Sir Alan Moses has been propagandising again about the merits of IPSO, and in particular its alleged superiority over its predecessor, the Press Complaints Commission (“PCC”). He told the Guardian that IPSO is “much better than before” – by which he presumably means the PCC. I will demonstrate that he is plainly wrong about this. Continue reading
The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
Month: March 2016 (Page 4 of 4)
This week the Independent Commission on Freedom of Information has published its report [pdf]. In anticipation of the release the government announced that there will be ‘no legal changes,’ Matthew Hancock, the cabinet office minister who commissioned the report, said “after 10 years we took the decision to review the Freedom of Information Act and we have found it is working well.” Continue reading
A digital market research company recently reported that “the top 10 publishers make up a huge chunk of the U.K. media market and own more than half of the entire industry”. The statement was based on data that SimilarWeb collected over 2015, specifically the number of page visits to the top 300 news websites. They found that 65 percent of this traffic was concentrated in the websites of the top 10 news publishers, and the top five alone attracted more than half of all traffic across the sample. Continue reading
Donald Trump recently said that if elected President he would “open up our libel laws so when [newspapers] write purposely negative stories…we can sue them and make lots of money”. That sounds eerily familiar to observers here in Australia, where there is a long history of politicians suing or threatening to sue the news media. Continue reading
Culture secretary John Whittingdale gave an update on the progress on the renewal of the BBC Charter in a speech at the Oxford Media Convention last week. All the parties, as well as recent select committee reports, and even the chair of the BBC Trust, agree that reform of BBC regulation is necessary. Continue reading
In the first libel trial of 2016, Mr Justice Mitting found that the claimant, Ronald Stocker, had been defamed by his ex-wife, Nicola Stocker, in a post on his new partner’s Facebook page. The Judge rejected Mrs Stocker’s argument that the allegations she had made were substantially true and assessed compensation in the sum of £5,000. He added, however, that he was not making an award of damages because Mr Stocker had indicated that he did not want one. Continue reading
On 1 January 2014, the Defamation Act 2013 came into force in England and Wales, introducing a series of new provisions applicable to the law of libel and slander. Cue a frenzy of speculation among media and reputation management lawyers as to how the new Act would be interpreted by the courts and, more importantly, what impact it would have for those seeking to protect their reputations in the face of false and damaging allegations. Continue reading
There was a time, not so long ago, when newspaper presses may as well have been printing money. A combination of hefty advertising revenues and circulation growth saw huge profits flow into the coffers of owners and shareholders. But those days are long gone. Continue reading
The most important case of 2015 for the media in South Africa (even though it didn’t involve the media directly) was City of Cape Town v Sanral, as a result of which, once court documents are filed in court, we can now generally regard them as public documents. Continue reading
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