APPENDIX 4
Memorandum submitted by Mr Geoff Elliott,
Broadcasting Standards Commissioner, Former Press Complaints Commissioner
THE CASE FOR SELF-REGULATION
INTRODUCTION
I write as someone with possibly unique credentials
to comment on the relative strengths and weaknesses of self-regulation
in the guise of the old Press Council; its successor, the Press
Complaints Commission; and statutory regulation in the broadcasting
field.
I believe I am the only journalist, possibly
the only individual, to have sat on both press bodies and the
Broadcasting Standards Commission. Between membership of the PC
and PCC, I was also a founding member of the Editors' Code of
Practice Committee, which wrote the code against which PCC adjudications
are made and which maintains it as a dynamic code.
I was a member of the Press Council for three
years between 1987 and 1990, and while there worked on writing
a code, many of whose provisions were later absorbed into the
PCC code. Between 1990 and 1995, I sat on the editors' code committee,
resigning to join the PCC itself for a two-year stint between
1995 and 1997. Since 2000 1 have been a member of the Broadcasting
Standards Committee.
No doubt you will have had many submissions
from others. Indeed, I have seen those from the editors' code
committee and the Society of Editors and concur with the arguments
expressed in both and with their conclusions. I will not seek
to repeat their evidence but focus, from the point of view of
a commissioner, on the merits of each form of regulation with
which I have been associated.
I should be prepared to enlarge orally on any
of the following evidence if the committee wished me to.
PRESS COUNCIL
This was self-regulation without a defined constituency
and without a code to anchor its adjudications. It was set up
by the newspaper industry but did not have the commitment of many
within it. Without a code, its deliberations were often rambling,
incoherent and inconsistent. They were also lumbering and slow.
Though the public were given an opportunity for redress, delays
in reaching adjudications often robbed them of any effectiveness.
Editors lost faith in the tortuous process and in the inconsistency
of the findings, and gradually the body lost trust and goodwill.
It became discredited. As a result, the press became unregulated.
I shall not waste any more of your time on a
body now lost deep in history, except to say that in its dying
throes it turned to the possibility of a code as a way of seeking
the support of editors and the public to principles that would
serve both sets of interests and would underpin decisions on future
complaints.
PRESS COMPLAINTS
COMMISSION
The PCC came into being as a reformed process
of self-regulation and with the commitment of publishers and editors
to improving standards. Unless it was successful, both groups
of professionals knew that statutory regulation would be parliament's
recourse, with all the risks that would entail for the freedom
of the press and its role in a democracy.
In my opinion, it has found that success. It
has a code accessible to all, written by the editors who must
apply it and endorsed by the PCC which has a lay majority. The
public can understand the principles by which newspapers work
and can see it change along with their own expectations. Editors
and journalists have bought into the code. It is theirs. They
are proud of it. They allow it to govern their decision-making.
They frown on those who let them down by recklessly breaching
its tenets. It is unlikely that statutory regulation would ever
find that degree of ownership.
We have a robust and highly competitive media.
From time to time, mistakes and misjudgments will be made, no
matter how well intentioned the culprits. These do not devalue
the process but give it renewed rigour as lessons are learned.
The PCC gives swift redress for those who are
wronged. Its first aim is to seek conciliation and to do so within
40 days. Many of the problems that arise are solved to everyone's
satisfaction by corrections, retractions and apologies. The average
length of time for such cases to reach their outcome is 32 days.
Relatively few go forward to frill adjudication, and most of these
are reached within three months. Let no-one doubt the embarrassment
of publishing adverse adjudications in their own papers, the importance
attached to them by editors and their staffs and, in the worst
or repeated cases, the consequences for those who have acted improperly.
For all that their critics might like to think
otherwise, newspapers take themselves and their standards seriously;
indeed, so much so that the impetus for greater levels of ethics
teaching on journalists' academic and training courses comes from
editors. They want new journalists to beware the pitfalls and
to understand the issues from the very beginning of their careers.
They are actively supported by the PCC, which readily provides
speakers and materials. Here I write also as the head of the Department
of Journalism teaching 800 journalism and public relations students
at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston.
In newsrooms everywhere, what the code says
rules. Journalists carry it everywhere they go. It influences
every story they write.
None of the issues has as much dynamism as privacy,
and therefore media intrusion. Though the Data Protection Act
and the Human Rights Act are having a profound and not always
beneficial effect on the workings of the media, it has been the
media itself that has provided most of the nation's privacy casebook,
acting to uphold its codes and by so doing creating a common law
of its own.
The privacy complaints of celebrities may be
the ones to hit the headlines, but most are fielded by regional
newspapers from ordinary people suddenly thrown into their columns.
As a regional editor of 20 years, and former
president of the Society of Editors, I recognise how often such
people may dislike their accidents, court cases, inquests and
tribunals reported but who come to understand why they must be
if an individual's public accountability is to be maintained.
These are not instances of press intrusion but of the press doing
its job. The PCC's conciliation service can be invaluable in achieving
a common understanding.
STATUTORY REGULATION
I will concentrate on the Broadcasting Standards
Commission because of my own experience and because it is alone
in having a full content brief.
It has a standards, or taste and decency, function
as well as fairness and privacy but for the purposes of this paper
I shall stick to the latter.
There is no escaping statutory regulation in
broadcasting because of the finite band width available to "publishers".
The government has to be sure that access goes to those who will
provide a public service. So balance and impartiality become considerations.
As a result, the processes of regulation are
laden with legal representation and fears of judicial review.
No matter how hard the BSC tries, its deliberations are much slower
than the PCC's. its average fairness and privacy case without
a hearing takes five months and, with a hearing, eight months,
though both spreads of time are inside targets. There is no conciliation
service, only entertainment of a complaint or its dismissal. Consequently,
one side or the other leaves the process inevitably dissatisfied.
The commission is perceived to have got it wrong, and they were
right all along.
But the greater difficulty is that broadcasters
have no ownership of what happens. The regulation is not theirs
but imposed on them. They co-operate because they have to, not
because they have any wish to see it succeed. While newspaper
editors give themselves seven days in which to respond to complaints
represented to them by the PCC, broadcasters often frustrate any
attempt to speed the process along. They probably do not do so
wilfully but because the questions are being asked by a body they
see as an adversary.
Ofcom will labour with the same disadvantages,
not because it will fail any more than the BSC fails but because
there won't be the same ownership as that within the press, and
legal interventions will sit heavily on the legs of anyone trying
to run swiftly.
It will, of course, have penalties to impose,
but these will only increase legal defensiveness and therefore
delay, and may have limited punitive value.
CONCLUSIONS
Self-regulation in the form of the PCC works.
It doesn't prevent every misjudgement or, indeed, every culpable
act. No law prevents every breach. No body acting for peace prevents
every war.
But self-regulation, as it is practised in the
newspaper industry, does promote improving standards. While the
number of complaints has continued to rise, the number of breaches
of the code has not.
It has engendered in publishers, editors and
journalists a community of interest in getting the practice of
journalism right. Ethics have come to the top of the agenda. There
is a very real sense of ownership in the process of regulation.
In 12 years, no editor has challenged the code or refused to publish
adjudications prominently.
So successful has it been that the PCC is now
seen as a model of self-regulation through much of Europe and
the Commonwealth. While controversy continues to surround its
dealings in this country, other countries are seeking something
like it of their own.
Its deliberations are quick, giving complainants
access to redress before their complaints take root and flourish
into resentment. The great majority leave the process content
with the outcome and the way it has been derived.
While it seeks objective adjudication, it does
nothing to diminish the freedom of newspapers to be partial, which
distinguishes them from broadcasters. Therefore, the newspapers
themselves are left to serve the public interest in a democracy,
as is the regulation process when things are perceived to have
gone wrong.
Conciliation and adjudication are free to the
public and free to the Exchequer. Both are paid for by the industry
itself
The alternative of statutory regulation would
threaten press freedom, without any greater hope of eliminating
all ethical breaches, would be slower and more cumbersome, create
no higher rate of satisfaction and represent a cost to the public.
February 2003
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