Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Media Standards Trust

NewsInnovation videos from @newsmatters: featuring @kevglobal, @currybet, @markng, @simonw, @willperrin

Judith Townend — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:02:41 +0000

The Media Standards Trust has finished uploading content from its NewsInnovation event, held in association with NESTA and the WSRI, earlier this month to its YouTube channel.

[Previous Journalism.co.uk coverage at this link]

We’ll embed the first segment of each session, and for further installments follow the links below each video.

Martin Moore and Mark Ng of the Media Standards Trust explain the Value Added News project, launched in association with the AP.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Kevin Anderson (@kevglobal) Guardian blogs editor talks about news business models.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Ben Campbell talks about the Media Standards Trust website, Journalisted.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Will Perrin (@willperrin) on digital possibilities for the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.

Part 2.

Simon Willison (@simonw) of The Guardian talks about using the crowd to sift through MPs’ expenses.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Martin Belam (@currybet) information architect at the Guardian on ‘The tyranny of chronology’.

Part 2, Part 3.

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The growth of online watchdogs: are they ‘journalism’ and does it matter?

Judith Townend — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:04:51 +0000

The influence of UK-based democracy organisation, mySociety, often gets forgotten, perhaps deliberately downplayed, in the British press. Let’s go back to the MP expenses row, for example. Well before the Telegraph played its central role in exposing the various scandals, mySociety saw a significant campaign victory when Gordon Brown U-turned on an attempt to keep certain MP expenses details private, back in January.

At the time, mySociety’s founder, Tom Steinberg said: “This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellweather for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the internet has seen to that.” But did mySociety’s, in my view, undeniably influential part get reported in the UK press? Not really.

So it was good to see that in Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s speech at the Media Standards Trust event earlier this week, all of which will be available to watch here, he opened with examples of online projects (two mentions for mySociety) – that do exactly what newspapers do – or used to – do. Is it journalism, but does it matter, he wondered.

Rusbridger gave three examples that showed, he said, ‘changes in how information is organised, personalised, ordered, stored, searched for, published and shared.’ These sites, he said, have many things in common with conventional journalism, ‘dealing with facts, with statistics, with information about public life, politics and services.’

FixMyStreet (mySociety). Just as the Cotswold Journal draws public attention to potholes, FixMyStreet allows users to identify problems in their local area, and get them noticed. “That to me is essentially what a local newspaper is or was,” Rusbridger said. It’s ‘much more responsive’ and allows a ‘direct transaction between the citizen and the council’ he said. And it’s ‘crucially cheaper than sending out a reporter and a photographer,’ he added. “I don’t know whether that’s journalism or not, I don’t know if that matters.”

TheyWorkForYou (mySociety). This, Rusbridger said, was ‘essentially what has replaced, or will replace’ parliamentary reporting, as he flashed up on the screen an example of the old-style reports from the Times in 1976. It’s ‘better than what went before’ he said. “I don’t know if that’s journalism or whether it matters.”

EveryBlock. It provides information on local areas, just as a local paper does or did. Adrian Holovaty’s US-based project allows one to ‘drill down into every neighbourhood’ in a personalised way, he said. Crimes on your route to work can be plotted. “I don’t know if that’s journalism or whether that matters but I think it’s fantastically interesting.”

This is the relevant part of Rusbridger’s speech:

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‘Why Journalism Matters’ by Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger): the video

Judith Townend — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:13:24 +0000

Journalism.co.uk coverage of ‘Why Journalism Matters’ by Guardian News&Media editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger at the British Academy on Wednesday evening:

Also worth a read:

The debate in the comments beneath the Guardian’s report on the public funding aspect.
Addiply’s Rick Waghorn picks up on a significant repetition of speech at this link.

You can now watch the speech for yourself, thanks to the Media Standards Trust (@newsmatters). Part one below, and the rest to follow on the organisation’s YouTube channel.

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Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger) on why Twitter matters

Judith Townend — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:38:15 +0000

Twitter got a big mention in Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s ‘Journalism Matters’ speech last night. Repeating his ‘future of newspaper’ Twitter recommendations made in Berlin in April (@amonck, @niemanlab, @jeffjarvis and @cshirky) he praised the way it could be used as a personalised filter for information consumption.

He used Guardian technology writer Jemima Kiss as one example of why to use it – she’s probably in labour, and twittering it, ‘as we speak’, he joked. Journalism.co.uk didn’t put its hand up to say ‘err, no – she’s already had all 10lb 6oz of it’ (we learned via Twitter, obviously).

He also mentioned @GuardianTech with its impressive 900,000+ followers, and showed how journalist Paul Lewis (@http://twitter.com/paul__lewis) had used his account to report from the G20 protests.

Before Rusbridger was reborn as @arusbridger he thought it was all a bit, well, ’silly’, but now he’s well and truly converted. In fact he thinks all Guardian journalists should use it: “I”m trying to get everyone to twitter”. He told this to a room of newspaper journalists in Norway and they asked whether he, as editor-in-chief, would have to moderate all those tweets?…

John Mair’s report on last night’s Media Standards Trust event here, and tweets from @journalism_live, and others captured by the #journmatters tag, below.

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Alan Rusbridger’s digital crystal ball: what next for ‘public information’ journalism?

John Mair — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:40:54 +0000

One of the more influential figures in British journalism – Alan Rusbridger the editor-in-chief of the Guardian and the Observer discussed his ‘why journalism matters’ at a star studded Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night. His audience included Lord Puttnam, Robert Peston, Roger Graef, Bill Hagerty, Felicity Green and Nick Cohen.

In his tour d’horizon Rusbridger chose to refer back to the past and, most importantly, forward to the future. He traced the origins of the recent seminal reporting on the G20 protests by Paul Lewis – which lead to a furore over the death of an innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson, after a phone video came to light. It was reportage taking the Guardian back to its foundations, Rusbridger said, drawing comparisons with its reporting of the Peterloo riots in Manchester in 1819.

That and Lewis’ work was based on simple journalistic principles of observing, digging for the truth and not giving up. “It was a piece of conventional reporting and tapping into the resources of a crowd,” he said. “There are thousands of reporters in any crowd nowadays. There was nothing to stop people from publishing those pictures but it needed the apparatus of a mainstream news organisation for that to cut through and have impact.”

Likewise on investigations. The money and time the Guardian had invested in the major series on tax avoidance earlier this year was, initially, simply the traditional way investigations were done. That story had been transformed by documents which came from readers of the series and were put first on the net before being injuncted by Barclays Bank. His audience had a sneak glimpse of them up on the screen.

But the days of journalists behind castle walls sending out articles ‘like mortars-some hit, some missed’ to readers were now gone. The process was thanks to the internet firmly a two-way one.

He quoted Jemina Kiss, the Guardian technology reporter, who has over 13,000 personal followers on Twitter and uses them to help research, shape and comment on her stories. Rusbridger admitted to being an initial Twitter sceptic, before his conversion: ‘I didn’t get it’. “Sometimes you are too old to keep up with all these things and Twitter just seemed silly and I didn’t have time to add it to all of these other things – but that was completely wrong.”

The Guardian editor looked back – all of 30 years – to the days of long and dull parliamentary reports in the broadsheet British press and compared them to the likes of EveryBlock on the internet, the US-based site which aggregates information in micro-areas to help plan journeys to work, and to avoid crime and other hazards. He’s not sure if it’s journalism, but ‘does it matter?’

Local struggles

But it was on the death of local news – on TV and in newspapers – that he was at his most challenging. ITV had all but retreated from the provision of it, with a final surrender due next year; local papers were feeling the economic heat severely and cutting back on the essential reporting of council, council committees and the courts – to the dismay of some judges. He called it the ‘collapse of the structure of political reporting’.

This ‘public information journalism’ should not be allowed to disappear, he said. It needed public subsidy. Rusbridger posited that it could be, but would not be, done by the BBC. More hopeful were the trials currently being run by the Press Association where they would act as a print and video agency / aggregrator for the country and syndicate those services to local papers/websites.

“This bit of journalism is going to have to be done by somebody,” Rusbridger said. “It makes me worry about all of those public authorities and courts which will in future operate without any kind of systematic public scrutiny. I don’t think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting.”

Rusbridger said local public service journalism was a ‘kind of utility’ which was just as important as gas and water. “We must face up to the fact that if there is no public subsidy, then some of this [public service] reporting will come to pass in this country,” he said. “The need is there [for subsidy]. It is going to be needed pretty quickly.”

Whilst modern journalism was evolving and being transformed by the new media, it still firmly mattered as did journalists, he said. “There are many things that mainstream media do, which in collaboration with others is still really important. The ability to take a large audience and amplify things and to give more weight to what would [otherwise] be fragments. Somebody has to have the job of pulling it all together.” All was not gloomy in Rusbridger’s digital crystal ball.

More to follow from Journalism.co.uk. The event was tweeted live via @journalism_live.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is currently editing a special issue of the journal ‘Ethical Space’ on the reporting of the Great Crash of ‘08. He will run a world-wide video conference, supported by Journalism.co.uk, on ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?’ in Coventry on October 28.

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A new blog for the MST’s independent press review group

Judith Townend — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:02:54 +0000

In May, Matthew Cain launched a new site, the Press Review Blog, as part of the second stage of the independent press review group’s work on behalf of the Media Standards Trust (MST). He is supporting the press review group in its examination of the effectiveness of press self-regulation, although the blog will not be part of the final review.

The first stage was the report on the current press self-regulatory system, strongly disputed by the PCC. The second stage will make recommendations for UK regulation.

The blog will track the proceedings of the current House of Commons Select Committee (latest update here) into press standards, media law and privacy.

“I’ve started the press review blog in light of the considerable focus on media and regulatory issues, for example Baby P, Alfie Patten, MPs expenses,” Cain told Journalism.co.uk.

“The MST wanted to capture some of those issues and think through what we can learn from debates about reforms to self-regulation in other areas, such as Parliament and the lobbying industry; the debates resulting from the select committee inquiry; and continuing concerns about the impact of libel and privacy cases on the freedom of the press.

“The review group has been following the select committee hearings closely but because the committee’s inquiry is so extensive and might not publish until the autumn, we wanted to ensure that there we still had a public presence to participate in relevant debates.

“The blog isn’t intended to be a formal contribution to the review but a space to log issues, develop our thinking and ensure that our work is as transparent and open as possible.”

Matthew Cain can be contacted via matthew DOT cain AT mediastandardstrust.org or by calling 020 7608 8112.

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Why the PCC didn’t appear at Frontline event and Steve Hewlett’s take on UK press regulation

Judith Townend — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:16:05 +0000

The increasingly heated UK press regulation debate continued this week. Yesterday saw former PCC chair, Sir Christopher Meyer, appear on BBC Two’s Daily Politics Show, to defend the body, with criticisms offered by Roy Greenslade.

And here’s an update from an event a few weeks ago during which the Independent’s editor, Roger Alton – a former PCC member – defended the body at a debate hosted at the Frontline Club (reported at this link by Press Gazette). The event is still well worth a watch if you have the time, with a mixed line-up led by Radio Four Media Show’s Steve Hewlett.

Alton, along with Steven Barnett, special advisor for the Media Standards Trust report ‘A More Accountable Press, Part One’, and Albert Scardino, the broadcaster and commentator, hotly debated the current state of affairs.

Alton: “I don’t want to be the only person live on the web speaking up for the PCC.”

Debate host Steve Hewlett said that the PCC had been invited to participate but had chosen not to. Following the claim up, Journalism.co.uk asked PCC director Tim Toulmin why not. He said it was for a couple of reasons:

“First, we are focusing on the select committee inquiry at the moment, and think that the time to debate these big issues is within the context of their report, which of course is a more serious enterprise than the Media Standards Trust’s effort. Secondly, our dealings so far with the MST have shown them to be rude and not particularly well informed – which may sound harsh, but is a reason for not wanting to spend a precious evening being further exposed to their nonsense.”

That’s straight from the press regulation horse’s mouth.

Alton had also been particularly candid and, erm, descriptive in his language during the event – especially before he realised it was going out live. For example:

Alton: “The McCanns was a thing of such astonishing ghastliness by the press, you do indeed feel like viscerating your own bladder with it. I mean, it’s absolutely awful. But you can’t say the whole industry is fucked (…) What’s the basis for this conversation? It’s fairly confidential?”

Hewlett: “It’s being confidentially live broadcast…”

Alton’s face as he looks up to the camera, shown below:

Broadcaster and writer Steve Hewlett offered his take on the debate to Journalism.co.uk at the end of the Frontline event. For Hewlett, the issue is maintaining freedom of expression. “I think the press has always been disliked and it’s always been held in low regard (…) journalists may just be bottom feeders, but democracy is needed. You wouldn’t expect the press to be popular and well-thought of and I’m not surprised by that.”

“Multiplicity of regulation is one of the things that guarantees freedom of expression in a country that is prone to regulating everything out of existence if it can,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“The last thing you’d want is everyone regulated in the same way,” he added.

Robert Peston is able to have freedom in his BBC blog, but he also has quite a lot of restrictions on what he can say, Hewlett added. “For example, the level of proof the BBC will insist is at a higher level than many of their City [correspondent] counterparts [in newspapers].

“Traditional media that don’t deliver value are going to go out of business,” Hewlett said, adding that there are ‘probably one too many papers’ in the UK.

Hewlett said that the Media Standards Trust had ‘opened the door’ to criticism by the PCC in its review of UK press regulation, for which it consulted an independent peer review group for part one of the ‘A More Accountable Press’ report.

“If you look at the statistics [cited in the report] it’s so easy to question,” Hewlett said, referring to specific examples in the report – for example, that ‘only 0.7 per cent of complaints are adjudicated on’. But, Hewlett said, that omits complaints dealt with by mediation rather than adjudication and complaints that are on the same issue.

While saying that he ‘held no candle’ for the PCC at all, Hewlett said the fact the MST’s authors had been ‘partial’ in the way they presented their data, and that they didn’t raise issues with the PCC prior to publication led to an ‘open goal’ for Sir Christopher Meyer and the PCC, who were able to say the report was partial, misleading and that the PCC hadn’t been appropriately consulted.

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UK press regulation discussed at the Frontline Club

Judith Townend — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:21:40 +0000

At the Frontline Club tonight: a discussion of press standards, self-regulation and public trust on the question: Is the press accountable enough?

Click To Play

The debate features:

Roger Alton, editor of The Independent
Steven Barnett, professor of communications at the University of Westminster who researched the Media Standards Trust report ‘A More Accountable Press’
Albert Scardino, an independent journalist and commentator
Steve Hewlett, a writer and broadcast consultant who currently presents The Media Show on Radio 4.

From the Frontline Blog:

“According to a report published by the Media Standards Trust, the current system of press self-regulation is not successfully protecting either the press or the public. The current system is not, the report claims, effective enough, accountable enough, or transparent enough, and does not reflect the transformed media environment. So should Britain’s system of press self-regulation be over-hauled and if it is, will it do anything to restore public faith in the press?”

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MST response to Press Complaints Commission letter: “Suggestion of bad faith is entirely unjustified,” says Salz

Judith Townend — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:06:35 +0000

Anthony Salz, who is chair of the Independent Press Review Group and also on the Board of the Media Standards Trust, has replied to a letter from the chair of the Press Complaints Commission, Sir Christopher Meyer, (February 19, 2009), which made criticisms of the MST review calling for reform of UK press regulation, published on February 9, 2009.

Wednesday 11th March

Dear Sir Christopher,

Thank you for your letter of 19 February.

We will, of course, take it into account in the second stage of the review. In the meantime I feel I should reply to some particular assertions you make about the report.

1 Bad Faith

You suggest that the review is not being undertaken in good faith because we did not ask you to contribute to what you describe as a strident report. This suggestion of bad faith is entirely unjustified. I also strongly object to your personalised attack on the Director of the Media Standards Trust (MST).

The MST is an independent registered charity. It operates much like any other think tank and receives funding by donations from Foundations and individuals. This has included grants from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. It was set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public.

We state clearly in the report that it represents Part 1 of a two-stage review. The first part is an analysis of the current system of self-regulation (including, apart from the PCC, the legal cases, issues concerning user-generated content, the Motorman investigation, the challenge to achieve consistency of regulation and governance of regulators). This is based on publicly available information and on the findings of a recent YouGov poll that the MST commissioned.

No-one was formally consulted in the first stage. The analysis in Part 1 was always intended to start a debate and provide a basis from which we could consult widely. Consultation with the PCC alone in advance would have been inappropriate. We felt it important that Part 1 should not be influenced by a key body with a particular interest. The PCC has shown that it is, of course, well placed to obtain media coverage for its reply.

All members of the Review Group feel that there is a need for change and that the report facilitates a debate. We are keen that the PCC, those who have been involved with it and its stakeholders are part of that debate.

2 PCC Statistics

You claim that the report “fundamentally misinterpret[s] the PCC’s statistics”. Your letter cites one statistic in support of this claim – that less than 1 in 250 complaints is upheld in adjudication. This statistic is not in fact in the report, though it was mentioned by Sir David Bell on air. It derived from your 2007 Annual Report. Page 25 states that the PCC adjudicated in 32 cases of which 16 were upheld against newspapers, from a total of 4,340 complaints (equating to 1 upheld adjudication for every 271 complaints).

As your letter illustrates, the PCC’s figures and terminology are somewhat difficult to follow. The explanation in your letter is helpful, as is the recent addition to your website “the Facts behind the Figures”. Both show why readers of your published materials have had a hard time understanding what is going on. However you explain your terminology, 32 adjudications from 4,340 complaints is to me a small number of adjudications.

Our report acknowledges that you dispute the value of using adjudications as a measure (on page 28). We feel, nevertheless, that the number of adjudications is important – since it is the only public sanction the PCC has. Others have also argued for their importance. Professor Greenslade last year, for example, told the House of Lords Select Committee that “The failing of the PCC is the failing to adjudicate often enough”. Without adjudication, he went on to say, “newspapers escape censure and punishment too often when they actually at the final hour do some kind of deal to get themselves out of a mess, when they breach the rules as it were”.

3 Inaccuracy

You stated on air, and repeat in your letter, that the report has many inaccuracies. In addition to the 1:250 point above, you cite only the statement that the ASA was modelled on the PCC. You are right: it was in fact modelled on the Press Council, the predecessor to the PCC (Richard Shannon, A Press Free and Responsible, p.13). The substance of the point still stands but we will, of course, correct the reference.

4 2007 Select Committee

In your letter you criticise the report for failing to mention the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, 2007. You suggest that this Select Committee makes the PCC accountable. The CMS Select Committee has led important examinations of aspects of self-regulation although it is not constituted to hold the PCC to account. Select Committees are held at irregular intervals and the Committee ‘chooses its own subjects of inquiry’ (from its website). The 2007 Select Committee, for example, focused closely on the issues raised by the harassment of Kate Middleton, Clive Goodman’s conviction, and Operation Motorman.

Reference to the 2007 Select Committee report might have been useful. It expressed concern about the ‘complacency of the industry’s reaction to evidence presented by the Information Commissioner showing that large numbers of journalists had had dealings with a private investigator known to have obtained personal data by illegal means’ (p.3). It went on to say ‘we are severely critical of the journalists’ employers for making little or no real effort to investigate the detail of their employees’ transactions. If the industry is not prepared to act unless a breach of the law is already shown to have occurred, then the whole justification for self-regulation is seriously undermined’ (p.3).

It said that the current form of press self-regulation offered more protection than relying exclusively on the law. This is important and should indeed be a purpose of self-regulation. It noted (as we do in our report) that the Press Complaints Commission ‘has evolved’, and said that it had ‘become a more open body which provides a better service to complainants’. However, it also made clear that ‘This Report is not a broad look at whether the system of self-regulation as currently operated by the industry is the best way to curb unjustified practices and punish those who publish material obtained in such ways. To reach a properly informed view on such a complex subject would require more time and more evidence’ (p.5).

The same Select Committee concluded its Summary by saying that ‘The system for regulation of the press raises serious and complex issues which may merit a broader investigation than we have been able to undertake here. We believe that this is a subject which… deserves careful examination in the future’ (p.4).

These statements, taken together, both acknowledge positive changes in the PCC and support the case for a broader review of press self-regulation.

5 Some Substantive Questions

You say the PCC must give priority to the forthcoming hearing of the Select Committee. After this, I would be interested to meet with you and your colleagues to hear the PCC’s views on some of the substantive questions that are raised about future press regulation. For example:
•    Is it sufficient that the PCC’s constitution essentially sets it up only as a complaints-handling body?
•    Would it not be preferable to avoid having working editors on the Press Complaints Commission (as distinct from those who have worked in journalism)?
•    Would the position of the PCC as a regulator be assisted if it could be given greater powers to ‘enforce’ its decisions for the benefit of a complainant, making it more ‘competitive’ with the legal route?
•    Would you consider that there should ideally be some structure for independent appeal against a decision made by the PCC?
•    How might the PCC change in order to meet growing expectations of public accountability (expectations that are fed by the press)?
•    Why should the PCC not be covered by the Freedom of Information Act (assuming that it would be possible to protect the privacy of complainants who wanted it)?
•    Is there any reason why the PCC should not make its sources of revenue transparent?

We have been clear that our first report is a starting point for debate. Though I welcome your response, I do not accept your characterisation of our report.

I look forward to a discussion in the coming months of the issues raised about the future shape of press regulation.

Yours sincerely,
Anthony Salz

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Meyer’s letter to the Media Standards Trust in full

Judith Townend — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:35:35 +0000

As reported on the main Journalism.co.uk site, here is the letter sent by the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Sir Christopher Meyer, to the Media Standards Trust in response to its request for participation in stage two of its ‘A More Accountable Press’ report:

From the Chairman

Anthony Salz Esq
Media Standards Trust
Discovery House
28-42 Banner Street
London
EC1Y 8QE

19 February 2009

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.

I look forward to your comments.

Sir Christopher Meyer

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