Meyer savages press regulation deal

The former chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Sir Christopher Meyer, has launched a savage attack on the press regulation deal.

The statutorily underpinned royal charter deal is, he writes, "neither voluntary, nor independent, nor self-regulation…

"To the eternal shame of parliament, we have ended up with a political concoction based on a single judge's recommendations, which may lead to the courts telling editors what to put in their publications. That noise you hear is the applause of dictators around the world."

Meyer, who was in charge of the PCC when phone hacking at the News of the World first came to light in 2006, is unsurprised that the Leveson inquiry "has ended in utter disaster." He writes:

"It was blighted from the start. The inquiry's premise - that phone-hacking was a failure of regulation and that the PCC should be replaced - was false, the political hiding place of a Downing Street panicked into action by a fictitious allegation that the News of the World had deleted text messages from poor Milly Dowler's phone.

"To quote the Lord Chief Justice [Igor Judge], 'To criticise the PCC for failing to exercise powers it does not have is rather like criticising a judge who passes what appears to be a lenient sentence, when his power to pass a longer sentence is curtailed'.

Of course, the PCC needed more muscle and more independence. But it didn't need a full statutory inquiry to get them."

Meyer, who gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry, is unsparing in his criticism of Hacked Off and the Media Standards Trust, with whom he crossed swords during his PCC tenure.

Turning to the royal charter's version of a new regulator, he calls it "self-regulation only in the sense that the newspaper industry is expected to pay for it" and continues:

"There is much else to object to, not least the Orwellian threat of exemplary damages against all 'relevant publishers' - still to be properly defined - who choose not to submit to the 'approved regulator.

This is licensing by any other name, the weapon of choice for many an authoritarian regime."

And he concludes by pointing out - as the Daily Telegraph did - that one of the main international critics of the new regulation deal is the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was set up to police human rights.

"What a humiliation to get a warning from an organisation still dedicated to safeguarding democracy in Europe," he writes. And then he concludes with a ringing call for rebellion, supporting a boycott of the new system:

"Let's hope our news organisations have the courage to follow The Spectator's magnificent example and refuse to be part of this mess."

Source: HuffPo