Aug 042011
 

Pretty much everyone is agreed that the current “regulator” for the printed media (the Press Complaints Commission) is pretty much a waste of space and needs to be replaced with something else. After all, it has pretty much ignored the whole News of the World phone hacking scandal. But what ?

It would be easy to say that self-regulation has failed, and that a legal regulatory framework is required. But that gives politicians far too much say in how the media operates – which is something far less desirable even than allowing phone hacking. Because despite the current scandal involving phone hacking, breaking the law to obtain information for a story is not always wrong.

It depends on the story of course – a story about some celebrity up to some sexual shenanigans does not justify any illegal information gathering. This applies even more to some victim of crime, but getting to the truth behind something like the politician’s expenses scandal ? Perhaps that does justify what would be illegal activity.

The overriding requirements for a new organisation to oversee the press are :-

  1. It should not be controlled by politicians. This is the core of what it means to have a free press – free from political interference. Specifically free from interference from publishing stories that the press wishes to publish. That is not to say politicians cannot have a say on what kind of story would be acceptable.
  2. It should not be controlled by journalists, editors, or newspaper proprietors. The current PCC is controlled by the media themselves, and look how effective that is.
  3. It should be controlled by ordinary members of the public selected by lottery. This avoids the regulation of the press being controlled by the establishment; offer £75,000 a year and most people selected would jump at the chance.
  4. Sanctions available to the authority should be significant – varying from a fine as a percentage of daily revenue, banning publication for a number of issues, requiring an editor to resign, etc. This would require a law allowing the enforcement of the sanctions.
  5. All stories together with the classification of sources (more on this later) should be sent to the authority in an electronic copy. Most stories can (and should) be sent in advance of publication to allow the authority to review and prevent publication.

Public Interest Immunity

Certain stories qualify for public interest immunity, but the phrase “public interest” is problematic as it does not mean what the public are interested in. There is no clear definition of what public interest is, but you could think of it as what the public should know rather than what they want to know. For example, some members of the public may be interested in the sex life of a famous footballer, but that most definitely is not in the public interest.

Unless his “sex life” includes rape of course.

But if a story were to be about perhaps a bunch of newspaper editors allowing their journalists to routinely break the law on the flimsiest of pretexts, then there is a “need to know”.

In the later situation, a public interest immunity should apply. Or in other words, breaking certain laws to gather information is justified.

The key thing here is that we no longer trust editors to make this sort of decision without the commercial interest influencing their decision. Such decisions now must be made by an appropriate authority. So in addition to the list given above, a press regulatory authority needs to allow and encourage journalists to seek their advice on such matters in secret.

Classification of Sources

One of the things we have heard consistently on the past is that journalists do not reveal their sources … not even to their editors. Well, perhaps (or I’m not entirely sure I believe that), but that does not mean that the journalist has to hide what kind of source the story comes from.

The reason journalists never reveal their sources is that a source for a story may fear retribution for leaking information. After all footballers with a predilection for balling the wrong person are notorious for killing off those who would leak their stories. But fair enough. After it is not just their lives that sources might fear for – it could be job security, or reputation, etc. And in some cases, they could have a legitimate fear for the life.

But anyone who has read any history of the intelligence services will know of this problem, and of any number of solutions. The most obvious solution, is not to name sources but to allocate them code numbers, and categorise the source information – from which numbered source, and what kind of source it is – information from a whistleblower, copied from a document, rumour, etc. There’s a lot of ways this can be improved.

But the key thing is that an editor or a regulatory authority does not need to know the name or identity of a source, but the methods by which the information was obtained.