Abstract
An American friend passing through during the early days of our election campaign was astonished by the front pages of our national newspapers strewn over my kitchen table. Politically engaged, but somewhat of a naif about our great election newspaper tradition of Labour leader bashing, he shook his head: “It's all so vindictive and so desperately … personal”.
He was, of course, talking about the relentless attacks on Ed Miliband that – in The Sun, Mail, Express, Star and Telegraph as well as their Sunday stablemates – variously painted him as a philanderer, a geek, a fratricidal backstabber, a Stalinist ideologue, a hypocritical toff and a clueless tosser. According to one analysis for openDemocracy, personal insults directed at Miliband in the second week of April averaged five a day across the Mail, Sun, Telegraph and Times. These declined in ferocity as “Milifandom” threatened to turn the geek all Poldark, and tabloid attention turned to scaremongering about England surrendering to a Scottish dominatrix. Surely, mused my friend, this is not so much crusading journalism as crucifying vendetta?
I reminisced about 1992 and Neil Kinnock – a campaign in which I was peripherally involved – but agreed that this time there was an extra edge: not only a visceral ideological objection to someone genuinely centre-left but – from most newspapers’ perspective – to someone who was threatening their own power and commercial self-interest. Miliband made it clear that he wanted to see the post-Leveson process on press self-regulation completed, and that was noted. In one telling pre-election piece by The Guardian's Jane Martinson, she quoted a senior editor at a right-wing newspaper as saying: “If Miliband gets in, it will be a disaster. The first thing he'll do is Leveson.” That might have been a rather self-obsessed exaggeration but Labour's disastrous performance rendered such anxiety irrelevant.
At this point, it's important to establish three relevant facts because there is a fashionable view – largely perpetrated by newspapers’ own megaphones, but parroted by others who really should know better – that the whole Leveson process is now dead in the water. After all, they say, the major publishers – albeit without The Guardian, FT and Independent – have acknowledged that the old Press Complaints Commission was useless and have signed up to the new self-regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), which really is independent and really is “the toughest regulator in the western world”. This is self-serving guff.
Fact one: Ipso is entirely under the thumb of the same combination of powerful publishers that bankrolled and controlled the PCC, via a shadowy organisation called the Regulatory Funding Company (RFC). As a forensic analysis by the Media Standards Trust revealed, the RFC controls Ipso's rules, code, investigations and sanctions. Ipso's independence is an illusion.
Ipso's chairman, Sir Alan Moses – a man of independent mind but no match for the serried ranks of scheming publishers – has made noises about demanding changes, but with no specifics and no timetable. It is a futile task anyway, since the then chairman of the RFC, Paul Vickers, gave away the ballgame when he told the Lords Communications Committee: “When Sir Alan says he's going to put a red line through a whole load of things, he can't.” Ipso, just like the discredited PCC, is subject to the whims of its corporate masters.
Fact two: Ipso is most certainly not “the only show in town”. Under the Royal Charter framework agreed by all major parties in Parliament, a genuinely independent Press Recognition Panel (PRP) – established without any links to government or political parties – now exists to scrutinise any aspiring self-regulator that wants to take advantage of the incentives offered by recognition. It will, according to its chairman, David Wolfe QC, be “open for business” by the autumn.
Meanwhile, plans for a charter-compliant regulator are well advanced. The Independent Monitor for the Press (Impress) is the brainchild of the former director of English PEN Jonathan Heawood, and could be ready to apply for recognition by the summer. Several online, regional and hyperlocal publishers have expressed an interest in joining a self-regulator that, once recognised, will confer a status of credibility and ethical commitment that is sadly lacking in the reputation of much national journalism. They will also be able to access the benefits of reduced court costs, now enshrined in the 2013 Crime and Courts Act (CCA).
Fact 3: as many staunch defenders of fearless reporting recognise – think Harry Evans, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie – there are potentially huge benefits for watchdog journalism because small publishers within a recognised regulator will be protected from the chilling effect of powerful and wealthy bullies who try to intimidate them with threats of bank-busting litigation. New online start-ups or hyperlocal enterprises intent on exposing local corruption or incompetence will have an invaluable weapon to support proper journalistic scrutiny through the CCA.
So the Leveson framework is up and running. And regardless of this election result, once Impress is recognised things could begin to become uncomfortable for the big newspaper companies as they become vulnerable to heavy court costs by staying outside the recognition system. But what if those incentives/penalties fail to bite and they stick defiantly to their faux-independent Ipso? The PRP must deliver a “failure report” to Parliament if “significant” publishers remain outside the system. It will then be up to Parliament to decide next steps.
Much will depend at that point – probably around October 2016 – on perceptions of whether anything has really changed. Leveson's personal view (though not a recommendation) was that some kind of statutory regime involving Ofcom would be an obvious next step. With a wafer-thin majority, an opposition united on this issue (including the SNP), a cross-party alliance behind Leveson in the House of Lords and a significant group of Tory MPs who were sufficiently appalled by press behaviour to threaten rebellion in the last Parliament, there could easily be parliamentary pressure for further action.
However indebted to the anti-Labour press onslaught David Cameron may feel, he will then be faced with an awkward choice: overtly support the publishers’ refusal to be accountable for their own code of ethics – and be accused of pandering to the whims of powerful publishers – or acknowledge that perhaps something more than Leveson's voluntary, independent system is now required. At that point, even the most defiant publishers might be forced to rethink.