THE LEVESON REPORT (‘the Report’) on 29 November 2012, an inordinate 1,978 pages in length (and 46 pages of summary),
was successful both publicly and politically on the issue of a self-regulatory body to replace the Press Complaints Commission - with or without statutory underpinning. One had only to read the House of Lords debate of 11 January 2013 to note that judgment; with rare diversion, the seven-hour debate focused on the system that should succeed the Press Complaints Commission as the self-regulatory body for the newspaper industry.
The contents of the Coalition Government’s Royal Charter (published on 12 February 2013) are covered in the next issue of Hansard. It reflected, in the ensuing months only, its core recommendation in consideration of the ‘culture, practice and ethics’ of the print media. The Report, on the other vital aspects of the media - tracing and culture of journalism, the ownership of the media (indeed its cross-media issues), the plurality and funding of a free press and its relationship with data protection, politicians and the police - was either largely underdiscussed or exclusively favourable to the Establishment. The Leveson Inquiry’s findings, moreover, disclosed an initial failure to observe the nature of the press’s public service to a public that voraciously called for an independent inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005. But the Report in its historical background (20 pages of it, at pages 195-215) to its remit of July 2010 purports to set out the beginnings of press regulation.The opening sentence of the historical background to the Report on ‘culture, practices and ethics of the Press’ states that, ‘in order to understand the present position in relation to press regulation, it is necessary to examine what has happened in the past’. But for any useful purpose, the report of the Leveson Inquiry is sadly unreliable. This is why. For all its 1,978 pages, the historical background to self-regulation of the press is both short and inadequate.
Its description of that single element in the Inquiry is a misstatement of elementary facts, misrepresentation of events from 1988 to 1990, and a misjudgement over the period of 37 years of the Press Council. Independence, moreover, had been a prominent feature of the Press Council, from 1966 to 1990. Was that not a prime consideration in evaluating independence and press freedom? Or rather, how much independence of the Council did it in fact portray?The gravamen of the Leveson Report was its total failure to reverse the finding of the Calcutt Committee and therefore deal with the argument, advanced by Sir David Calcutt and his colleagues, that the two roles of the Press Council (ever since 1953) of maintenance of the freedom of the press alongside a growing system of dealing with individual complaints of press maltreatment were incompati- ble.1 It followed that the Council should be replaced exclusively by a complaints body. In my written submission to Sir Brian Leveson on 6 December 2011 I urged that this reasoning was constitutionally and practically flawed. I can do no better than repeat these submissions, which I maintain were hugely relevant to the future system of self-regulation. The Report ignored this fundamental challenge.