UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, it is 20 years since I was a journalist, so perhaps you would spare me the rotten oranges this afternoon. I am very glad I am out of it, frankly, because there has been a revolution. The revolution has been caused by digital developments. If you can get most of your news for free from a telephone, are you going to go down to the local shop and buy a newspaper? That has happened, it is going on and this report summarises it well. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg, in his brilliant and magisterial introduction, made proposals to level the playing field with digital media. I will not repeat what he said because he said it better than I can.

I want to focus on two specific threats to the future of journalism that this report does not touch on. The first is the online safety Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg’s, committee said in a previous report that it was concerned about the exemption from regulation of what the Government call “citizen journalism”. The trouble is that there is no clear definition of citizen journalism. If my next-door neighbour takes against the council’s policy on traffic, does his research, argues his case, puts it out online—yes, that is journalism, and yes, it can be protected. However, if the next-door neighbour instead takes against my approach to transphobia and posts vile threats against my family, is that citizen journalism? Not so much.

My second concern is journalistic standards. To be a journalist you do not have to have a professional qualification, as you would to be a lawyer or a doctor. I just got rung up one day and asked if I fancied a job as a journalist. There is no register that you can be thrown off and forbidden to practise. This seems to me inadequate.

What should take the place of this free-for-all? The proposals of Lord Justice Leveson, referred to earlier by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, at least gave people abused by the press a proper system for complaining, backed in the last resort by a royal charter. The remedy was generally accepted, including by Parliament —and then the rats got at it. Leveson recommended protection from costs for newspapers that joined a regulator compliant with his recommendations. So what did the Government do? Though Parliament passed the legislation, the Government simply refused to implement the critical Section 40 that would bring those cost-sharing things into effect. As a result—and we will come back to this in a minute—nobody much has joined any regulator that is Leveson-compliant. Not surprisingly, politicians prefer sucking up to Rupert Murdoch to protecting the public.

Instead we have IPSO, whose distinguished chairman is here today. As a regulator, IPSO has been shredded by a new publication by the academics Steve Barnett and Gordon Ramsay, entitled IPSO: Regulator or Complaints Handler? It quotes the Media Standards Trust research showing that, of 38 Leveson recommendations, IPSO satisfies only 13 and does not satisfy 25.

There is a compliant regulator under the rules set by the Press Recognition Panel, which is Impress, but the big publications have ignored it. IPSO procedures are designed to be procedurally flawless and substantively useless. I complained recently about a bogus poll in the Daily Express, which used methods that would have shamed a junior cub reporter on a local paper. IPSO ruled that this completely bogus poll was okay. Successive chairs—I hope the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is an exception—have flailed about in the IPSO quagmire, without success. We remember Sir Alan Moses, who became IPSO chair, breathing fire over its inadequacies, only to retire hurt.

If journalism is to flourish, good journalism needs to be protected and bad journalism punished. One way to punish bad journalism would be an effective complaints regulation system. IPSO is no such system and never will be. Bring back Leveson—or something even better.