Posted by Calls for a new, independent system to regulate the press is urgently needed to prevent abuses of privacy and improve standards of journalism in the UK were made last night at a speech in Bristol.
Nick Davies, the renowned journalist and author, told an audience at the Arnolfini on Thursday night that citizens could not trust newspapers or government to regulate the press.
Nick Davies: Neither journalists nor government can regulate press
Describing journalists saying they could regulate themselves as “rapists saying they believe in free love”, Mr Davies said the current system of regulation allowed, for the first time in history, an industry which “harvests the private lives of people for profit”.
Speaking at the annual National Union of Journalists Benn Lecture, he added: “Anybody is a potential victim. The news media will crash over the line of privacy for their story, and there is no regulatory framework to stop them”.
The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) – the self-regulatory body set up by newspaper groups – came in for fierce criticism from the former Guardian correspondent and writer of the celebrated book Flat Earth News, which shone a spotlight onto the murky side of national newspaper reporting.
More than 150 people at the event heard that during the last 10 years, the PCC had received 28,000 complaints regarding false stories printed in newspapers across the country.
But of these, only 0.69% were successfully dealt with, while about 90% were dismissed on technical grounds.
Mr Davies revealed that during the media frenzy surrounding the parents of Madeleine McCann in 2007, the head of the PCC Sir Christopher Meyer had said he had been unable to contact the parents because he had not had a phone number for them – despite there being hundreds of journalists on site in Portugal at the time.
During a question-and-answer session after the speech, former ITV West executive James Garrett suggested a new regulator along the lines of Ofcom – the broadcasters’ regulator which has strict powers to demand balance and accuracy.
“Ofcom has the power, quite draconian, to take a broadcaster’s licence away, and I suspect that’s the only sort of language that newspapers understand,” he said.
Drawing heavily on his book, Mr Davies told of the PCC’s attempt to whitewash the News of the World phone hacking scandal – in which members of the royal family and household, and other major figures in public life, had had their mobile phone messages intercepted by journalists at the paper.
He also revealed that reporters on newspapers were being forced – through cutbacks – to produce three times as much material as their counterparts had done during the 1980s.
Blaming the “corporate mindset” of the media, he said that 80% of stories were being created from second-hand sources such as news wires and press releases which he described as “inherently unreliable”.
Further reading
The idea of an ‘independent’ regulator is a nonsense. It would be an arms-length government regulator.
The example used – Ofcom – proves this. The current Chief Executive is Ed Richards, a former policy advisor to Tony Blair. The former Chief Exec was Stephen Carter who then went on to serve in Brown’s government.
This is not ‘independent’. This is arms-length unaccountable government. Do we really want the government telling us what can and can’t go in newspapers?
Rather than setting up expensive bureaucracies of the great and good who have good relations with government, we’d be better off reforming and modernising our ridiculous libel laws so they’re easily and cheaply available to the public at large.
But that would involve handing power to us rather than to a self-selecting elite wouldn’t it?