Memorandum submitted by Professor Julian
Petley
I note from the current issue of Press Gazette
that the Select Committee of which you are Chairman is thinking
of holding an inquiry into whether press self-regulation is currently
working successfully.
I'm writing to you in a number of capacities—as
co-chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, a
member of the board of Index on Censorship, a former journalist
and trustee of MediaWise, and also as the convenor of an MA in
journalism here at Brunel—to encourage you most strongly
to hold such an inquiry.
Over recent years, I have carried out a fair
amount of work on the Press Complaints Commission; I am enclosing
some of it and I hope that you will find it of interest.[4]
As you will see, it is all extremely critical of the Commission.
The conclusion to which I have come, regretfully, is that the
Commission is so far from being independent of the medium which
it is supposed to be regulating that its only real function is
as a PR device for the press industry. It produces a great deal
of rhetoric about the importance of preserving press freedom,
which is indeed vital to any democracy, but what it appears to
mean by this, in the last analysis, is simply the freedom of press
owners do with their newspapers exactly what they will. It also
appears to be a freedom (and a power) quite devoid of any concomitant
sense of responsibility. Furthermore, by repeatedly failing to
criticise what most people regard as the excesses of the press,
it actually weakens the case for press freedom (in the proper
sense of the term) in the eyes of the majority. This is hardly
a healthy state of affairs in a democracy.
I should stress that in no way am I advocating
greater censorship of the press—either via statute or by
the PCC. Indeed, I am a particularly firm supporter of the "publish
and be damned" principle. However, the problem is that the
PCC is quite incapable of damning anything remotely effectively—unlike,
for example, the Advertising Standards Authority, which is a successful,
respected, self-regulatory body with its own teeth, and ought
to serve as a model for the PCC.
February 2007
4 Not printed. Back
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