How the Press Recognition Panel is relying on the fear factor

In the face of challenges from government, the quality press should abandon its search for regulatory perfection and make common cause with the more raucous end of the market.

Just in case it passed you by, this week marked the first anniversary of the remarkable Press Recognition Panel.

What a busy year it has been for this child of Leveson.

It has a chairman in David Wolfe QC, a staff headed by executive director Susie Uppal and £900,000 in funds, the first tranche of three years of funding.

How busy it has been in its first year – drawing up protocols for the 28 Leveson-inspired criteria that any regulator will have to meet if it is going to be recognised.

There have been meetings up and down the country attended by some of those who support the life and times of Lord Justice Leveson.

Submissions have been received, although the PRP chairman has complained bitterly that the national press has sought to undermine its work by claiming that it would lack legitimacy without their support.

And that of course is the problem for the Press Recognition Panel. Nobody but nobody wants to be recognised by the Press Recognition Panel.

It goes even further than that. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the body set up by the vast majority of the UK publishing, would actually breach its contract with its national newspaper backers if it ever tried to do such a thing.

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The PRP can take heart from the fact that Impress – a would-be regulator with no-one to regulate, might seek recognition from a body with no-one else to recognise.

We’ve all had lots of fun with this manifestation of 21st century government and saw it as a Gilbert and Sullivan creation. Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, called it a pantomime horse.

But there is a serious side to this as the Panel noted in its birthday communiqué. The birthday coincides with the coming into effect of one of Leveson’s more dangerous concepts – exemplary damages in privacy and libel cases for publishers who have not signed up to a recognised regulator, a form of statutory involvement by proxy.

At least Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has backed down, for now, on one of Leveson’s more preposterous and unjust ideas – publishers should have to fund the costs of those taking legal action on privacy and libel even when the publishers won their cases in court.

But at the recent Society of Editors conference Whittingdale did not blink on exemplary damages – that was the will of Parliament and publishers would have to face the financial consequences if they continued to resist being regulated by a “recognised” regulator. Naturally he advised them to do so and seemed to think, despite all signs to the contrary, that they might.

We now have the unedifying sight of the Press Recognition Panel relying on the fear factor – that small publishers could be closed down by a single court action – in order to drum up support, any support, for its existence.

At that level you might well get a few small publications signing up with Impress as a security blanket and Impress being recognised before the year is out.

What should the press do now? Continue to ignore the PRP and give Sir Alan Moses their complete and unstinting support.

The Financial Times has gone its own way but The Independent and The Guardian should relent on their rather precious reluctance to join IPSO.

For the good of the overall publishing industry in the face of such challenges from government, they should abandon their search for perfection and make common cause with the more raucous end of the market.

As for Sir Alan, he should do a better job of arguing the case for IPSO in public – something he has markedly refused to do until now.

All of this could be seen as a rather arcane debate but for the fact it forms part of a larger pattern involving a government with an overall majority seeking to impose its will in the direction of greater statutory controls and restrictions on freedom of information.

The signs that the government is going to water down Freedom of Information legislation grow ever stronger.

In a truly extraordinary outburst last week House of Commons Leader Chris Grayling, a former journalist for goodness sake, insisted that journalists were “misusing” the Act to create stories.

That is the very point – journalists use the FoI to dig out information on behalf of the public that is in the public interest.

The Daily Mail did what it does best – hurled well-aimed abuse at Grayling, dubbing him The Minister For Hypocrisy. When Labour had been in power Grayling had been happy to use dozens of stories obtained under the legislation to embarrass the then government.

The Guardian took a more measured and telling approach by collating 103 stories obtained from FoI requests from January to July this year.

They range from “only 40 of 250 returning jihadis in UK face prosecution”, to police publish secret training manual telling undercover cops to have “fleeting, disastrous” affairs with targets.

Along the way there is the fact that the government was told of last year’s Christmas rail chaos a month before and failed to act, 500,000 home care visits last less than five minutes and landlords enjoy £14 billion in tax breaks as figures reveal buy-to-let expansion.

What staggering “misuse” of Freedom of Information legislation by journalists to reveal such things.

A new edition of Data Journalism: Inside the Global Future is being launched this week. It would be a shame against the trends of the times towards greater openness if the British Government tries to make less data available to be analysed.

Perhaps some progress will be made in Home Secretary Theresa May’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill which will give specially vetted judges the power to veto ministerial decisions on anti-terror spying operations.

Somewhere in the small print should come greater protection for journalistic sources and finally put a stop to the police using anti-terrorism legislation to reveal sources without judicial approval.

There is already a code of practice designed to stop such clear misuse but worries that the police are still exploiting loopholes.

It will be next year before the formal bill is published and the small print will require careful scrutiny.

As Thomas Jefferson, may or may not have said: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”