Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1840
- 1859)
WEDNESDAY 30 JANUARY 2008
Sir Christopher Meyer KCMG
Q1840 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Forgive me, if I may just follow up; given your abhorrence for
any form of publicly instituted regulation, how does that then
affect your position in relationship to the broadcast media who
are regulated? Are you suggesting that they are lesser journalists,
less independent, less rigorous, less competent?
Sir Christopher Meyer: No, I am not saying that.
Broadcasting has unique challenges and you can understand why
the Communications Act was passed in 2003 and why it led to the
creation of the Office of Communications. I think some of the
deficiencies you can see in a legislative/statutory approach are
shown by the fact that almost certainly there is going to be need
for another Communications Act in the next couple of years to
cover the lacunae in the first one.
Q1841 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
The public trust the voice media more than newspapers.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I know; I am sorry, I
was waffling there. At the moment if you look at the regulatory
architecture in this country on editorial content, in all media,
it looks pretty weird and you have the PCC doing what it is doing,
we are right up against the frontier with Ofcom now because we
do video, then you have Ofcom, you have the Advertising Standards
Authority and you have the BBC Trust. That is a typical sort of
British fudge; it has built up over the years, it is very empirical,
with bits here and bits there, and I do not think their architecture
can last, it is going to need some kind of rationalisation. My
argument would be that against the background of the digital revolution,
that direction in which there should be a rationalisation of the
regulatory architecture has to be in the direction of self-regulation
and not government regulation. What in practice that means I am
not sure, I do not know.
Chairman: I am sorry to say this but
we are coming into the last ten minutes or so, so if we could
keep questions and answers reasonably succinct. Lady Eccles.
Q1842 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I am really continuing with the same theme, Sir Christopher, but
from everything you have told us about the lay membership having
been increased to ten and everything you have said about the code
being kept under permanent scrutiny and being adapted it may be
that this is more a question of perception than reflecting the
changes that you told us about. There is a sense that the code
itself is both as it were constructed, monitored and agreed by
editors; is that correct?
Sir Christopher Meyer: The code committee comprises
editors because the original concept of the Press Complaints Commission,
which is valid, is that if you are going to have a code which
the press respect you have got to give editors ownership of it,
and if they have imposed upon them a code of practice devised
by the state, for example, they are going to bump against it—and
something similar has happened in the Republic of Ireland with
the very recently created Press Council there. Tim Toulmin and
I are also members of the code committee, so it is not as if there
is no transmission belt from the PCC proper and no influence from
them on to code committee discussions.
Q1843 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
The question really is does this create an impression that self-regulation
and independence are in some way in conflict and that independence
is not strongly enough accepted by the Commission?
Sir Christopher Meyer: There is that perception
out there. It is less than it was in 2003 and it is something
against which we have to struggle all the time. I do not know
how many speeches and interviews I have given over the last five
years in which I have stressed that it is possible to be wholly
funded by the newspaper and magazine industry of the United Kingdom
and yet be independent of it. A metaphor I use sometimes is Frankenstein's
monster; the thing is created and it gets out of their control,
so in no way, shape or form do I consider that either Tim or I
or any of the permanent staff of the PCC is overwhelmed by the
editors, but they have to get out there and convince the public.
I have to say that when you get out of the M25, beyond the beltway,
you find in the nation at large—and we take our roadshows
around the country all the time—far less scepticism about
this than you do inside the beltway.
Q1844 Lord Maxton:
The real problem is there are other organisations in this country,
the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants, chemists or whatever
who have self-regulation, but at the end of the day they have
powers, they have the ability to say to somebody who has in some
way gone against their code of practice you will no longer practise
law, you will no longer practise medicine, we can fine you if
you do that. You have no such power whatsoever. Do you have the
right to fine? Do you have the right to say to a newspaper you
will no longer publish?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I am going to give a
succinct answer, but I interrupted you and I apologise.
Q1845 Lord Maxton:
At the end of the day if a newspaper has a ruling by you against
them and says "Hard luck, we do not accept your ruling",
what can you do? I will ask the question, at the end of the day
what can you do?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I will give you a succinct
answer. The ultimate sanction is the threat of dismissal, both
for the editor and for the journalist responsible for the story.
Q1846 Lord Maxton:
Your dismissal, you can dismiss them.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I cannot say "You
are fired"; I can, if I want to, make a very strong recommendation
that the management consider the position of the editor or even
the journalist.
Q1847 Chairman:
Have you ever done that?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I am just trying to remember;
I think on one occasion, yes. I do know—although this is
more rumour than absolute fact—that jobs have been lost
as a result of gross breach of the code of practice where journalists
are concerned. What I was going to say is fines are useless; even
if you could agree on what the tariff should be, you would fine
editors with whom the buck must stop and this is where we are
better than television. We have a clear chain of responsibility—no
editor can claim "That agency is usually reliable" for
a story of cock-and-bull that goes in his newspaper, the buck
stops with the editor. I have now lost my train of thought. The
ultimate sanction therefore is that a job could be lost. The one
thing editors hate above all else is to be named and shamed in
their own newspaper, prominently, in terms over which they have
no control whatsoever—it is our words and not theirs. Fines
will not work because lawyers will come rushing in where they
are not now present, because you do not need a lawyer to use us
and complain, and once we get into money and lawyers, even if
we could agree the tariff we would slow down immeasurably and
the editor would take out some indemnity policy against having
to pay any money, or the proprietor would, and they would all
write it off as expenses and jolly good, it was worth the extra
boost in circulation. Fines are a delusion.
Q1848 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
I wanted to be clear about your remit with regard to the general
public interest as opposed to complaints which are brought to
you by individuals, and to use as an example, we have received
some evidence about how within newspaper groups it is alleged
that within the same group they will not report stories about
each other for obviously commercial purposes. If we were to take
the protection of the public's right to know, if you had evidence
that that sort of activity was taking place, is that something
on which you could act?
Sir Christopher Meyer: You mean we would act
against a newspaper for not writing a story?
Q1849 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
Yes.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I do not think we would
do that. We have public interest considerations for a number of
our specific clauses of the code of practice—I guess from
your question you are familiar with that—and we have a general
public interest which is actually in the freedom of the press
itself. If you are saying to me that even if we could find this
out, that one editor had not written a story about another editor
because they were in the same group, that would not be a breach
of the code of practice nor of our concept of public interest.
Q1850 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
If, for example, you had evidence that a directive was given to
the editor of a newspaper that they were not to write a story
about a sister paper, would that not surely, under your terms,
be an interference in freedom of the press?
Sir Christopher Meyer: If that were to happen
I doubt that we would ever get sight of it, there would certainly
be no evidence of it and I still do not think it would be considered
a breach.
Q1851 Lord Inglewood:
I was going to ask you a question about regulation and self-regulation
but you have effectively answered my points in response to Lord
Hastings. What I wondered as we went through your remarks was
do you see success as being more complaints or fewer complaints?
Sir Christopher Meyer: Now, more complaints,
but at some time in the future fewer complaints. One of the problems
that we have had and still have is the question of visibility;
that people should know about us, particularly about the anti-harassment
service. Always bear in mind Lord Inglewood that nine and a half
out of ten complaints lay no claim to celebrity whatsoever. The
enormous bulk of complaints are from so-called `ordinary' people,
so part of our mission has got to be to get out there and explain
to so-called `ordinary' people that there is this thing, and I
think we are still in that process and, as long as we are in that
process, I think the gross number of complaints will continue
to rise. There will come a platform, a threshold, at some point,
I do not know when that will be, because what we have not yet
been able to take fully into account is the impact of online,
video and email on the overall numbers, so for the foreseeable
future I will take increasing numbers as a sign of success and
some time in the future, almost certainly after my time, it will
be possible for a future chairman to say, "We've reached
a kind of plateau" and we might even see some diminishing
figures, but I think that is some way off.
Q1852 Lord Inglewood:
So you are approaching it, and I do not think you are necessarily
wrong, let me hasten to add, on the basis that, human nature being
what it is and the human condition being what it is, it is inevitable
that things will go wrong in the press, however successful one
is in encouraging journalistic behaviour.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Absolutely.
Q1853 Lord Inglewood:
So it is a kind of norm to which one wants to aspire.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Does the existence of
police and judges mean there are no more crimes? No. Does the
existence of bishops mean there is no more sin? No. Does the existence
of the Press Complaints Commission mean that we have no more bad
behaviour by journalists? Absolutely not. There is freedom of
the press here which is absolutely vital to our democracy and
over here, as a corollary to that, are the jagged edges of journalism.
Q1854 Chairman:
This wonderful world that you portray, are there no improvements
at all that you can see inside the Press Complaints Commission,
no improvements in coverage, nothing that you want to see improved?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I want to see everything
improved.
Q1855 Chairman:
Well, what?
Sir Christopher Meyer: I want to see accuracy
improved, I want to see better respect for people's privacy improved—
Q1856 Chairman:
Yes, I understand that, but what do you want to see improved in
the Commission?
Sir Christopher Meyer: In our organisation?
Q1857 Chairman:
In your organisation and the coverage of your organisation.
Sir Christopher Meyer: What do you mean by "coverage"?
Q1858 Chairman:
Well, the areas that you are going into. Let me give an example.
Cross-promotion between one newspaper and another, would that
be something for you?
Sir Christopher Meyer: That sounds very commercial
to me.
Q1859 Chairman:
You do not do that sort of thing?
Sir Christopher Meyer: No, I do not do commercial.
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