Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 February 2012 14.55 GMT

The Guardian's headline on a story about Mark Duggan was misleading, the PCC has ruled. Photograph: Rex Features

The Guardian has been found to be in breach of the Press Complaints Commission code of practice over a headline and subhead on an article published by the newspaper in November regarding the circumstances of the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting by the police prompted the summer riots.
However, the PCC also ruled that the combination of steps taken by the Guardian to remedy the error met the requirement of the editors' code. The complaint was therefore not upheld because the mistake had already been corrected.

Hackgate: Computer hacking

Confirmation of what both the Despatches (C4) and Panorama (BBC1) docs on Hackgate flagged up last year: the hacking was NOT restricted to mobile phones/answer messages, but also emails and computers (including agents in Northern Ireland as well as a range of Labour government ministers.
Restrictions have just been lifted on reporting the conviction of Philip Campbell Smith; here's an extract from a Guardian report (full article here):

A man at the centre of allegations that computers were hacked for the News of the World has been convicted of conspiring to illegally access private information for profit.
Until Monday legal restrictions meant that what is known about Philip Campbell Smith's alleged involvement in computer hacking could not be reported.
Smith is alleged to have hacked the computer of a former British army intelligence officer in 2006 as part of a commission from the News of the World. In a tape recording, Smith says he was in contact with Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who went on to become David Cameron's director of communications. Smith also claimed Coulson was in his mobile phone directory.
Smith is understood to be under investigation by a Scotland Yard inquiry, Operation Kalmyk, which is examining allegations that email hacking may have been used against several dozen targets.
The allegations against Smith highlight growing concern over computer hacking. Met officers are known to have approached leading members of the Labour party as possible victims, including Gordon Brown, the former No 10 communications chief Alastair Campbell, the former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain, and Tom Watson, the backbench Labour MP who has been particularly vocal in the phone-hacking scandal. If any of the Labour figures were targets, it is not known who carried out the hacking and for whom.
The computer that Smith is suspected of hacking belonged to the former British intelligence officer Ian Hurst.
The computer hacking involving Smith is alleged to have been carried out in July 2006 by sending Hurst an email containing a trojan virus that copied Hurst's emails and relayed them back to the hacker. It is claimed this was commissioned by Alex Marunchak, who was a senior editor on the News of the World when it was edited by Coulson.
The material accessed by the hacker included messages concerning at least two agents who had informed on the Provisional IRA: Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Stakeknife, and a second informant known as Kevin Fulton. Both men were regarded as high-risk targets for assassination. Hurst was one of the few people who knew their whereabouts and the emails contained information capable of disclosing this.

OfCom + press flak

Whilst the PCC has had it fairly easy (at least until Hackgate blew up and their assurances that all was okay looked absurd) from their brothers in arms of the press, OfCom has been an object of bitter attack by Fleet Street's finest.
Why might this be?
While the PCC essentially let the press off with murder, with any wrist-slapping carried out with a feather, OfCom has frequently frustrated the cross-media ambitions of media magnates and conglomerates, looking for synergies, or horizontal/vertical integration, through expansion into TV, radio and web. Its OfCom that holds the power to refer proposed purchases of one media company/outlet by another for legal scrutiny, and much of the press bitterly restrict this - even though this OfCom has been hugely reduced with the deregulation/pro-free market reforms that started under Thatcher in the 80s, carried on under New Labour and threatened to be completed by the coalition government until Hackgate made the News Corp buyout of Sky (which the Tory minister has okayed) a huge scandal.
Papers like the Daily Mail take a typically hypocritical line here: constantly attacking OfCom for being too powerful and interfering in the free market whilst constantly demanding OfCom uses more power to stop sex, violence and all those bad things you never read about (with helpful pictures) in the Mail...
This highlights a real dichotomy in the debates over media regulation: issues over ownership and the debated need for regulation of a free market on the one hand, and debates over media content and freedom to/restrictions on publishing on the other.
The right-wing press (ie, most of it!) constantly bemoan the interference in a free market of media ownership ... but attack the perceived failure to interfere enough on media content (especially if, like Sachsgate, the naughty party happens to be the BBC, loathed by free marketeers who see it as diminishing their potential for profit). The left-wing press (all two of them!!!), whilst also nervous and antagonistic about any prospect of a new licensing regime, tend to report more favourably on criticisms of the concentration of ownership, and barriers to new entrants (basically, you need to be a billionaire), whilst being pro-BBC and much less likely to froth at the mouth at the latest saucy C4 drama.

THEORY TIP: Hopefully that description rang a few bells ... the way the right-wing press cover OfCom is akin to flak, one of the five filters Chomsky argues shoots down media messages which go against the interests of the most wealthy and powerful.

Here's one recent example of the Mail firing flak at OfCom - and note the typically mealy-mouthed, low-profile 'apology' (hardly a ringing endorsement of the PCC that this sort of daily propaganda is seen as acceptable in the UK; in a paper such as the New York Times this might cause a fair degree of uproar at the lapse in journalistic standards):

'A production error'

From today's corrections column in the Daily Mail:

An article on Saturday about children dialling up pornography on mobile phones suggested that Ofcom could not explain why filters to block adult material on BlackBerrys would not be available for at least six months.

We are happy to clarify that Ofcom’s response, that the ‘project is highly technical and software filters need to be developed from scratch’ was omitted from the article due to a production error.

Posted by MacGuffin at 13:58

The blog this is taken from - Tabloid Watch - is written in a very caustic manner but is nonetheless an absolute goldmine as regards your exam preparation; it has a huge archive of stories on such inaccuracies which you can use to bolster your notes on the PCC (and its failings) in particular.

PCC director quits (Feb 9th 2012)

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/feb/09/stephen-abell-pcc
(and here's Roy Greenslade's analysis of his time at the PCC, and how un/successful he was)

PCC director Stephen Abell departs

Stephen Abell, the outgoing PCC director. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian Stephen Abell, director of the Press Complaints Commission for the last two years, is leaving. He will leave at the end of the month.
His departure, which has been under discussion for some time, is unsurprising given that the PCC will almost certainly be reconstituted.
Abell, who has spent more than 10 years with the commission, has been in charge during its most difficult period, culminating in the controversy over phone hacking.
He oversaw the early departure of its previous chair, Lady Buscombe, and has worked alongside her successor, Lord Hunt, since his arrival in October last year.
Hunt said he and Abell had agreed that they would work together until they "were in a position to propose a new structure for self-regulation of the press." He added:

"I have valued Stephen's assistance in this, and his professionalism in leading the PCC's staff as they continued their important work...
It is testament to him that the service to complainants, both those in the public eye and those without claim to celebrity, has improved and expanded over the last few years. I wish him success in all his future endeavours."

Abell, 31, is to become a partner with Pagefield communications consultancy, where he will assume responsibility for media relations and crisis communication.
He said: "I decided last year that it was time for a new challenge. First, I wanted to work with David Hunt in the development of positive proposals for a new structure of self-regulation... I also wanted to give a full account of the work of the PCC to Lord Justice Leveson."
He said he remained "a firm supporter of enhanced self-regulation for the press", adding:

"My greatest professional satisfaction at the PCC has been in our establishment of a bespoke 24-hour service to help complainants obtain redress, stop harassment and prevent the publication of inaccurate or intrusive material.
I leave a great team of people, who have much to offer in the changing world ahead."

It appears that Abell's PCC job, as its is currently constituted, may not be filled. Instead, the commission has appointed Michael McManus to be "director of transition."
McManus, pictured left, has been a long-time associate of Hunt's. They worked together for six years at the law firm Beachcroft, where he dispensed political and legislative advice to clients.
Hunt and McManus co-wrote an article for The Guardian in September 2010 in which they praised Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg for forging a "strong" coalition with the Conservatives.
McManus spent years as a special adviser in parliament and also ran Edward Heath's Westminster private office. Most recently he has worked at the PR firm Bell Pottinger.
McManus said: "I am delighted to be joining the PCC at this crucial juncture in its existence. All my work in journalism and politics has convinced me that self-regulation of the press can and must be made to work.
"I relish the challenge of playing such a senior role in the urgent and crucially important task of creating a new, independent press regulator with real teeth."
A further senior PCC appointment is expected shortly.
Sources: PCC/Personal knowledge

C4s history of controversy

Useful Guardian article (tho' the comments that follow are arguably superior, and are certainly educative) which contains links to a range of further features on various controversies, including sanctions from the TV regulators, that have hit the station in its 30 years of broadcasting: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/from-the-archive-blog/2012/jan/03/channel-4-30-shows-talking

X Factor in new product placement row with OfCom

The show seems to be determined to the equivalent of the Daily Mail, the paper the PCC has had most investigations into: every week some new controversy arises, the latest being accusations that Tulisa's arm tattoo, given prominence by her tiresome arm salute at the show's opening, is effectively an ad for her new perfume. OfCom is investigating. See http://www.metro.co.uk/tv/882434-x-factors-tulisa-contostavlos-investigated-by-ofcom-over-arm-gesture

BBC/OfCom + DRM

Long but fascinating article, from which I'll add an excerpt then the fullt thing below
Esseentially, the BBC has somehow gotten OfCom to agree to allowing it to add DRM (digital rights management) to its broadcasts, in contravention of European (and even American) norms; the practice is widely banned. The article gets at the lack of openness and accountibility of the 'independent' OfCom - tho' would this differ if it was a government agency? (Perhaps questions would be asked in parliament or in the DCMS Select Committee?)
Full article link
Excerpt:

In other words, "Auntie knows best, so shut up and run along and let us get on with breaking your TV."
Ofcom was equally unhelpful in explaining why any of this material passed muster in its "case by case" evaluation of confidentiality. Rather, it switched back to its statement that it had to take all claims of confidentiality at face value, and freedom of information seekers need not apply when one of the companies it is meant to be regulating tells it to keep mum, no matter how compelling the public interest and how unconvincing the claimed need for confidentiality.
And now we're gearing up for DRM Britain. Our BBC will give privileges to American TV companies that the US government won't give them, and our "independent" regulator won't even tell us why.
In the new DRM world, the rights you've enjoyed to your licence-fee-paid material are now contingent. If you want to save your copies to your computer, transfer them to your tablet or phone, loan them to your neighbours, excerpt them for education, criticism or parody, you're going to have to ask a committee for permission. If your kids want to do these things, they're going to have to seek this permission as well, and if you have the sort of children who aren't comfortable making submissions to regulatory committees, then your children won't be able to do what other children all over the world are accustomed to doing.

Full article:

Series: Digital rights, digital wrongs

Previous | Index

How the BBC's HD DRM plot was kept secret … and why

Corporation's Ofcom submission reveals it is willing to give privileges to US TV companies they can't get at home

• 
• • Cory Doctorow
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 November 2011

The BBC lobbied for DRM to be included on all Freeview HD receivers, offering shows such as Frozen Planet. Photograph: Jason Roberts/BBC
Back in 2009, the BBC approached Ofcom for permission to add "digital rights management" locks to its high-definition broadcasts. The locks would work by scrambling some of the information used to decode video, and in order to get the descrambling key, manufacturers would have to submit to the rules of the DTLA, an offshore consortium led by Intel.
This was a strange request for the BBC to make. There aren't any licence fee payers who put a cheque in the post this year and thought, "Gosh, I wish there was a way I could do less than the law allows with the video my licence fee pays for." The BBC has always eschewed DRM in its Freeview offerings, and other public broadcasters in Europe, the US and Canada eschew DRM. German law prohibits DRM on its public broadcasts, and American law prohibits DRM on all broadcasts, both commercial and non-commercial.
What's more, the DRM scheme proposed by the BBC had three major flaws: first, technical experts believed it would be trivial to defeat; second, the part of the broadcast that the BBC wanted to scramble was shared by closed captions and assistive audio tracks used by disabled people; and finally, the full rules set out by DTLA for its DRM were governed by confidentiality agreements, which meant that UK manufacturers would be ordered to comply with a set of secret rules that the public wasn't allowed to know.

PCC: New chairman Lord Hunt interviewed

This article highlights the Establishment nature of the PCC: Hunt is the 3rd Tory peer to become PCC chairman (after Lord Wakeham + Lady Buscombe) + only took up the post after Wakeham sold the idea to him. Denying tabloids are the main issue facing the press is a curious starting point, though he does seem keen to extend PCC powers. Its still in the balance whether or not the Levinson inquiry will lead to the closure of the PCC of course...

Article link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/13/lord-hunt-pcc-interview

PCC chairman Lord Hunt: the greater challenge is with bloggers

He quotes Wilkes and Thatcher, admits he doesn't know much about how papers work, and reveals how he will run the PCC

• Roy Greenslade Sunday 13 November 2011 

Lord Hunt: 'I have arrived [at the PCC] with a blank piece of paper.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
So Lord Hunt, why did you apply for the poisoned chalice that is the chairmanship of the Press Complaints Commission?

Guardian editor proposes new press regulator

The Guardian editor proposes a PCC-replacement he calls the Press Standards Mediation Commission (PSMC)

Guardian editor proposes new press regulator

Alan Rusbridger calls for new independent body 'with teeth' that offers a 'one-stop shop' mediation service for libel and privacy

Lisa O'Carroll Friday 11 November 2011 

The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has proposed a new independent regulartor to replace to current Press Complaints Commission. Photograph: Teri Pengilley
The Guardian's editor-in-chief has proposed a new independent press regulator with teeth, offering a "one-stop shop" mediation service for libel and privacy.
Alan Rusbridger, delivering the annual Orwell lecture, said he believed a new regulator, armed with powers to investigate, could offer a "quick, responsive, and cheap" way of resolving disputes.
It would be "our own one-stop shop disputes resolution service so that people never had to go to law to resolve their differences with newspapers".
Rusbridger suggests the new body could be entitled the Press, Standards and Mediation Commission (PSMC) and would replace the existing Press Complaints Commission, which is facing the axe after the Leveson inquiry publishes its findings.
He supported calls by the Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre for a press ombudsman who could investigate serious lapses of standards on a "polluter pays" basis.
Rusbridger proposed that the PSMC would have a small number of staff to deal with libel cases in particular, with a panel of qualified mediators.
He suggested mediators could: decide on fairness and accuracy; whether the disputed article was opinion or an allegation of fact; whether it was in the public interest; whether the complainant had a reasonable chance to respond and whether their response was included.
Rusbridger also called on the industry and any other interested parties to come up with an agreed definition of "the public interest – and stick to it".
"If we fight legal actions and mount campaigns over articles that even we don't pretend are in the public interest as we define it, aren't we inviting people to be cynical about our motives and out commitment to self-regulation?" he asked.
Rusbridger said it was an "incredibly anxious time for journalism, with even the most powerful and professional newspapers clinging on to financial viability", and the Leveson inquiry would make for some "uncomfortable" moments.
But he said that while the upcoming Leveson inquiry may well uncover some "uncomfortable truths" about the way a number of journalists have acted in the past, that was "surely good, not bad".
Shining a light on bad practice would lead to good outcomes, he said, as transparency normally did.
"Leveson provides an opportunity for the industry to have a conversation with itself while also benefiting from the perspective and advice of others," Rusbridger added.
He said it provided "a-once-in-a-generation chance to celebrate great reporting" and to think again about what journalism at its best can do and what it should be.

Bye bye Berlusconi

The UK has come perilously close to the political/media monopoly enjoyed until this week by Silvio Berlusconi; here's an article which provides an overview of his political career, and a particular section I'll copy in first:

For as long as Bossi withheld his support, Berlusconi was to remain out of office. He lost the 1996 general election and might well have been reduced to political insignificance subsequently had the centre-left taken the opportunity to blunt his most formidable political weapon. But, in the late 1990s, Berlusconi tricked the leader of the ex-communists, Massimo D'Alema, into believing he would back a grand project for constitutional reform in exchange for a promise not to dismantle his near-monopoly of commercial television. D'Alema never got his reform, but Berlusconi kept effective control of his TV channels.

His apologists mock the idea that Italians would take their instructions from his three channels, and point out that Berlusconi's ownership of the Mediaset network did not stop him from twice being defeated at the polls. But it is also true that his sway over television (reinforced when he was in office to include all but two of the seven main national channels) helped create an environment in which he could thrive (and later survive).

If Italians were unable to grasp the seriousness of the financial misdemeanours of which he was accused, if they were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to his claim that he was a victim of politically motivated prosecutors, if they were untroubled by his anachronistic sexism, and if latterly they failed to grasp the extent to which Berlusconi was held in contempt outside Italy, it was to a large extent because of what was said – and not said – on their small screens.

Silvio Berlusconi: a story of unfulfilled promises

The most influential Italian politician since Mussolini has done much to damage his country's standing and prospects

John Hooper  Sunday 13 November 2011 

Silvio Berlusconi has weakened the rule of law in Italy, but failed to keep his promise to make his compatriots rich. Photograph: Giuseppe Lami/EPA
The resignation of Silvio Berlusconi has very likely put an end to the most colourful, eventful, improbable and destructive career in Italy's recent political history.
No Italian since Mussolini has made such a lasting impression on his country. And none has done as much to damage its prospects and standing in the rest of the world.
The story of Berlusconi's involvement with the public life of his country was one of repeatedly unfulfilled promises. He entered politics vowing to transform and unify the Italian right. And, as recently as 2009 when he founded his Freedom People movement, it looked as if he might realise his dream. Yet he is going at a time when Italy's conservatives have never been as divided or demoralised.

Mail articles on children

One of our key case studies is included in this, but click through http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/search/label/children to see a range of dubious Mail articles about children

ITV consolidates further: buys ChannelTV

ITV plc buys Channel Television

Acquisition of Channel Islands service leaves STV and UTV as only independently held channel 3 broadcasters. By Tara Conlan