Waiting for Leveson – my note to the Hacked Off campaign

This short note suggests that the Leveson Report might need to be seen in the wider context of the Government’s Communications Review which is being led by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport.

In May 2011, the then Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt issued an open letter which launched the DCMS Communications Review which is intended to lead to a new Communications Act in 2015. In the intervening year and a half, progress has been painfully slow, the promised Green Paper never materialised, and Hunt himself has now moved on.

The Hunt open letter posed 13 questions.

Two were relevant to the regulation of the press, although at the time perhaps not intended to apply to this subject which was then dormant:
Q3. Is regulatory convergence across different platforms desirable and, if so, what are the potential issues to implementation?
Q13. Where has self- and co-regulation worked successfully and what can be learnt from specific approaches? Where specific approaches haven’t worked, how can the framework of content regulation be made sufficiently coherent and not create barriers to growth, but at the same time protect citizens and enable consumer confidence?

In December 2011, the Department finally published the 168 submissions to the review including my own on the regulation of convergence.

A Green Paper was drafted and cleared within Whitehall but never published.The plan now is as stated by DCMS: “We will publish a White Paper in early 2013, with a Bill introduced by the last session of this Parliament, subject to the legislative programme.”

The relationship between the Communications Review and the Leveson Inquiry concerns both timing and content.

On timing, the Government will have to consider whether either or both require legislation and, if so, the timing of such legislation. It is likely that both will require some legislative provisions. This will then raise the question of whether Parliamentary time can be found for two Bills or whether the necessary legislative provisions will be rolled into one Bill. If there is only one Bill, the proposed timetable of the Comms Review – a Bill by the last session – might well be too slow to meet the political pressure for implementation of the new regime recommended by Leveson. This would suggest an earlier Bill with the Comms Review being foreshortened.

On content, the Government will have to consider whether the Leveson recommendations for a tougher regime for the press have implicated for web sites and social media which are in any event converging with broadcasting. Some newspapers now have more visits online to their web site than readers of the print version of the paper. It is only a matter of time before some newspapers become online only. Meanwhile we have the evolution of social media and citizen journalism which begs the question of how we balance free speech and privacy online. Social media can breach citizens’ privacy or libel an individual just as easily as newspapers or television.

One approach might be to attempt to have a common set of principles that would apply to all content independent of the format or delivery platform – print, radio, television, Internet – under one overarching piece of legislation and one overarching regulator. There might then be sector-specific mechanisms or institutions to give effect to these principles for different parts of the media ecology. In this way, newspapers would not be singled out for special controls but press regulation would have institutional arrangements that reflected the nature of press ownership and consumption.


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