Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1820
- 1839)
WEDNESDAY 30 JANUARY 2008
Sir Christopher Meyer KCMG
Q1820 Chairman:
It is not very difficult.
Sir Christopher Meyer: It can be. In this case
the fact that she herself was not employed—if this is the
point at issue—by Derek Conway in his office, but nonetheless
appears in a published photograph of the Conway family, that in
and of itself from my point of view is not a problem.
Q1821 Chairman:
Is not a problem.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Is not a problem and
not grounds for complaint.
Q1822 Chairman:
Even if the individual complained in that case, you would not—
Sir Christopher Meyer: We would look at the
complaint made, we would look at the arguments supporting the
complaint and we would make a decision, but here you are asking
me to make a snap judgment, almost in a vacuum, and that is the
answer I give you.
Q1823 Chairman:
What would happen if a third party made the complaint, would that
be simply ruled out because it was a third party and not involved?
Sir Christopher Meyer: We do not rule out all
third party complaints. There is a myth out there that we never
entertain them; that is not true, but of course the vast bulk
of the complaints we get are first party complaints. In a case
where the first party has not complained and does not wish to
complain, but a third party comes in and says I want to complain
on behalf of so and so—
Q1824 Chairman:
Or because it is a bigger issue.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Or because it is a bigger
issue, and there can be bigger issues, then in that case—and
I think in this particular one you are drawing attention to—we
would not entertain the complaint. We might go and ask the first
party and say so-and-so has made a complaint on your behalf, what
do you think, but we would not proceed with a third party complaint
unless we were quite sure that the first party was happy about
it.
Q1825 Chairman:
Thank you. We are not trying to accuse you of anything, what we
are trying to do is actually discover how you would view things.
Can I ask another question then? There was a case regarding Katy
Price, better known as Jordan, and her son was born with a disability.
The Press Complaints Commission received 143 complaints about
a sticker that was issued by the magazine Heat because
basically what they did was they poked fun at this child with
a disability. The complaint was resolved when the magazine apologised
privately to the complainants, but they did publish an apology
on-line and in hard copy in the magazine itself, and at that point
the Press Complaints Commission said that is the end of the matter.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Just one point missing
from that, Katie Price herself then withdrew her complaint.
Q1826 Chairman:
Fine, but the 142 other people did not withdraw their complaints,
who had made complaints.
Sir Christopher Meyer: That is perfectly true,
but since Katie Price herself, the first party, accepted Heat's
apology—it was a disgraceful piece of journalism, let us
make no bones about it—and Heat magazine apologised
every which way, as you say, on-line, in hard copy, publicly and
it was universally regarded as an extremely poor piece of journalism,
at that point she said to us "I withdraw the complaint, I
am happy with that outcome." On that basis no further action
is taken.
Q1827 Chairman:
Fine, I understand that from the point of view of Katie Price,
and we can perhaps understand her motives, but it may well have
been that in the other 142 who were making that complaint there
were many who thought—and even perhaps with personal reasons
thought—that it is quite wrong that someone with a disability
should be mocked in this particular way. Would it not have been
open for the press, or is it open for the Press Complaints Commission
to actually set out a wider condemnation than simply thinking
that individual complaint has been withdrawn?
Sir Christopher Meyer: Our views on this were
pretty widely known, but the point I want to make here is if we
are talking about third party complaints here, we cannot have
the interests of the third party trumping the interest of the
first party, the person who was directly most hurt—apart
from the child himself—by what Heat magazine published.
In those circumstances, with the speed and, quite right, the abject
nature of the apologies made by Heat the dossier is closed,
but no one can be in the least doubt that had it gone to a decision
by ourselves it would have had the roundest condemnation.
Q1828 Chairman:
The point that worries me and concerns me about a case like that—and
it may not concern anybody else—is that out there in the
public there were a lot of other parents with disabled children
who may be deeply concerned that it could become currency that
you can actually mock disabled children. Do you not think that
in that kind of case, whatever is the individual negotiation between
you and the individual complainant, you should make a rather wider
statement of condemnation of a practice of that kind, which we
both agree was absolutely deplorable?
Sir Christopher Meyer: It is absolutely clear,
firstly from our reaction and secondly from our code of practice
which has inside it the very strongest defences for the welfare
of children, that we could not have come to any conclusion other
than to condemn this; I just want to make that absolutely clear.
In other cases where there is a speedy apology by a newspaper
or a case is resolved we will frequently—and this is to
be seen on our website—make plain why we have taken the
position that we have taken. It is not as if all the other complainants
and their concerns are ignored, and we look at the other complaints,
it is not as if they are all chucked out of the window simply
because Katie Price is the first party. I want to make that very,
very clear.
Q1829 Chairman:
Yes, you are making that very, very clear but it seems to me that
you are several degrees away from taking a proactive role in this;
you are several degrees away from saying this is absolutely disgraceful
practice, we need to give it the highest publicity and we need
to go onto the attack and tell everyone that this is completely
beyond the pale.
Sir Christopher Meyer: My Lord Chairman, we
are extremely proactive in a whole range of areas. We go on the
attack very frequently; to take another case, which is very, very
different, when Prince William's on and off fiancée Kate
Middleton found herself grotesquely harassed by the paparazzi
only last year, I was out there on television making it perfectly
clear that this kind of behaviour was not acceptable. We do not
sit back and wait for it to come in; a great deal of our work,
which is below the waterline, is in dealing with cases before
things start to go really wrong. The clearest example of this
is our seven days a week, 24 hours a day anti-harassment service,
and I spend a great deal of time publicising the helpline, hotlines,
where people can stop themselves being harassed by journalists
where this happens and where there is no public interest in that
happening.
Q1830 Bishop of Manchester:
Yet, Sir Christopher, we understand that about 50% of the complaints
that you receive fall outside the scope of your code, and that
only 9.8% of complaints received in the last ten years were accepted
by you for further investigation. Could you give some indication
of how the code is shaped and who actually influences this pattern
which dictates how you operate?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I do not recognise that
percentage figure, which I suspect has been taken from a recent
book which I saw excerpts of in Private Eye the other day.
The attrition rate, if you take the gross figure for complaints,
which except for one in every year that I have been chairman has
gone up, and it went up very significantly last year. When I say
"attrition rate" what that then boils down to in terms
of rulings, investigations and in certain cases adjudications,
we have compared notes for example with the Advertising Standards
Authority; I had a conversation only last week with the Information
Commissioner, and by and large the way it works out with us is
very similar to other regulatory bodies which take complaints,
so I do not think we have anything to apologise for there. Last
year the total number of complaints was 4,340; a lot of those
will fall by the wayside. Some of them will be about our good
old friend taste and decency; taste and decency does not come
under our code of practice. People read a red-top newspaper, for
example, that has pictures of bare men or bare ladies and we get
people calling up and complaining about that. Our answer has to
be that that does not come under the code of practice unless there
is some other reason deriving from the code, and so a lot of them
fall by the wayside. A lot of people complain and then we pick
up their complaint, then we go back to them and they say "No,
we do not want to complain any more", and so you get a lot
of stuff falling by the wayside. Some of them are third party
complaints, so in the end what it boils down to is if you have
4,340 complaints, as we had in 2007, and we then made 1,227 rulings,
that is not a bad proportion.
Q1831 Bishop of Manchester:
You have given one example of an area which you would say was
out of your remit; it would be helpful to us if you could indicate
are there any other general areas where you get, quite commonly,
complaints coming in which you would feel do not belong within
your scope.
Sir Christopher Meyer: One of my nightmares
is going out to dinner in the evening and somebody steaming towards
me across the room, red face, the veins standing out on their
neck, complaining about an opinion expressed in a newspaper. Of
course, some of our newspapers express extremely strong opinions,
very, very toughly drafted. That, in and of itself, is not a breach
of the code, it is a strongly expressed opinion, and very frequently
people will call us up and say we do not like the thrust. Unless
there is something else in there like accuracy or invasion of
privacy, you are not going to take that up.
Q1832 Bishop of Manchester:
You have on the Commission quite a lot of editors, I think. To
what extent do the editors dictate the way in which the code is
both shaped and operated?
Sir Christopher Meyer: Let us take first of
all the Commission itself, and then we will look at the code committee.
We introduced a series of reforms back in 2003 and one of those
key reforms was to increase the lay majority on the Commission
and, at the same time, to introduce advertising and the public
appointment of lay commissioners which in the past had been a
typically British tap on the shoulder, "My dear chap, would
you like to come on the Commission?" At the moment we have
a Commission of 17; there are ten publicly appointed lay commissioners
and seven editors, of whom there are three national editors, one
magazine editor and three from the regions and nations of the
UK, which always include one Scot. This body meets together physically
about once every five weeks to adjudicate on the hard cases which
we have not been able to resolve. In these meetings may I say
that if there is any kind of caucus at all it is to be found among
the lay commissioners and not among the editors. I often say that
people think that the editors must be like the Albanian politburo
of the old days, but they are all over the place and tend to take
very different views on news reporting and news gathering, and
you get a more consistent view on the whole from the lay commissioners.
Q1833 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You have talked about individual complaints that come in to you
but I do not know whether you saw the Hugh Cudlipp lecture that
Alastair Campbell did.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I saw bits of it.
Q1834 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Which is really echoing Tony Blair's comment about the feral beast
and saying that Hugh Cudlipp, if he was living now, would lament
a significant fall in basic standards of journalism. Alastair
Campbell went on to talk about crises that they faced in government
and saying that it was when Tony Blair appreciated that actually
the role of the press with crises was actually to try and make
them worse and not actually just report them, that he paid less
attention to their opinions and got more worried about the role
they played in society. What role do you have in seeking to raise
overall the general journalistic standards?
Sir Christopher Meyer: The first thing I would
say is that when I was a press secretary in the 1980s I thought
press standards and standards of reporting were inferior to those
today; there has been an improvement, although you see far more
mistakes in grammar and syntax than you used to see, but that
is a different matter. Sorry, I have now lost my thread. Sorry,
Lord King, could you just repeat the last point again?
Q1835 Lord King of Bridgwater:
The point really is as well as individual complaints, one of the
complaints is the general low standard of journalism, rushing
out news without checking it, anything for circulation or headlines;
get that headline in and worry about the truth later.
Sir Christopher Meyer: That kind of statement
one has seen written about the British press since the later 18th
century and it certainly peppers the 19th century as well. That
is no excuse, but it is a common thing.
Q1836 Lord Maxton:
It must be true.
Sir Christopher Meyer: What we do—this
goes back to proactivity—is we organise seminars, workshops
and study groups for all kinds of aspects of journalism. We target
different markets, we send out people across the United Kingdom
who go and talk to schools of journalism and trainee journalists
and so forth—I speak to them quite often myself—and
then we have workshops and seminars for people working in the
industry. One of the things we discovered a few years ago was
that while the code of practice was well-known to editors, it
was not particularly well-known, for example, to picture editors
or news editors and we go lower down the scale and induct them
into the mysteries of the code of practice and how it has been
applied over the last decade. Following the case of the News
of the World when Clive Goodman and Mr Mulcaire were sent
to jail for violation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act, we conducted a series of workshops at the News of the
World at the invitation of and at our suggestion the new editor
of the News of the World to inculcate the kinds of standards
that we think should be met in journalism. This is painting the
Forth Bridge; we are going around the country all the time doing
this, and then of course there is the code of practice itself.
Back in 2003 an editor said to me "We know what the code
says, but we are not quite clear how it has been applied in practice
over the years," so we arranged for the publication of a
thing called the editor's code book which summarises our "jurisprudence"
and this too is very widely disseminated.
Q1837 Lord King of Bridgwater:
What steps are you taking to see whether that is having any effect
and what steps do you take to monitor the overall health and quality
of journalism?
Sir Christopher Meyer: Our permanent staff including
me is 14; the Commission membership itself is 17. We ourselves
cannot monitor every single publication in the United Kingdom
including the on-line editions. We employ a professional monitoring
service which helps us in this and, at the end of the day, like
editors always say the people who have the most effect on how
we write and what we write are our readers, and there is a lot
of very strong evidence for that. We also, to a degree, have to
rely on the general public—not in every case but very often—to
tell us what is going wrong, and that is why I am very pleased
that compared with when I became chairman in 2003 and we were
having as I say the 2,500 complaints a year, we now have almost
four and a half plus thousands of general enquiries. I have therefore
seen our role move from being ombudsman, regulator—which
we are—to being almost a citizens' advice bureau for the
media, which has got nothing to do with complaining. All of this
feeds back into journalism.
Chairman: Can I bring in Lady Howe?
Q1838 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I would like to ask a little bit about what Simon Jenkins said
last week, because he was really saying that one of the best ways
in which the profession keeps buccaneering newspaper ownership
in its proper place is self-regulation, and I wondered to what
extent you think there is adequate self-regulation. He quite clearly
thought it was not adequate and if it is not being as rigorous
as it should be then what more should it be doing and are you,
the PCC, encouraging newspapers to behave in that kind of way?
Sir Christopher Meyer: A general point and then
to your point specifically. The general point is that the Press
Complaints Commission, as long as it exists, is always going to
be in the eye of controversy; there is no way in which we will
ascend to some nirvana where there are no critics at all. There
are a lot of people around town and in the country who do not
think we do our job well enough, and that actually is a spur to
us doing better, even though some of the criticisms are severely
misplaced. Sir Simon is sceptical about us; Alastair—if
you ask him the question in the next session—will dump all
over us, for lots of reasons, but let me come specifically to
your question. I believe so strongly that the state should keep
out of editorial content and its regulation—I do not want
to see a privacy law, I do not want to see any other intervention
of the state, I do not want to see us coming under Ofcom—that
my collateral belief is self-regulation is therefore the only
way to go and it must be made to work and it must be seen to be
working. I am not here to toot my own trumpet, but since 2003
and early 2004 when Tim Toulmin, our director, took up his job,
we have done nothing other than to try to make this thing more
effective. That is why we introduced the reforms of 2003 and 2004;
that is why we now have the code committee with its own website,
so that people can see deep into the heart of this PCC's system.
Improvement, doing better, is what moves us all along. If I can
give you one very concrete example, it was at our initiative—this
goes back to proactivity, My Lord Chairman—that the newspaper
and magazine industry of the UK, after overcoming some quite deep
misgivings, agreed that our competence should spread to on-line
editions of newspapers and magazines and indeed to their video
content. That is a whole other story. Lady Howe, the objective
therefore is constantly to do better because I think in the new
age of media with all the digital innovation there is no other
system of regulation that can conceivably work, even on a practical
basis.
Q1839 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Sir Christopher, accepting the progress that you say you have
made, and we would not dispute that, could you be very specific
and tell us, given the large number of complaints you still receive,
how would you enforce or even encourage, how would you monitor
better self-regulation? What would it look like in 2009? You cannot
be satisfied with what you have because of the level of complaints,
so what would you change?
Sir Christopher Meyer: There are two measures
I would like to use—and I do not know if this specifically
does answer your question—I would like it understood beyond
all challenge that there is only one way in a free society for
regulation to go, and that is through self-regulation or it might
be better called independent regulation. I would like to see banished
forever the notion that there is a role for government or a role
for a privacy law. The other thing I would wish to see is ever
better adherence to and respect for the code of practice. That
is where we go back to time and time again. It is not an immovable
thing, it changes every year—the code committee meets annually
at least to make changes to the code—and the way we monitor
it is the way in which we see newspapers respecting the code.
There is something even more specific than that: one of my campaigns
has been to get every newspaper in every edition to have some
little box or reference to the fact that if you do not like a
story and you have not got satisfaction from the editor, there
is this thing called the Press Complaints Commission, phone number,
website, email, that you can go to. We are now waging a campaign
to get this into the on-line editions of newspapers and we are
making very good progress. When I can say to you that every newspaper
in the land, on-line or in print, directs the reader—or
the viewer as we must now say sometimes—to the PCC in times
of dispute, then I think that will be a clear measurable impact.
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