Thinking more about the Impress initiative, I think the main issue with the idea of a ‘Leveson compliant’ regulator is that Sir Brian’s principles might not be the most appropriate way to solve the problems which prompted his Inquiry in the first place. Continue reading
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Last Monday, my former colleagues Jonathan Heawood and Lisa Appignanesi launched the Impress project. This is an attempt to devise a new press regulator that is compliant with the principles of the Leveson Report, but also tempered to resist being nobbled by either the politicians or the press. Continue reading
Sitting in a waiting room and browsing the web, three examples of poor fact checking bubble into my ‘stream’:
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Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, just gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, concerning the newspaper’s publication of the Edward Snowden leaks. The Guardian has a live-blog and stream of the session.
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I promised a comment on what form political intimidation of the press might take, under the new system of regulation.
The provisions in the Royal Charter for press regulation, and the associated sections of the Crime & Courts Act 2013, are complex and layered. There are buffers between the politicians (and the wider ‘establishment’) and the press. There are plans for an arbitration service and a body that oversees the regulator, which in turn will try to keep the press both strong and honest.
Supporters of these provisions have emphasised that the politicians will not be able to censor the newspapers or stop stories from being published.
But free expression issues do not begin and end with formal state censorship that we see in hideous regimes like China, Iran or Zimbabwe. There are much subtler ways of exerting pressure on publishers, that nevertheless ‘chill’ (i.e. discourage) the exercise of free speech. Continue reading