John Humphrys asks: should government accept all the recommendations made by Lord Justice Leveson about how the press should be regulated in future?
David Cameron and Nick Clegg each got up at the despatch box in the House of Commons on Thursday to make a statement about the Leveson Report on the press – and each said contrary things. Mr Clegg said he wanted to accept all the recommendations made by Lord Justice Leveson as to how the press should be regulated in future; Mr Cameron said he didn’t. But this is something that affects every single one of us so let’s explore the arguments.
What few people dispute is that parts of the press have been behaving outrageously in recent years. The phone-hacking scandal, which brought down the News of the World, was only the latest example of gross journalistic misconduct in a list painstakingly set out in Lord Justice Leveson’s excoriating report. He said parts of the press had been prepared to behave recklessly and outrageously in pursuit of stories, had caused real hardship to people and wreaked havoc in the lives of many wholly innocent individuals. He said that whilst the freedom of the press was an essential safeguard of democracy, with that freedom came responsibility but it was a responsibility that had too often simply been ignored.
And there’s scarcely anyone these days who believes that the Press Complaints Commission is capable of doing the job. On the phone-hacking scandal, for example, it proved itself to be completely ineffectual, simply accepting the word of the offending publisher that it wasn’t happening.
But that is where the consensus ends. While everyone agrees that there needs to be a new system of press regulation, what that should be has become the subject of intense controversy, especially on the issue of whether or not the state should get involved. On one hand, it’s argued, if the press is left to regulate itself, the result will be more of the same – continued abuse of press freedom with more and more innocent people having their lives ruined by journalists trampling over them in search of a story, true or false. On the other hand, if the state gets involved, the press will lose its freedom and one of the vital pillars of democracy will collapse. So everyone waited to see how Lord Leveson would try to square the circle.
The verdict is that his answer is a clever one but, perhaps inevitably, not clever enough to end the dispute. His solution, in summary, is for the press itself to set up a new, independent regulatory system, independent both of serving newspaper editors and of the government, but underpinned by the state. In short he doesn’t want the state to regulate the press but he does want the state to regulate those who regulate the press – to guard the guardians, as he put it.
The new regulatory body he envisages would be set up by the press and would have on it a majority from outside the industry. It would adjudicate on disputes about press conduct and have the power to fine up to a maximum of £1million. It would be up to individual newspapers to decide whether or not to sign up to this new regulator, but Lord Justice Leveson proposes a set of incentives to make sure that most papers will voluntarily choose to do so. In particular he proposes a much quicker and cheaper arbitration system for settling disputes, leaving papers which didn’t sign up facing potentially much greater financial penalties if they had to deal with such disputes in the courts as now.
It is the next stage where his proposals become controversial. For he says that in order for this voluntary, independent system to work there must be regular oversight of it to check that it is indeed doing what it should. Only the state can provide such an oversight and he suggests that Ofcom, the media regulator, could fulfil this role (though he adds that if others didn’t like the idea of Ofcom doing the job, the government could set up some other sort of overseer of the regulator). All this, of course, would require legislation, legislation that he says must also reaffirm the freedom and independence of the press.
In a nutshell, what Lord Justice Leveson advocates is not statutory regulation of the press but statutory regulation of the independent press regulator.
This is what both Nick Clegg and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, accept. But David Cameron doesn’t. The Prime Minister told the House of Commons he had “serious misgivings”. He said: “For the first time we will have crossed the Rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land. We should think very carefully about crossing this line.”
What seems to worry him is that once the Rubicon has been crossed it will be tempting for future legislators, in response to some new press outrage, to amend the statutes he will have put in place in order to increase state interference with the press even more. Before we know where we are, he seems to say, we’ll have state regulation of the press. Even Lord Justice Leveson’s own idea, that Ofcom might be the regulator’s regulator, has its problems in this regard. The Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, pointed out to me in an interview that she has the responsibility to appoint the chairman of Ofcom – so, in effect, a cabinet minister would be only a few steps along the chain that regulates the press.
Mr Cameron hopes that the press itself will now take the initiative in setting up an effective system of press regulation along the lines suggested by Leveson and that its success will mean that the statutory element of the judge’s proposals won’t need to be enacted. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister wants to create a cross-party consensus on the issue and so has agreed at least to draft the legislation that would be required. He seems to hope that once people see the sort of detail that would be required they will come to share his view that this is a Rubicon too far.
And what of the politics of all this? Mr Cameron certainly has the majority of the press on his side and some will argue that that is his cynical calculation: the last thing he wants is a hostile press at the next election. But at the same time, in resisting Leveson, he is going against both public opinion and the views of the very vocal group of people who have recently been victims of the press and want a new regulatory system, possibly even tougher than the one Lord Justice Leveson is advocating. Mr Cameron told these victims that unless what the judge came up with was “bonkers”, he’d implement it in full. Neither the Prime Minister nor anyone else is describing the Leveson proposals as bonkers, so many of the victims are saying they now feel betrayed by Mr Cameron.
There is, of course, another dimension to all this. Some commentators argue that it is now both futile and a threat to the continued existence of a free press to try to regulate it at all. The press now faces a serious competitor in the business of providing news and comment from the internet and the social media. If the press finds itself over-regulated its readers will switch their attention to these other, unregulated media outlets and the newspaper industry, already in deep financial trouble, will disappear altogether. What’s needed, it’s argued, is not greater regulation of the press, let alone anything that smacks of state regulation, but properly enforced laws on libel, defamation and privacy. Almost all the recent cases of press misbehaviour involved activity that was illegal. We should leave the law to deal with the transgressors, it’s urged, and not worry about regulation at all.
What’s your view?
- Do you think the press needs tighter regulation or not?
- If you do, are the proposals set out in the Leveson Report the right ones?
- In particular, do you think the basic idea of leaving the press to set up its own regulatory system but having a statutory underpinning of it, with a state body like Ofcom charged with ensuring it does its job, is right?
- How worried are you that this involves too much state supervision?
- Do you share Mr Cameron’s concern that this is a Rubicon (of state supervision of the press) which we should not cross?
- Do you think his resistance to Leveson is motivated by the reasons he gives or because he wishes to stay onside with newspaper editors?
- Do you think the recent victims of press misconduct are right to feel betrayed by Mr Cameron, or not?
- And what do you make of the argument that in the era of the internet and social media, attempts to regulate the press are futile and perhaps dangerous to the health of our democracy?
