Key Questions for Leveson 1: What next for self-regulation?

Having identified the key questions for the Leveson Inquiry, I shiuld have a go at answering them myself.

The first concerned the future of self-regulation.

The print media is exclusively privately-owned in the UK. Why would a privately-run industry want to be seen to regulate itself when it comes to matters of ethics? This might be because the industry wishes to present itself as credible and trustworthy. In the case of the news media, this amounts to having a reputation for reporting accurately and truthfully on matters of significance.

But is there a strong motivation for the news media to appear to be credible and trustworthy in this way? On the face of it, it makes sense to suppose that there is, because why would anybody buy a newspaper which had demonstrated that it has no credibility and cannot be trusted? But this is to assume the ‘ideal’ reader, and all the evidence seems to show that people will buy a newspaper in large numbers even though that newspaper makes little serious claim to be credible or trustworthy, or to report accurately on matters of significance.

So why would the industry want to be seen to be self-regulating in a thorough and efficient way? The answer is, of course, that self-regulation has always been seen as the price the industry pays for keeping statutory regulation off its back.

The Press Complaints Commission is the latest version of self-regulation the industry thinks it can get away with. The Seventh Report of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, considering what it then knew about the phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World in 2007, concluded: “We do not believe that there is a case for a statutory regulator for the press, which would represent a very dangerous interference with the freedom of the press. We continue to believe that statutory regulation of the press is a hallmark of authoritarianism and risks undermining democracy. We recommend that self-regulation should be retained for the press, while recognising that it must be seen to be effective if calls for statutory intervention are to be resisted.”

This is just another statement of the ‘last-chance saloon’ commentators have said the newspaper industry in the UK has been drinking in when it comes to regulation. That saloon seems to have very late drinking hours. Will Leveson call time? It seems unlikely, but unless the threat of statutory regulation becomes credible, then self-regulation by the newspaper industry will remain weak and inadequate.

My guess would be that we might get something like a halfway solution, in between self-regulation and a statutory legal body – a body without statutory power but completely independent of the newspaper industry, and, importantly, with greater powers to enforce a more effective code of ethical conduct: most importantly with the power to impose fines. Whether such a hybrid monster can be effectively created is a question we may have to face by the end of the enquiry.

At the moment, though, what we are witnessing is a distorted and degraded public sphere being fought over by a newspaper industry which has clearly lost its moral compass if indeed it ever possessed one, an army of celebrities who are taking the opportunity to take revenge, a few genuine victims of press intrusion, and a government which would probably prefer not to get involved and doesn’t want to take the industry on. This is being witnessed by a public who are disgusted by newspaper practices but are only too happy to buy the newspapers that print the kind of stories that have led us to this sorry spectacle.