Is Ipso a façade?

Professor Roy Greenslade in the Guardian’s Media blog draws attention to the emperor’s new clothes in the press industry’s answer to Lord Leveson’s recommendations for a beefed up regulator.

In a blog exploring the similarities between the former Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and the newly established Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), Greenslade notes the significant influence publishers continue to have over press regulation and the weak shift in regulation that has occurred as a result.

Ipso was established by the press industry to replace the PCC, in an attempt to refute the provisions in the Government’s Royal Charter and the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry. Publishers that are behind Ipso have been resolutely against implementing the full range of Lord Leveson’s recommendations and have refused to seek recognition of their proposed regulator by the Recognition Panel inaugurated under the Royal Charter’s provisions.

Moore and Ramsay analysed recent developments in press regulation, particularly the appointment of members to the Board of the Regulatory Funding Company (RFC), which control’s Ipso’s budget, and the Editors’ Code Committee, which oversees the Code of Practice against which press practice is assessed.

With regards to the RFC, the Board not only consists of nine white corporate men, but it also comprises of senior members from the publishing companies. The board is led by Paul Vickers, Trinity Mirror’s legal director and includes Murdoch MacLennon, chief executive of Telegraph Media Group; Christopher Longcroft, chief financial officer of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK; and Paul Ashford, editorial director of Northern & Shell (publishers of the Express and Star titles). The similarities between PressBoF and the RFC are evident in the representation of the major publishers on the board. Greenslade also notes the absence of women on the board of the RFC. We would point out the absence of ethnic minorities on the Board of the RFC.

Likewise, not much has changed with the Editors’ Code Committee. The Daily Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, who was the Chairman of the PCC’s Editors’ Code Committee, has been reappointed to the same position despite the Daily Mail being the title with the most number of breaches under the previous Code.

The committee overall has also remained “exactly the same”, according the analysis. Indeed, Moore and Ramsay highlight that every member in the new committee was on the previous committee with an average tenure of almost a decade. It isn’t just the same faces are occupying the same positions but that their length of service in those roles has meant that no fresh thinking has emerged.

In addition, the Editors’ Code of Practice operated by Ipso it not too dissimilar to the Code of Practice adopted by the former PCC and which the Leveson Inquiry showed to be entirely inadequate for the purposes of effective press regulation.

Although Ipso has powers to impose fines and launch investigations as well as a new 12 member complaints committee, Greenslade concludes “there is no structural difference between the PCC and Ipso”.

This is perhaps not particularly surprising given that media coverage on press regulation has been predominantly negative since the publication of the Leveson Inquiry report.

The Media Standards Trust report in 2013 and one from earlier this year both found that the Leveson Inquiry and the Royal Charter received negative scrutiny from the media with widely inflated concerns about a potential threat to press freedom and freedom of expression dominating the media debate about press reform.

Such developments spearheaded by the press industry continue to ignore calls for the adoption of the Royal Charter despite support shown for it by the public, by public figures who signed the Leveson Royal Charter Declaration last year and by MPs who acknowledged that the Charter had “a better prospect for effective regulation which is both independent of the Press and of Government.”