Media Standards and Media Regulation

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and I share her view that a free press is a vital ingredient of a free society. A free press is an extension of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. It is not, and should never have become, a freedom for large corporate organisations to trash the lives of others and—when they chose to do so—to mislead the British public by presenting factual inaccuracies on quite a large scale.

Although it is important that we wait for Leveson, I hope that when the report comes the Government will indicate very quickly that they intend to legislate for a new regulatory system, which I shall come to in a moment. If they do not do so, I will look at bringing forward a Bill of the type that I presented to the House of Commons in 1992. I would make significant changes to that Bill, but the core would stay the same on media standards, to which the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, referred. Had that Bill been accepted at the time and become law on those issues of media standards—and I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, who, as Chief Whip of the Conservative Government of the time, played such a crucial part in seeing that that Bill did not become law—then the press would not have had such a bad time as it has had in recent years. It is very important to understand that. I say that knowing that I did not get everything right in that Bill, and there is one crucial change I would have made.

We would do well to remember that CP Scott said 90 years ago:

“Comment is free, but facts are sacred”.

If the media could get back to that, then we would go a long way to solving many of the problems. There is a tough choice to be made between state regulation and self-regulation. I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Sugar that we should have licensed journalists, but I also disagree profoundly with the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. As I said to him back in 1992, just because you have a regulator that is backed up by statute, that does not mean, as he said in his speech, that you have to license journalists. There are other ways of dealing with this, and I will come to them in a moment.

One reason why we want regulation kept out of state control of any kind is that there is a difference, as the noble Lord said earlier, between electronic media and printed media. Print media in this country have always been campaigning media, which means that they pursue political objectives; so the Guardian is seen as left wing and has a left-wing spin—and it is a spin—on its stories, and the Daily Mail has a right-wing spin on its stories. The BBC and ITV do not, although anybody on the left will tell you that they are on the right and anybody on the right will tell you they are on the left—but that is the way it goes. By and large, the campaigning nature of newspapers is an important thing to protect. That does not mean that the BBC and ITV are not capable of doing good investigative journalism with state regulation; they are, and they do. It is clearly not an either/or. It is more subtle than that.

I would favour a non-statutory body, but a non-statutory body has to have real teeth. That is what I want to say a little about. An independent Press Complaints Commission has to be independent of the media. I found nothing more offensive in the old Press Complaints Commission than the fact that the code of conduct was drawn up by an editor—largely by Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail at the time. The fatal flaw in that is that they tended to write something with let-out clauses. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, who said that the Press Complaints Commission’s code is good. It is not; it is bad. If you read it as a straightforward thing, it seems right. It says all the right things about not invading privacy unnecessarily and so on, but it has big get-out clauses. One of those says, quite simply, that it is all right to print anything if it is in the public interest to do so. That overrides all the other things and conditions. The press can say, “It is in the public interest, so we’ll do it”. There are other clauses where, had I more time, I could point out how cleverly worded they are. They allow a big let-out from the PCC.

Any regulation should not include pre-publication censorship. In a way, that is one of the core points. Do not put in pre-publication censorship: pre-publication censorship of a story would inhibit the freedom of journalists and editors. However, the other side of that is that they must take responsibility for what they do, whether in the court or in front of the regulatory body. That is what I mean when I talk about the freedom and responsibility of the press. There should be a conciliation service, but it should be backed up by some help for those people who complain. Those who need help are not people like me or people in powerful positions. They are small people who need someone to take their case for them, and possibly take it to court. The regulatory body should be funded like other regulatory bodies—I shall not go into that now because it is a long issue—and it should also have, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grade, here, the power to call for evidence and witnesses and be able to assert that power.

Let me deal with what happens in the case of a breach. Again, I disagree profoundly with the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, on this. There are a number of ways of dealing with a newspaper group or person who does not follow the PCC code or join the PCC. I shall give two simple examples in view of the limited time. If an organisation refuses to join the new independent body, one of the things you can do is say that its right to have the VAT exemption on newsprint is lost. That is a helpful fact. The other thing you can do—and you can do both these things—is allow the courts to recognise that a newspaper that is a member of the PCC and has shown a good record in its general observance of the PCC code will get a reduced sentence when it breaches, but one that is not and has not would receive a heavier fine if it breached the code. There are a number of ways to punish the newspaper if it tries to avoid the code.

Bear in mind that, by and large, although there are obviously very big exceptions to this, and clearly Jimmy Savile is one, people’s sexual lives should not be on the front pages of newspapers. Most sex stories are run because they sell newspapers. Newspapers’ hypocrisy is enormous. I always made it very clear that I would feel much more confident in defending the right of newspaper editors to protect privacy if I had seen photographs of, for example, their wives sunbathing semi-naked in a private setting, but you never see that and you never hear about their private lives. You only hear about the private lives of others, although there are one or two exceptions to that. The public interest is to have some form of regulation backed up by statutory powers, which must provide the new regulatory body—not unlike the Advertising Standards Authority—with the ability to take a case to court. Those are the ways forward.

My final point is about the coverage of politics. I disagree again with my noble friend Lord Puttnam. I think he was very naive in the Power report about the relationship between politics and the press. It is a very important relationship that needs to be protected, but it is being abused, as he rightly says. The reality is that politicians need the press, and vice versa. The way in which we use that is important, but it ought to be publicly open, and there also ought to be some controls on it too, not least in announcing the relationship between the press and politicians at times. Remember, though, at times stories would not run if you did not have a relationship between the elected politicians and the press.