The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
‘Fake news’ is a topic that dominates many current debates in academia, politics, and the tech world. In his new media policy brief ‘Fake news : public policy responses’, Damian Tambini illustrates the challenges of finding regulatory solutions to the ‘fake news’ phenomenon. The following excerpt from the brief clarifies who exactly benefits from using the term ‘fake news’. Continue reading
The UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee recently launched an inquiry into ‘fake news’ which the Committee chair describes as a “threat to democracy” that “undermines confidence in the media in general.” Continue reading
Academics like to talk of ‘critical junctures’: moments of great instability when different pressures and crises come together to produce the possibility of dramatic change. Continue reading
Since the Brexit vote, EU media policy has a new sense of urgency. It remains to be seen if member states will be more prepared to deepen media policy convergence in an attempt to protect fundamental values and rights, but last week DG Justice held a joint colloquium with DG CONNECT, discussing current challenges to media pluralism and media freedom. This is an extract from Damian Tambini’s Keynote speech to the colloquium. Continue reading
It has been a long road from the phone hacking scandal which came to light between 2006 and 2011 and threw regulation of the UK press into disarray. Continue reading
In debates concerning Internet intermediary liability, an often-expressed view is that intermediaries (such as Facebook and Google) shouldn’t be turned into adjudicators, who reason and decide about the legal or illegal nature of content they host, and thus about whether or not to take such content down. But is that a plausible view? Continue reading
A predictable ‘blame the media’ theme has surfaced following the Brexit vote. This has taken two forms that seem to contradict one another. On one hand, the vote to leave is seen by Natalie Fenton and others as a result of a classic newspaper-led campaign of propaganda, involving covert reciprocities between key personalities, unchallenged by the BBC which took the easy option of ‘balancing’ all opinions in mechanical impartiality, rather than serving the search for truth. Continue reading
Media councils in Europe were set up primarily to deal with traditional forms of media (mainly print and sometimes broadcast), yet now all members of the Alliance of Independent Press Councils of Europe (“AIPCE”) – a loose network of national, voluntary self-regulatory organisations set up to deal with complaints about editorial content from citizens) have extended their jurisdiction online, to online versions of traditional media outlets and, increasingly, to online-only news websites. Continue reading
Recent media regulatory changes in Poland elicited strong reactions from international institutions and the European Union. In his letter to the Polish President Andrzej Duda, Thorbjørn Jagland, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, expressed particular concern about the new law “and the impact it may have on the integrity and independence of public service media, as a vital condition for genuine democracy”. Dunja Miljatović, OSCE Representative on the Freedom of the Media, warned that the controversial new Act gives the Government “direct control over management positions in the PSB.” On 13 January, the European Commission took an unprecedented move to launch an investigation into the rule of law in Poland. Continue reading
On 6 October 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) declared that the Safe Harbour agreement which allowed the movement of digital data between the EU and the US was invalid. The Court was ruling in a case brought by Max Schrems, an Austrian student and privacy campaigner who, in the wake of the Snowden revelations of mass surveillance, contested the fact that data about Europeans and others was being stored in the US by tech companies such as Facebook. Professor Lorna Woods of the University of Essex explains some key aspects of the judgment. Continue reading
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