Hacked Off: Ten things the press would rather you didn’t know – Brian Cathcart
INFORRM
Seventy-eight per cent of the population wants independent press regulation backed by statute.
No witness or anybody else at the Leveson Inquiry advocated state control of the press.
Lord Justice Leveson’s terms of reference require him to make recommendations that support press freedom.
Editors have been seeking the power to license journalists by ensuring that only people they approve can have press cards.
Far from being in financial difficulty, the Daily Mail, Mirror, Sun, Express and Star papers make well over £200m in profit a year.
Twenty-six leading academics in law and journalism have written to the press to denounce the editors’ proposed new self-regulation scheme as inadequate.
Statutory backing for a press regulator is supported by the NUJ, the largest organisation in the country representing journalists.
It was ITV, whose regulation is underpinned by statute, and not the ‘self-regulated’ press, that opened the floodgates of revelation about Jimmy Savile.
The overwhelming majority of victims of phone hacking and data mining are ordinary people and not celebrities.
Only last month the Mail and Mirror were fined for contempt of court after their reporting helped cause the abandonment of a child kidnapping trial.
