THE CALCUTT COMMITTEE: THE LOSS OF PRESS FREEDOM
The Calcutt Committee on Privacy and Related Matters7 ( June 1990) was hardly expansive in its conclusion that ‘the two distinct functions of defending the freedom of the press and adjudicating on complaints sit uneasily together’.8 While the Committee grudgingly acknowledged that ‘no incompatibility had been detected [sic] by the three Royal Commissions on the Press’, and the Press Council in its internal (1989) review of its functions had strongly expressed its desire to strengthen the objectives of the Council as established by the newspaper industry founders in 1953, the Calcutt Committee stated in cavalier fashion: ‘We have come to a different conclusion.’ It proceeded to give as its sole explanation for such a categorical, unhistorical attitude, that ‘there is insufficient interdependence between these responsibilities to make it necessary for one body to undertake both’.9 The Committee did not deign, moreover, to refer to what the Council’s first independent chairman Lord Devlin (a retired Law Lord) said in 1966 in a public speech to the Commonwealth Press Union, that he had a profound belief in the Council functioning to promote press freedom and as a complaints system.
If the Calcutt Committee’s conclusion was woefully inadequate as a sound reason for ‘detecting’ incompatibility, it is true that by the end of the 1980s (if not much earlier) the predominant work of the Press Council had been handling and adjudicating formally upon complaints of breaches of uncodified journalistic ethics in ever-growing numbers, such that its other functions played a minor role in its work. This was due not just to the increasing volume of complaints by readers of newspapers (both regional and national) and periodicals, but to the paucity of funding for the Council’s operations.7 The Committee consisted of chairman Sir David Calcutt, David Eady QC (later Mr Justice Eady), John Cartwright MP, Professor John Last, John Spencer (later Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge) and journalists Simon Jenkins and Sheila Black.
8 Para 15.2.
9 Para 15.3.
Anyone addressing Article 10 ECHR will instantly appreciate that press freedom (everyone’s freedom of expression) in Article 10.1 is qualified by an enumerated list of public concerns in Article 10.2: the two parts of Article 10 are interrelated, and entirely compatible. It was precisely what Lord Devlin had proclaimed in 1966 - the regulatory organisation was to stand up for the freedom and rights of the press as well as to censure misconduct. ‘To censure misconduct effectively,’ he asserted,
it needs the support and respect of the press and it will obtain that much more readily if, in the words of its constitution, it seeks to preserve the established freedom of the British press and work as to maintain its character in accordance with the highest professional standards.
He added, prophetically, that the organisation ‘must never allow itself to become mostly a tribunal which convicts or acquits’. In 1990 the newspaper industry did not desire to possess a complaints system that undermined its precious task of press freedom. Only after it was found wanting in this public task did it accept the Leveson report’s urge for the new body to be solely the recipient of readers’ complaints.