Like many people, I’ve been watching, reading about, and listening to the Leveson enquiry in to press standards, with great interest.
It’s been clear, almost from the start of the testimonies, that there is something so rotten in this particular state of Denmark, that the press landscape stinks more than a barrel of dead fish.
Several surprising revelations have stuck out more than others.
The revelation, from the current chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), that his organisation is not a regulator or arbiter of standards, would have made many people sit up.
The clue is in the name, but many people would have assumed that, because of its position, the PCC was a watchdog with disciplinary powers.
It isn’t.
It’s a toothless complaints organisation.
And newspapers – such as the Duly Getworse Daily Express and the Daily Spurt Daily Sport, who have walked away from the PCC – can choose to ignore everything the PCC ever says.
For me, the wider question is ‘How can the concept of self-regulation work?’
To be truly effective, doesn’t a regulator have to be *outside* of the industry that it is regulating?
I do find it interesting that the vested interests who have testified to Leveson have all said they feel that statutory regulation would damage, not help their industry.
These are, presumably, the same newspaper publishers who want every other industry independently/statutorily regulated?
This Leveson Enquiry thing has been going on for months.
It’s probably costing (the taxpayer?) a fortune and at the end of it, I bet nothing will have changed.
I will have laughed a lot at Paul Dacre’s appalling testimony.
It is a very rare occasion on which I read a newspaper. There seems to be so little news in them. Or at least not in the newspapers likely to be hauled over the coals by the Leveson Enquiry. I agree that self-regulation seldom works. Except perhaps in the Society of Sado-Masochists.
The Society of Sado-Masochists has missed a trick! Thanks for the thought.