He has referred to it more than once as the “elephant in the room”.

As his Inquiry into press standards continues, Lord Justice Leveson is finding it trickier to grapple with the issues presented by the internet, perhaps the most awkward piece of the press puzzle he has been enlisted to solve.

It seemed the topic, admittedly outside of the judge’s broad terms of reference, vanished for a short time, only to rear its contentious head in the last month of witness evidence.

In May MailOnline editor Martin Clarke implored Leveson and his team to stop “obsessing” with newspapers, describing them as just one part of a wider, tangled media spectrum, and that to focus on them solely was to look backwards.

Clarke has a fair bit of clout with which to make this claim. Last December his website overtook the New York Times as the world’s most popular news site, with two-thirds of its monthly users based outside the UK. Clarke listed Yahoo!, MSN and the Huffington Post as MailOnline’s biggest competitors — sites which are making headway in becoming global news providers — in addition to unregulated bloggers and social networks.

Fundamentally, as Clarke stressed, the way we consume news has changed. “You can’t really slice and dice the Internet up into different bits,” he said. “People consume the Internet as a kind of continuous spectrum. They’ll get up, they’ll look at their friend’s Facebook page, so that friend on Facebook has published something. They’ll then follow somebody on Twitter who has also published something.”

“Stephen Fry has nearly 4 million users. He can reach more people in an hour than I can. So is he going to be regulated?”

While MailOnline follows the same rules as UK newspapers by adhering to the PCC code and abiding by laws of contempt and libel, the question is whether or not this reach will extend to his online, unregulated competitors. Easier said than done, as Clarke wrote in his witness statement:

Underpinning any press regulator as a statutory body effectively gives the state the power to licence newspapers and penalise ones that either do not join the body or ignore its rules. The only way to force bloggers to sign up as well would be to give that statutory body the same power to shut down blogs. If licensing newspapers is a severe restriction on free speech, this would be positively North Korean and the subject of mass internet protest. But even if we could get a law through, is it enforceable? Are we really going to drag Guido Fawkes off to the tower like his famous namesake for not joining the PCC?

Ultimately it is a question of adapting, rather than trying to control the changes to journalism that web publishing has triggered (in Peter Mandelson’s words, “a runaway train”). The damage, if it can so be called, has been done: for all the rich opportunity and diversity it has brought to newsgathering and production, it is undeniable that the web has shaken the newspaper industry to its very core, leaving it with little in the way of a viable business model.

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s press-card system might go some way to protect the status of newspaper reporters, but what about the citizen journalists, whose material has been shown time and again to be of huge value, particularly during fast-moving news (citizens’ and reporters’ use of Twitter to keep track of the London riots is just one of a library of examples).

We have also seen the law clamp down upon those who tweet as freely as they would talk in the pub, as Swansea student Liam Stacey found out all too well. We are taking part in swathes of 140-character conversations, but how much is the average Twitter user familiar with the Contempt of Court Act, for example, and that our Attorney General is willing to come down like a ton of bricks on those who breach it? A need for a wider understanding of media law is now more relevant than ever.

Yet squaring the circle is tricky when what we’re discussing is a medium built on the basis of openness and making things easier to access.

Perhaps Leveson didn’t quite know what he had himself in for when he was appointed to lead the Inquiry last summer. He does now.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index, where she leads coverage of the Leveson Inquiry. She tweets at @martaruco

Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson

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The pair, Balázs Navarro Nagy and Aranka Szavuly, both union officials, are protesting against the blurring out of the features of a prominent judge in a news broadcast last Saturday. The face of Zoltán Lomnici, the former president of the country’s supreme court, was digitally removed from a news report despite the fact that he was standing directly next to László Tőkés, a Romanian Euro MP of ethnicity who was his co-host at the press conference. Mr Tőkés, a prominent ally of Hungary’s ruling populist-conservative Fidesz party, was quoted extensively in the story.

Picture: www.index.hu

Picture: www.index.hu

Mr Lomnici, whom Fidesz last year chose not to reappoint for a second term as chief justice, said the use of the technique, normally used to protect the identity of people facing criminal charges, as “the most serious infringement of press freedom in the past 20 years.”

While it has not been suggested that the blurring out of Mr Lomnici from the report was politically motivated — television insiders suggest personal differences between Mr Lomnici and senior management at one of Hungary’s public television stations are to blame — the case does highlight a decline in ethical standards at Hungary’s public broadcasters since the passing of a widely criticised new media law and the reorganisation of public broadcasting last year. In one notorious case last year, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a French Green who is a prominent critic of the media law, was shown dodging a question relating to allegations about his private life in a news broadcast on Television. It later emerged that the footage had been cut to hide the fact that the Euro MP had in fact answered the question at length. The reporter on that story, Dániel Papp, was later promoted to head of news at Television.

The union activists are also protesting against the subsequent handling of the affair: after a swift investigation, the agency in charge of public broadcasting announced it had issued reprimands to three employees, without naming them. It was later reported that the three were the story’s reporter and editor, as well as the news programme’s duty editor. The activists say the three were following a standing order not to show Mr Lomnici in the news, and have pledged to continue their hunger strike until those responsible for that order have been identified.

In a statement today, the public broadcasting agency said it would be “patient” in its actions towards hunger strikers. “For now, we are not considering dismissal, because we have no wish to create a martyr out of someone … who is showing signs of losing his sense of judgement,” the agency said in connection with Mr Nagy.

Hungary has faced growing criticism from European governments, the US and NGOs over the past year because of its new media law. The law established a media supervisory authority whose board, appointed by the government for a nine-year term, has the right to mete out swingeing fines for ill-defined offences such as “breaching human dignity”. Critics say the threat of being fined under the law has already had a chilling impact on press freedom.

PLUS: Read Mike Harris on “Hungary – How Not To Regulate The Press“

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