Leveson Inquiry

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood]

My Lords, at the beginning of my remarks I should point out to the House that I am the non-executive chairman of the CN Group, the Cumbrian local media company.

In the fuzz and noise surrounding the deliberations and report of Sir Brian Leveson’s inquiry, a lot of commentators seem to have lost sight of the fact that the inquiry was not about hacking, which is and has for some time been a criminal offence. Rather, it was about the culture in which hacking and other forms of unethical behaviour came to be treated as generally acceptable. After all, the title of the Leveson report is, An inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, pointed out, we all expect a basic standard of ethical behaviour around the institutions that are the building blocks of everyday life—Parliament, government, the Civil Service, commerce, financial services and banking. Equally, and quite rightly, we expect it from the press, where the Editors’ Code is the road map for reputable and ethical journalism—that is to say, about what it does and how it does it. That is not the same as gagging the press from being radical and anti-establishment. Of course, the problem is that in parts of the press, and especially, I fear, in the national press, standards have fallen below what they should have been.

The immediate purpose of the Leveson report is to provide the springboard for defining and establishing a successor to the PCC which, in its present form, has become discredited. However, in my view, the most important part of the Leveson report, certainly in the longer term, is part 6 of chapter 8, on page 1,790. I would not claim that I had meticulously read all the preceding pages. In paragraph 6.21, he looks beyond the immediate issues of the Press Complaints Commission and its successor and discusses things on which he has subsequently elaborated at much greater length in speeches in Australia last year.

As we speak, newspaper presses are being decommissioned and sold for scrap. Last month, Newsweek in its printed form was available for the last time in the Library. This month, it has all gone digital, which means, in the words of a Q&A for its readers:

“You will be able to enjoy Newsweek on any device or platform that we support, and we’ll notify you as new platforms become available so you will have the option to change the version you receive”.

Earlier last year, the Seattle Times, admittedly the second paper in the city, went entirely digital. In this area, where the United States leads, the United Kingdom tends to follow—and very frequently rather more quickly than you might expect.

This revolution matters, because regulation surrounding media behaviour has traditionally depended on two things—platform and jurisdiction. The platform up until now, be it newspaper, television, radio or whatever, has been the obvious focus for media regulation. Jurisdiction has been the obvious envelope to put round it, because it was the obvious limit to the marketplace in which the products were in circulation. But the digital revolution, in the form of convergence, means that all these means of communication are now electronic binary code. The same code delivers across a whole range of different platforms, such as computers, tablets, mobiles and internet protocol television, and across any jurisdiction. Television news and current affairs are morphing into blogs and websites, which in turn are merging with newspapers, which now have moving images on their apps, websites, and so on. As the printing presses go to the physical scrapyard, the framework for regulation is going to the metaphorical one. This is the real challenge of anyone trying to place an ethical framework around the media in the future since, as I have already shown, our existing approach is built around distinct platforms that will become increasingly irrelevant. That is happening in parallel with traditional legal jurisdictional boundaries becoming increasingly porous.

The “ugly duckling”, if I can put it that way, of contemporary British politics—the European Union—has probably done as much thinking about these kinds of things as anyone else in its development of regulation and consumer protection across, and inherent in, the European single market, much of which is conducted by electronic means. In the case of the single market, specifically in media products, the audiovisual media services directive has put in place an approach that gives national authorities some legal ability to intervene in cross-border services emanating from outside their own national jurisdictions but within the European Union. This may be a place where, in the medium term, we should start seeing what we can find which could teach us helpful lessons.

We must also remember that there is the greatest commonality in the media in this country with the United States, which is of course not within the jurisdiction of the European Union. We must not overlook the fact that this is a two-way street. After all, the biggest online website in the world is now, I believe, the Mail Online, which has 50 million unique users a month. The Guardian website is probably third. On a whole range of levels, the relationship between the two English-speaking media areas needs to be examined with care.

In the short term, we need to find a replacement and successor to the Press Complaints Commission that runs with the grain of our traditions and our traditional guarantees of freedoms in this country. For the longer term, more importantly, we need to think through the implications of what has happened both in the press and around the BBC in recent months and see what lessons they can teach us in the evolving world of digital convergence. In this House, in the Communications Committee, we have started to do that in our current inquiry, and it does not look as if there is an immediate and obvious answer. But it is important that we start thinking now, since the commercial and technological developments of today, which are a revolutionary evolution taking place with hardly any reference to us as legislators or to Governments, are going to render the traditional approach to media regulation anachronistic. That is a much greater and more important challenge than simply finding a short-term successor to the Press Complaints Commission.