MEMBERSHIP

This aspect of the Press Council was totally absent from the Report. At the time of its disbandment in 1990 the Council was 36 members strong - an absurdly overmanned governing body.

Each year there were advertisements signifying vacancies among the 18 members of the Council. In my last year, there were over a thousand applicants for membership. The selection was conducted entirely outwith the purview of the newspaper industry or of any government agency. A separate appointments commission was chaired by Lord Asa Briggs, a distinguished historian and a retired Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. There could hardly be a more open system of appointing half of the members of the self- regulatory body than this. Yet the Report makes no allusion to this important element in the control of the print media.