But go to the PCC website and you will find something like defiance. We do a great job helping people with complaints, they say. A lot of the criticism we endure is unfair. Hacking was a matter for the law and not for us. Yes, there is a need for reform, even fundamental reform, but in the end you must come back to something like the PCC or democracy will be endangered.
This is misleading and smacks of self-delusion. The PCC’s failures did not begin with hacking; hacking is just the last and heaviest straw. The PCC, when it had its chance, gave the News of the World a clean bill of health on hacking although the same evidence led MPs on the media select committee to conclude that the paper was gravely at fault and senior executives were displaying ‘collective amnesia’. The PCC also criticised the Guardian, which broke the key hacking story in 2009. The MPs and the Guardian have been proved right and the PCC wrong.
Why was the PCC wrong? Because it is a complaints agency and doesn’t know what to do when a big problem comes along. In the McCann case it did nothing while for a year newspapers indulged in an orgy of libels — they have since admitted to publishing hundreds of false articles, possibly more than a thousand, grossly misleading millions and millions of readers. Like hacking, this was apparently not the PCC’s business.
Nor is the failure of accountability in the tabloid press the PCC’s problem. Again and again we see these large libel payouts, the latest to Chris Jefferies, the retired Bristol teacher so disgracefully treated in the tabloids. Has the PCC ever followed up such cases to see why lessons are not learned? Have they ever asked about internal systems and accountability in these papers? Have they asked about discipline? There is no sign of it.
Such matters are too big for the PCC. Its concern is the micro — individual complaints, and (largely) only those which are made by the people personally affected. This has nothing obvious to do with standards, though the argument was often made that by chasing up such complaints the PCC would effect a general raising of standards in the press. It has been nearly 20 years since the PCC began work and we are entitled to ask: has there been a general raising of standards? No.
The complaints work is worthwhile and something like it will be needed in the future. Few people dispute that. It does not follow that to meet our present needs all we have to do is improve the complaints agency. Though the PCC seems to be the very last to recognize this, we need radical change. We need a regulator.
As for the need to balance regulation with freedom of expression, that is a challenge the Leveson Inquiry will address and which it is perfectly capable of addressing successfully. It will have many options before it, and you can read some ideas here. To suggest that the only way to achieve a balance is to stick with a structure that has failed is nonsense. Far from being chained to the PCC we are about to discard it, and very few people who care about press freedom and press standards will be sorry to see it go.
*Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
This post originally appeared on the Hacked Off website and is reproduced with permission and thanks.