Regulating the Press , livre ebook

254

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English

Ebooks

2000

Écrit par
Tom O'Malley , Clive Soley

Publié par
Pluto Press

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254

pages

English

Ebooks

2000

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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Pluto Press

Date de parution

20 novembre 2000

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781849645102

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

A free press is the cornerstone of democracy. Does this then give the press the right to print inaccurate material with relative impunity? Should the public have a statutory right of reply to inaccuracy in the press? And how free is the press in a world of converging technologies and crossmedia ownership?

Clive Soley and Tom O’Malley set the issues of press regulation in their historical context, focusing on the period after 1945. They specifically look at the history and record of the Press Council and assess the performance of the Press Complaints Commission. The book analyses the arguments surrounding attempts to improve standards by introducing statutory rights for the public, and the reasons for the failure of these initiatives.

Focusing on issues of principle such as accuracy, misrepresentation and privacy, the authors re-examine the ways in which debates over press freedom versus regulation illuminate the fundamental conflicts between a fully accountable press and the economic imperatives of the free market economy.

Introduction

Part I: The History Of Self-Regulation by Tom O'Malley

1. Putting The Press Into Perspective

2. The Meanings of the Press

3. Working on the Law: Employers, Journalists and the legal framework.

4. A Sense of Doubt: the Origins and History of Self-regulation up to 1972

5. Nothing Resolved: Self-Regulation, 1972-1998

6. Organising and Defining Self-Regulation

7. Self-Regulation at Work - An Overview

Part II: Cases And Issues by Clive Soley

8. The Problem of Accuracy in the UK Press in the 1980s and 1990s

9. The Distorting Mirror. The problem of Misrepresentation in the press in the 1980s and 1990s

10. Privacy and Self-regulation

Part III: Reforming Regulation by Tom O'Malley And Clive Soley

11. Rights and Responsibilities: The Need for Reform

Appendix Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill

Bibliography

Index

Voir

Publié par

Pluto Press

Date de parution

20 novembre 2000

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781849645102

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Media studies Media

Regulating the Press

Pluto Press

Tom O’Malley and Clive Soley

Regulating the Press

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2000 by PLUTO PRESS 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

The right of Tom O’Malley and Clive Soley to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data O’Malley, Tom, 1955– Regulating the press / Tom O’Malley and Clive Soley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1198–9 — ISBN 0–7453–1197–0 (pbk.) 1. Freedom of the press—Great Britain. 2. Journalistic ethics—Great Britain. 3. Press Council. 4. Press law—Great Britain. I. Soley, Clive. II. Title. PN4748.G7 O47 2000 323.44'5'0941—dc21 00–009391

ISBN 0 7453 1198 9 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1197 0 paperback

09 1 0

08 9

07 8

06 7

05 6

04 5

03 4

02 3

01 2

00 1

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England

Contents

Introduction

Part I

The History of Self-Regulation Tom O’Malley

1 Putting the Press into Perspective 2 The Meanings of the Press 3 Working on the Law: Employers, Journalists and the Legal Framework 4 A Sense of Doubt: The Origins and History of Self-Regulation up to 1972 5 Nothing Resolved: Self-Regulation, 1972–98 6 Organising and Defining Self-Regulation 7 Self-Regulation at Work – An Overview

Part II

Cases and Issues Clive Soley

8 The Problem of Accuracy in the UK Press in the 1980s and 1990s 9 The Distorting Mirror. The Problem of Misrepresentation in the Press in the 1980s and 1990s 10 Privacy and Self-Regulation

Part III Reforming Regulation Tom O’Malley and Clive Soley

Rights and Responsibilities: The Need for Reform

Appendix Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill Notes Bibliography Index

7 19

71 97 120

145

154 165

177

191 199 221 233

Introduction

Newspapers have been a central part of social experience of people in the UK for a long time. They play an important part in cultural and political life by informing, entertaining, exasperating, delighting and infuriating their readers. Within the press there has always been a range of content, from the simple, popular style of papers like theSunto the more considered tones of papers like theGuardian. The modern daily press emerged over a period of around 300 years, from the early 1600s to the early 1900s. During that time the state moved from trying to control all of the outpourings of the press through the use of various forms of direct and indirect controls, to a position where, formally at least, it claimed no power to interfere significantly in the content of the press. This idea that the state should not control the press was the product of a long historical development and became a central part of the way people, within and without the industry, have understood the relationship between the press and the people. When broadcasting emerged in the early part of the twentieth century successive governments claimed the right to exercise controls over the content of materials broadcast for a variety of reasons. Some of these were to do with a desire to exercise political and cultural control over a powerful new medium; others were to ensure that standards remained high. Governments have continued to exercise these controls and there are many who would argue that under the new regime since the 1990s explosion of TV channels in the UK there needs to be more government intervention to prevent monopoly ownership and to promote higher standards for all. The press has, however, remained immune from the kinds of require-ments that have governed broadcasters in the UK. This would be fine, were it not for the fact that the press has, as we outline in this book, had a long record of printing inaccurate and misleading information as well as breaching the privacy of ordinary citizens. The damage and upset this causes has led, especially since 1945, to calls for a system that regulates standards in the industry without infringing on the freedom of expression so rightly prized by all. The industry’s answer to these calls was to decry any attempt to set standards by law as a threat to press freedom, and to establish, under

2 REGULATING THE PRESS pressure, its own self-regulatory bodies, the Press Council (1953–90) and the Press Complaints Commission (1991). These bodies have had some success, but they have failed, as we demonstrate, to stop either abuses by the press or to stem demands for statutory reform. In the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century it was still possible for the press to print inaccurate and misleading information about people and be subject, with the exception of a limited number of expensive libel actions, to very little rebuke or penalty. Whether the press should be subject to statutory regulation or whether it should be allowed to continue to have its own self-regulatory system has been the subject of fierce, sometimes bitter, political debate in the twentieth century. It is this debate and the issues it raises that are the subject of this study. This book therefore combines historical survey with political argument. It aims to provide much needed historical perspective on the debates in the UK over the self-regulation of the press since the 1940s. It alsoargues a particular case. This is that there are nosound reasons, in principle, or in practice, why self-regulation of the press should not be replaced by laws that guarantee the right to correction of factual inac-curacies in the press and promote press freedom. We hope the amount of detail presented here will be informative and, for many interested in the subject, fresh. We also hope our arguments will persuade. We have surveyed an area that has not, as yet, had the benefit of being extensively examined by contemporary historians; there are, therefore, many other areas that need much more detailed examination if we are to understand the historical processes surrounding the evolution of ideas and practices about the regulation of the press. In particular there needs to be a detailed study of aspects of the decisions taken by the Press Council so as to link the institution more closely to the changing political and cultural framework of which the press was a part; something which, for reasons of time and space, we could not do here. In addition Press Council rulings have not been satisfactorily analysed to illuminate the continuities and discontinuities in decision-making and the implications of often complex cases for regulatory practice. Also, the history of criticisms of the press since the seventeenth century is only sketched here. Our account is meant to provide a context for understanding debates in the twentieth century. Readers whoseek a richer, more informed account of the nature, sources, variety and wider significance of this long-running body of public discourse can begin to explore these issues through our references. Nonetheless we hope we have made a useful start in recovering the history of debates about self-regulation as well as contributing to them ourselves. In an age when the power of media conglomerates is growing, the issues here will be of interest to those in other countries who are seeking to deal with the thorny issue of press regulation.

INTRODUCTION 3 We come to this work as two people who have been closely involved in the subject matter of the book since the 1980s, and have both campaigned for a statutory right of reply. We have therefore argued a case for reform, but at the same time tried to do justice to the range of materials and arguments that we have surveyed regardless of whether they support the overall view that we take. Self-regulation of the press is defined, for our purposes, as the right of the newspaper industry to regulate itself on matters of standards, and as exemplified in the actions of the Press Council and its successor the Press Complaints Commission. The press is hemmed around with all sorts of laws, and although these play an important part in our discussion they are not the focus of the book. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of the book are designed to place the whole question of the relationship between the state and the press, and the questions of press standards, in a long-term perspective. We want to show that whilst orthodoxies about the relationship between the press and the state exist, they do not reflect the variety of views or practices that have held sway over time about the proper relationship between the press and the state. This provides a context for the detailed account of the range of debates on these issues that occurred in UK politics from the 1940s onwards and which are the subject of Chapters 4 and 5. Here we try to show that self-regulation of the industry never won the wholehearted consent of significant bodies of political, pressure group and journalistic opinion, and survived, in the last analysis, because of the reluctance of Labour and Conservative politicians to challenge the influence of proprietors. We recover a long tradition of people, of all hues of opinion, who have wanted some form of enforceable mechanism to bring redress to those people who are the victims of press malpractice. In Chapters 6 and 7 we provide an analysis of the Press Council and aspects of its successor body the Press Complaints Commission. Whilst recognising that these bodies performed some useful functions, our overall assessment, based on the evidence we present, is that they were designed to stave off assaults on the interests of the proprietors as well as to, in effect, act as a mechanism for rejecting the vast majority of complaints they received. In Chapters 8, 9 and 10 we take a closer look at the way the Press Council and the Press Complaints Commission have acted in particular cases. This illustrates points made earlier in the book, that the self-regulatory process has lacked both teeth and conviction when it came to promoting high standards in the press. Finally, in Chapter 11, we review some of the key themes in the book and propose that some form of statutory reform of the framework of press regulation is needed. We reproduce a copy of Clive Soley’s Press Freedom and Responsibility Bill in the Appendix, as we hope it will be an aid to further study, discussion and debate of these issues. We hope that this book will help students and interested people grasp the fundamental fact that what is at stake in this debate is an argument

4 REGULATING THE PRESS about power – the power of those who own and run the media versus the power of those who consume it. As in other areas of life, such as local government, education, and health, it has long been recognised that providers of services, be they private or public, need to be accountable, often through law, for their practice. We consider that this should apply in the media, and in the press in particular. There has been no shortage of proposals for reform of the system of self-regulation over the years. What has been absent has been the power to implement them in the face of opposition from proprietors. We do not consider that the interests of the community are served by allowing the way that the press is run to be defined by owners, or for that matter editors. It is far too important a social institution for this to be so. We would like to see the balance of power in the press, and the media at large, shift away from proprietors and towards journalists and citizens. That would be a major advance, albeit only a small one, in the ongoing campaigns to make the media in general more accountable to the people they are meant to serve. In writing this book we have accumulated a large number of debts. We would like to thank the following. Professor Eric Barendt, Anne Beech of Pluto Press, Michael Bromley, Professor James Curran, Peter Goodwin, Nick Hallet, Mark Turner, Barry White, Tim White and Granville Williams read the manuscript. We very much appreciated their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Mike Jempson and Jo Treharne who assisted Clive Soley in the early stages of the project and Nora McCleod who played an important role in Clive Soley’s office throughout all stages. We have been greatly assisted by the courtesy and efficiency of the staff at the House of Commons Library, the Public Record Office, Kew, and the Learning Resource Centre of the University of Glamorgan. Tom O’Malley would like to thank the University of Glamorgan’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Committee for a grant towards the costs of researching this book, and to its Social Policy Research Committee for funding teaching relief to free time for writing. We would like to thank the many people involved in the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom whose work and ideas have been central to the development of the ideas expressed in this book. Any errors of fact or interpretation are the responsibility of the authors.

PART I

The History of Self-Regulation Tom O’Malley

Voir