The news that the Press Complaints Commission is going to close and re-constitute itself in a different guise before the end of the Leveson Commission shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s an astute and cynical move by the newspaper industry to pre-empt any Leveson recommendations. Whatever Leveson comes up with, the industry can say that it has already acted, and that we have to give the new body time to prove itself effective before we move onto something else. So Leveson gets undermines and self-regulation gets perpetuated.
The news reports say the new system has been approved in principle by most newspaper and magazine groups. The suspicion has to be that the push for this came from those groups, rather than the PCC itself, as a manoeuvre to avoid statutory regulation.
The print media is exclusively privately owned in the UK, so 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 that 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 was the latest version of self-regulation the industry thought it could 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 was 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. The industry looks as though it wants to extend those already 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, whatever the industry has up its sleeve to replace the PCC.
My guess would be that what we will get from Leveson will be 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 will have to face by the end of the enquiry.
