Newspapers are inaccurate and untrustworthy and need government intervention. That is the message of a preliminary report by the Media Standards Trust, a lobby and research body set up by a group of the Great and Good disgruntled with the state of our press.
On the Today Programme this morning, their very admirable chair, Sir David Bell (Financial Times) was taken on by Sir Christopher Meyer from the Press Complaints Commission. The MST report is highly critical of the self-regulatory system presided over by the PCC. It implies that the inaccuracy and untrustworthiness of newspapers could have been dealt with by the industry’s watchdog. And yet Meyer said that the MST had not actually spoken to the PCC before publishing their report. [The MST deny this – see Martin Moore’s comment on this post]
That will happen in the second stage apparently, when the newspaper people get a chance to respond. I am not sure whether it wll be worth their while to do so when the initial report is so sure of its position.
A poll by YouGov for the MST says that the public say they don’t trust the newspapers to be accurate. Well, that is hardly news. I am not sure if there is ANYONE that the public is prepared to tell a pollster that they trust right now.
The MST points out that a combination of the Internet and recession is hitting newspaper resources. That, too, is not exactly scoop of the year.
And finally, it echoes Nick Davies’ chournalism thesis, that newspapers are driving standards down to keep profit margins up.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the basic analysis of pressures upon newspapers. However, I would contest the assumption that accuracy has worsened. In many ways I would argue that newspapers are less crass and give more data than ever before. This is partly because their readers are better informed, and partly because in a declining market, they have had to get their acts together and be less offensive to certain readerships. Their online operations also mean that readers have a chance to respond directly to what is written.
So I find it odd that the MST, which is doing some really interestng research on accuracy Online, has missed this opportunity to offer a more supportive critique at such a vital moment of change.
I think that all of us – including those newspapers currently facing apocalyptic forecasts for their very existence – should accept that newspapers could benefit from being more accurate and trustworthy. You only have to look at the reporting of debates around science, for example, to see how important it is that journalists (on all platforms) should improve their understanding, be less prey to PR influence, and to explain better these complex and important stories. In that sense, the MST is asking the right queston. How can this happen?
In the end I profoundly disagree with their general idea that more regulation and government intervention is the answer. ‘Better an imperfect press than a muzzled one’ is my knee-jerk reaction. Newspapers are already losing their grip on public discourse and their power over public life is waning. The Internet offers greater accountability and transparency through market forces and open communication. So why raise the spectre of old-fashioned control, censure and regulation through central government? Are there ANY examples anywhere in the world where that has not led to greater secrecy, corruption and lower standards of journalism?
I find the MST stance confusing. Sir David is no advocate of government intervention. I have recently heard him defend the private sector free media as a business model and a way of upholding standards. Unless, of course, he means this to be true only in the case of the Financial Times.
Polis has recently published a report on Financial Journalism, so we, too, believe that standards in the news media need constant scrutiny. Journalists should always be subject to the law and held responsible for their mistakes. But as we point out in our report on economic and business coverage, standards are set by a complex mixture of commercial, ethical, editorial and regulatory pressures, with the latter perhaps the least important.
News is an innately imperfect craft. It is done in a rush without all the facts. But the structural pressures that produce distortion and deception have little to do with regulation. Yes, the extremely bad cases such as the Express’ reporting of the McCanns should have been dealt with as they arose, rather than waiting until complaints had been filed and legal action taken. However, in general, standards are low for a series of cultural and editorial reasons.
I hope the MST review will now focus on how new technologies and new production processes can improve journalism as a whole, rather than get into a battle with the PCC. Newspapers have taken a disastrous view in the past of standards. They treated the public with contempt. Now the public is voting with their feet and heading off to the Internet and elsewhere.
Some editors, such as Rebekah Wade at The Sun have woken up to this and are trying to reconnect with their readers in a more meaningful way that will happen online as much as through the newspaper itself.
As newspaper sales continue to decline, it is a combination of market and technological forces that must drive trust and accuracy. The job of government and other institutions is to provide the resources for the kind of public service journalism that can give the citizen what they want.
Here is the response from MST Director Martin Moore post which I have extracted from his comment to this article:
“Just to clarify a few things about our report. It does not recommend State regulation – it says the opposite. It does not say British journalism is bad – it says most journalism is very good but, if something written is inaccurate or intrusive, then you ought to have someone or somewhere to go that is independent and effective. The current system is neither independent nor effective. Oh, and we did speak to the PCC. To the Director, and to the Deputy Director. And we made a public call for them to conduct a review last summer – on which we said we were happy to collaborate. The call was ignored.”
Read Stephen Glover’s trenchent defence of the British press here
Hello Charlie,
Just to clarify a few things about our report. It does not recommend State regulation – it says the opposite. It does not say British journalism is bad – it says most journalism is very good but, if something written is inaccurate or intrusive, then you ought to have someone or somewhere to go that is independent and effective. The current system is neither independent nor effective. Oh, and we did speak to the PCC. To the Director, and to the Deputy Director. And we made a public call for them to conduct a review last summer – on which we said we were happy to collaborate. The call was ignored.
If you’d like to speak to me or anyone else involved in putting the report together, please do get in touch via email, phone or mediastandardstrust.blogspot.com
I agree that the report seems a little strange in both its timing and its concept.Stephen Glover puts his finger on it in his piece in the Indy today which I am sure you have already seen.
You are correct in saying that a poll that comes out with the news that the public doesn’t trust the media is hardly news.
I would like to see the facts about the innacuracies that the report has come out with.
However I still believe that this is a warning shot for the media.There is only a certain level of cuts that you can make before quality starts to decline.
We are already getting examples in the local media where events are simply not covered due to lack of staff or where PR content is rewritten
Hello
Well, I am astonished at the suggestion that we took part in this inquiry. We didn’t know about it until Friday. No points in it were put to us (as will be apparent from a reading of it). The MST did not come (or ask to come) to the PCC to do any research for it. Martin and I have met in the past and discussed the PCC in general, and he had a cup of coffee with my deputy in May last year. But that’s it. There have been no discussions at all in the context of this report. To suggest otherwise is wrong – and frankly extraordinary when the authors are dishing it out about standards of accuracy.
Charlie – your headline at the top of this blog misrepresents the report, as does the thrust of your text. The report is not about trust. And, as Martin has said, it is not about statutory regulation. It is about the inability of the PCC either to protect the public from the worst excesses of the press or to promote higher journalistic standards.
I do find this almost knee-jerk response amongst journalists to defend the PCC very strange. It does the craft of journalism no favours at all. In his book of nearly 20 years ago, Ray Snoddy quotes a wonderful passage from a speech by Harold Evans: “A delinquent press diminishes, and diminishes logarithmically, freedom and democracy”. It was no exaggeration.
And yet the PCC stands by while the McCann family and their friends are trashed by journalists? And while at least 305 journalists – probably the tip of the iceberg – are suspected of illegally trading in confidential information? Be honest – if this kind of criminal deception and reckless incompetence were manifested in any other occupation, there would be (and have been) screams for heads to roll. Why should the press be exempt from the standards of competence and transparency that have – quite properly – been imposed elsewhere?
I’m afraid I profoundly disagree that the answer is on the internet, where there is a wonderful cacophany of news, views, and rabid opinionising but very little comparable investment in newsgathering. It’s also astonishingly repetitive and derivative, as the Goldsmiths research will be revealing.
And it’s not good enough to say that standards of accuracy are improving. So are standards of legal advice and medical care. But the GMC was self-serving and self-aggrandising and had to be reformed. Doctors accepted that. The Law Society was too intent on looking after its own. After Clementi, lawyers accepted that. The PCC is run by the industry for the industry. Journalists know that but obstinately refuse to accept the need for a radical overhaul.
It doesn’t need central government, it doesn’t need statutes. It needs imagination, and a recognition amongst journalists that the status quo is just not good enough. And it also needs Sir Christopher Meyer to stop trying to shout down criticism with daft accusations and to start engaging in dialogue. If he doesn’t, I hope Tim Toulmin will.
(For info, I was joint author of the report with Martin, and commissioned the Trust survey for the BJR which the report quotes).
Hi Steve,
Charlie here. Thanks for your detailed comment. I won’t hog the debate as I have had my initial say but here are a few points.
1. I think that trust is at the heart of this. You don’t provide evidence of a decline in accuracy. Instead you use the YouGov poll of public opinion plus a list of press failings to suggest ‘something must be done’. That sounds to me like an argument about how much we believe journalism is ‘accurate’, or what I would call ‘trust’.
2. I said myself that the defensive reaction against regulation is ‘knee-jerk’ but it does not mean that I defend everything about the PCC. They have reformed and they have offered dialogue. But the significant intervention you desire in newspaper journalism (which I suspect is something akin to broadcasting regulation) will need a completely new mechanism. That is never going to come from the industry so it will require government intervention.
3. Journalism is not the same as medicine or the law.
4. I never argue that ‘the answer’ is on the Internet. Networked journalism is always a sythesis of existing media and new formats and processes. I believe more strongly than you or Goldsmith’s that these new forms of journalism offer greater diversity beyond mainstream media. My argument has always been that new media technologies offer a way of reconfiguring newspaper and other media into something more responsible and responsive. You dismiss the Internet because it doesn’t look like the BBC. Goldsmith’s dismiss it because it hasn’t brought about some Progressive Nirvana.
Meanwhile, newspapers are going down the pan and Andy Burnham wants to regulate the Internet. I am not sure the government that brought us the Government computer screw ups and general economic mayhem can really be trusted to do that.
Let’s hope this debate throws up an alternative.
cheers
Charlie
I think Q1 of the MST/YouGov survey is poorly composed and confusing.
Behaving responsibly is not only vague — it would also mean something different for the types of entities specified — only the BBC is remotely comparable to newspapers.
And the authors equate ‘responsible behavior’ with what exactly? To a survey respondent, it could mean many different things. Charlie basically took it as trust, and so did I. I ordinarily take terms like that at face value and don’t think we should feign confusion where there is none, but in this case it’s an unreasonably vague term to use so casually.
Also, the MST should not attempt to average ordinal variables in Q1. It’s a meaningless thing to do…
Finally, (and this is really picky, I realise) the ordinal scales 2-4 need verbal labels. If you only label the extreme categories it can cause confusion — what does 3 mean — ‘sometimes’ or ‘some newspapers can be trusted, some cannot’?
Apart from that, I agree with Charlie that the results — what one might call low levels of trust in social institutions — are unsurprising.
Sorry Charlie, but you’ve completely missed the point. Worse, you’re trying to substitute your own questions and then pretend they’re ours. This straw man approach is exactly the same as other PCC apologists and does nothing to reassure critics that there is real substance to arguments on the other side.
I said trust is not the issue. You cannot simply assert that it is, and then lecture us about trust.
I don’t provide evidence of a decline in accuracy, because I never said there was a decline. There is a serious issue around standards, whether or not there has been a decline, because in a 21st century democracy we expect higher standards in every area of public life.
You make assumptions about intervention being akin to broadcast intervention which neither I nor the report mentions. Raising the deathly spectre of statutory regulation seems to be a favourite tactic, but it wasn’t done by the Media Standards Trust.
And to assert that journalism is not law or medicine is just trite: the argument is about accountability, and you really ought to address the issues raised by Onora O’Neill and others about why journalists should, uniquely, be exempt from the kind of accountability the public and the press now routinely expect from lawyers, doctors, the police, social workers, teachers and so on.
Finally, to say that I “dismiss the Internet because it doesn’t look like the BBC” is insulting nonsense. I neither said nor implied any such thing.
Neither you nor Stephen Glover nor Tim Toulmin have answered any of the substantive questions we have raised. Why should the PCC be immune from the Freedom of Information Act? Isn’t that a delicious irony?
Why did the PCC have nothing to say about the grossly inaccurate and recklessly incompetent coverage of Madeleine McCann?
Why don’t we know who pays for the PCC and how much they pay?
Why is there no information about the complaints being made?
Why does the PCC spend almost nothing promoting itself to the public while the Advertising Standards Agency spends over £500,000 each year? Where is the public profile enjoyed by Ofcom and the ASA?
If there are good answers to these questions and many others posed by the MST report, let’s hear them. But please don’t contrive and then answer different questions which have not even been posed.
What exactly is the problem with statutory regulation of the press? Our TV news is regulated for impartiality and accuracy and – despite flaws – well trusted by the public. The national newspaper market is overwhelming biased in favour of a narrow right wing view and littered with inaccuracy that borders on the dishonest (see any Daily Mail report into crime, for example). This may suit people of a particular political persuasion, but cannot be regarded as healthy or desirable. Is there a democracy anywhere that envies our newspapers?
To AlexC:
‘What exactly is the problem with statutory regulation of the press? ‘
It impairs freedom of expression in the name of ‘accuracy’. We should keep government regulation of all forms of content, whether newspaper or broadcast to an absolute minimum.
The 20th century has shown that government control over content is a much worse problem than inaccurate or puffed stories by journalists.
This is the text of a letter from Sir Christopher Meyer to the Media Standards Trust Chair:
Anthony Salz Esq
Thank you for your letter of 6 February, which enclosed part 1 of your report “A More Accountable Press”. You asked if you, and two of your colleagues, could meet me to discuss part 2 of your review.
I will certainly consider the possibility of a meeting. But, it is hard to see what this might achieve unless part 2 acknowledges and corrects the innumerable inaccuracies and flawed analysis of part 1. The PCC must also give priority to the forthcoming hearing of the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport (see below). You no doubt will wish to digest its analysis and recommendations before moving to your next stage.
I am afraid that we also require some reassurance about the credentials of those carrying out the inquiry. In addition to the inaccuracies – some as basic as the false claim that the ASA was modelled on the PCC – the report does not appear to have been written by anyone with much understanding of self-regulation or the relationship between the PCC and the law. More fundamentally, we have to ask whether this enterprise is being undertaken in good faith. We were dismayed that the Trust should be willing to allow publication of a strident report that is, by virtue of your failure to offer us any opportunity to contribute, both unbalanced and misleading.
Your director has compounded suspicions of bad faith by publicly suggesting that there was consultation with the PCC in the preparation of the report: this is a grave falsehood, for which I understand he has now apologised following the intervention of Sir David Bell.
In short, your report may be only “diagnostic”. But, if the diagnosis is flawed, how can the prescription be any better?
The brevity of my exchange with Sir David Bell on the Today programme of 9 February did not allow me to set out in detail the report’s weaknesses. Here in summary are some of the most egregious. The list is far from exhaustive.
The report (and subsequently Sir David Bell and Dame Helena Kennedy) fundamentally misinterpret the PCC’s statistics, which are set out in detail on our website and in our annual report. The allegation that only “1 in 250” complaints is upheld is wholly misleading. If one were to follow this eccentric statistical interpretation, it would be equally justifiable to say – and equally misleading – that only 1 in 250 complaints is rejected. You have presumably based your calculation on the ratio of formal adjudications to the gross number of complaints. This methodology is flawed for three reasons.
Firstly, and in line with other similar bodies, only about a third of the gross number of complaints fall under our jurisdiction.
Secondly, we receive duplicated complaints that are counted individually in the total statistics, but only as one formal ruling, because they relate to only one article.
Thirdly, and most importantly, you appear to confuse adjudications with rulings. All adjudications are rulings; but not all rulings are adjudications. This should be obvious from our website and annual reports. In 2008, 1420 complaints fell for consideration under the Code. About half of these cases involved a potential breach of the Code. Most of these were successfully mediated following our intervention. Mediation is, of course, increasingly recommended – including by Lord Woolf and Alan Rusbridger in his recent New York Review of Books piece on the Tesco libel affair– as the best way of settling disputes, where possible. As a result, we had to adjudicate formally in only 45 cases where it had proved impossible to resolve the complaint, or where there was an important issue of principle at stake. Of these, half were upheld. This underlines the success of our mediation service, which last year resolved 552 complaints to the customer’s satisfaction, an all time record. Incidentally, our customer satisfaction figures – independently audited and available for inspection – have been going up year-on-year.
This is by no means a full record of our activity. Many issues are now sorted out before publication, so that no complaint is necessary. By definition, these approaches for help are not classified as formal complaints, even though they are sorted out to the satisfaction of the person contacting us. Our pre-publication work and anti-harassment service are growth areas. Your report virtually ignores this activity.
Nor, bizarrely, does your report make any mention of the most recent detailed enquiry into self-regulation, namely that of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, published in 2007. The failure to take its analysis and recommendations into account is inexcusable, especially as the MST cites the far less relevant 2008 House of Lords enquiry into media ownership, where self-regulation was not the primary focus.
Given that self-regulation will later this year be the subject of a further Select Committee hearing – the third such in 6 years – it is hard to understand how the MST can conclude that the PCC is not accountable. The Select Committee, which will look at many of the issues that apparently concern the MST, has already properly set out the scope of its inquiry without prejudging its findings by an attack on the PCC. Furthermore, the Chairman and some of his colleagues will visit the PCC before the hearings open, as they did in 2007. By comparison with the Select Committee, the MST is guilty of very poor practice.
Unlike the MST, the Select Committee appears to recognise that the regulation of media content raises a number of complex factors; and that the debate cannot be confined to the merits or otherwise of “reforming” the PCC. For example, I understand that the Committee will want to look at whether the law has got the balance right on matters of privacy and freedom of the press. This takes us into territory where consideration will have to be given to the adequacy of Section 12 of the Human Rights Act in protecting free speech; the impact of Conditional Fee Arrangements on free expression; the growth of libel tourism; and many other structural issues affecting the way that editorial content is regulated.
There is no hint of these issues in your supposedly ‘diagnostic’ report. Instead, the MST baldly asserts that on matters of privacy the PCC is being increasingly by-passed by the courts. How can that be when in 2008 we ruled on 329 separate privacy complaints under the Code, a 35% increase on the previous year and far more than those handled by the courts? The public have a clear preference for our system, which is free, fast and does not force them to repeat in open court embarrassing details of their private life.
The assertion that the PCC has failed to make changes like other regulatory systems is astonishing in its ignorance. There is an unwarranted, underlying assumption that there is a common template for all regulatory systems. No one in their right mind would deny that the newspaper and magazine industry has unique properties. By definition so does its system of regulation. This point of principle aside, since 2003 the PCC has undergone profound changes in a process of “permanent evolution”. We have created a Charter Commissioner to take complaints from those who think their cases have been badly handled; and a Charter Compliance Panel to run quality control on the way we handle cases. Both are independent bodies and write public reports each year. We have also: a) increased the lay majority on the Commission; b) introduced public advertising for new Commissioners; c) introduced annual reviews of the Code of Practice, inviting the public to put forward recommendations for change; d) put in place a 24/7 helpline to protect people from media harassment through “desist” notices ( a power not available to OfCom); e) enormously expanded our pre-publication pro-activity; f) instituted Open Days in the towns and cities of the UK; and g) extended our competence to cover audio/visual content on publication’s websites.
The assertion that we are trailing behind the radical structural and technological change affecting the industry is similarly perplexing. To the contrary, for several years now we have been at the forefront of the debate in any number of seminars and public events, and in discussions with politicians, other regulators and our international opposite numbers. Self-regulatory solutions are increasingly being relied on by officials and legislators across Europe as the web-based globalisation of media undermines formal systems of regulation. I have myself frequently said that the current regulatory architecture cannot endure; and that I would expect this to mean a greater reliance on self-regulation, not less.
We recognise that there is always room for improvement at the PCC; and we welcome debate on how to achieve this. But the points above are a serious indictment of the quality and integrity of your report. It strikes me as a terrible shame that you have wasted the opportunity to make a sensible contribution at a time when a free press and democracy itself in Britain are facing unprecedented challenge.
yours etc
Sir Christopher Meyer
To Russ:
In considering regulated vs ‘free’ press in the context of 20th century history: how successful was the unregulated Western liberal press in reporting
1. Mass murder of US/UK backed dictators from Pinochet to Suharto
2. Genocidal conflicts in Africa
3. Government fabrication and deception in the run up to the last Gulf War
Millions of people died in the 20th century, either directly or indirectly by the hands of our government whilst the ‘unregulated’ press stood idly by.
It goes without saying that state controlled press used as an instrument for propaganda is deplorable but that does not mean we can’t in principle have a form of press regulation that defends against both commercial as well as political pressures.
Reply to Jr:
Explain to me how a system of statutory press regulation would require / ensure ‘successful’ reporting of genocidal conflicts in Africa (your item 2, above).
Would you create a Ministry of Truth?
And finally, it echoes Nick Davies’ chournalism thesis, that newspapers are driving standards down to keep profit