Leveson report: Victims urge full implementation

A key aide to Lord Justice Leveson claims his calls for press reform laws would be illegal and may breach the Human Rights Act.

Shami Chakrabarti, one of six assessors who worked with the judge on the inquiry, told the Mail On Sunday she could not support legislation because it would "coerce" newspapers into holding higher standards than anyone else, which would be unlawful.

Ms Chakrabarti,the director of civil rights group Liberty , warned that Lord Justice Leveson’s proposal for an independent regulatory body backed up in law could have "serious unintended consequences".

She said: "In a democracy, regulation of the press and imposing standards on it must be voluntary. A compulsory statute to regulate media ethics in the way the report suggests would violate the Act, and I cannot support it."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/chakrabarti-leveson-law-unlawful-031223507.html

I loathe our right-wing press and have been appalled with what they've been able to get away with. But I've also been pretty appalled by recent governments of all three parties and I don't fancy the media being at the whim of politicians either.

Mrs Skin - who is a journalist, albeit a highly specialist one - is equally unsure.

'Tis a puzzlement.

The Skin

to set up a regulatory commission that was not directly dependent on a particular government or political party.

In theory, the Press Complaints Commission might have been that body, but it has essentially no teeth.

I do not want the press to be even more politicized than it is; but at least politicians are elected, and are supposed to live in this country and pay taxes. The press barons are completely unaccountable, cannot be sacked by the voters, and often don't even live in the UK. And they have enormous power to influence governments, usually negatively; and to destroy ordinary people's lives.

as that activity was already illegal under existing criminal law.

Ordinary citizens do need a means of redress when mistreated by the press as most can not afford to engage expensive libel lawyers but given the patchy performance of Offcom and Offgen I am not sure an Offpress is the best route to go.

Lying about people; obtaining information under false pretences; spreading racism and hatred of disabled people; bribery and corruption; encouraging breaches of professional confidentiality (I was once pressed by a tabloid newspaper to break professional confidentiality in a case where there was no public interest involved except providing a 'human interest story' - I'm glad to say I refused); general all-round dishonesty.

I daresay most of these things are indeed illegal already, but no one is really enforcing it. And yes, I don't have full confidence in the competence of any regulatory body, but I don't think that's an excuse for complete lack of regulation.

As regards the 'freedom of the press' argument: Given that much of the press is not free anyway in the true sense but is run by rich, unaccountable individuals or corporations, I'm afraid this strikes me as having parallels with the arguments that if you have any regulation of corporations' rights to exploit their workers and pollute the environment, this will lead to something like Stalinism, or at least to the red-tape strangulation of small family businesses; or the decision by the American Supreme Court that corporations are 'people' and should have a First Amendment right to donate as much as they wish to political campaigns. Of course, some forms of regulation would be authoritarian or lead to extreme bureaucratic restrictions on small presses or individual writers - but there can be common-sense ways of increasing the accountability of powerful corporations without running roughshod over small independent presses, for example.

I just wonder whether Leveson's proposals would actually benefit ordinary people. Sadly, experience suggests legal restrictions on the press tend to be exploited by the rich and powerful more than the poor. I dont think Leveson would make the slightest difference to the press ownership structure in the UK or the way in which it is abused. Nor are the proposed changes going to make any difference to the way stories are slanted against certain groups in society or in favour of others. If there was one regulatory reform that I think that should be considered it is perhaps giving people impacted by stories that misrepresent them an automatic right of reply and specifying how that would appear in the media (ie requiring papers to set aside a certain part of their periodicals for this purpose and laying out where and how any replies should be displayed).

I just don't think that Cameron's preferred approach of basically doing nothing, sweeping everything under the rug, and letting the foxes guard the henhouse is going to work, any more than it did in the past.

http://newsthump.com/2012/11/30/tories-call-for-new-media-inquiry-that-has-recommendations-they-agree-with/

Yes - spend another £9 million the main beneficiaries of which were the briefs incluing her on the left.

Off topic : Duutchees of Cambridge is up the stick.

I haven't watched "The Omen" in yonks!

Joking aside, congratulations to them, and at least the papers will be full of happy stuff tomorrow rather then endless fury that there are people out there who don't share their agenda.

I note that if Kate is 12 weeks pregnant then the baby will be born around 06/06/2013.

I will really start to worry if they announce they are going to break with royal tradition and call it Damien.

Then it will just be case of waiting for the creepy nanny and the big black dog to turn up.