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The Press Complaints Commission was today criticised at the Leveson Inquiry for having taken a “somewhat restrictive and timorous” approach to investigate phone hacking.
Robert Jay QC told former PCC director Tim Toulmin that the self-regulation body had failed to “test the boundaries of its powers” by choosing not to question former News of the World editor Andy Coulson after he resigned from the tabloid following the 2007 convictions of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire over phone hacking. Toulmin rejected this suggestion.
Toulmin, who headed the PCC from 2004 to 2009, said the prospect had been discussed but it was decided that the body’s powers “wouldn’t have had traction” with Coulson.
He added that he later thought this was a mistake. “The PCC should have been seen to ask him,” he said. Lord Justice Leveson interjected, saying that doing so would have been “incredibly powerful”.
Quizzed about the PCC’s response to the Goodman and Mulcaire jailings, Toulmin said that although the PCC did not investigate the matter, it conducted an “exercise that was designed to produce a forward-looking report” and establish principles of internal governance to avoid future wrongdoing.
“We were looking at how it arose, and the culture,” he said.
The PCC produced two reports, one in May 2007 that found no further evidence of wrongdoing, and one in September 2009 that has since been withdrawn, which concluded the body was not misled by the News of the World.
Regarding the 2009 report, Toulmin conceded that dismissing evidence from the Guardian was a “major mistake”. He said he was not a member of the board that decided on the report’s conclusions.
Testifying at the Inquiry earlier this month, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had said the 2009 report was “worse than a whitewash”.
Elsewhere in his testimony, which ran for over three hours, Toulmin discussed the PCC’s response to the Information Commissioner’s findings on Operation Motorman, which examined the use of a private investigators by the media to obtain personal information. He said that the then commissioner, Richard Thomas, went to the wrong body when he approached the PCC with his report. “He either should have gone directly to the industry — trade bodies — or the code committee, which is more representative of the industry,” he said, noting that data protection breaches were outside of the PCC’s remit.
Last month, Thomas told the Inquiry the PCC “should have done more” in response to the Motorman findings, and that he sought their “loud, strident condemnation.”
Toulmin also asserted that the PCC was not subject to influence from current editors serving on its board, namely Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and former News International CEO Les Hinton. “They never a single time would phone me up and suggest we should behave in a certain way,” Toulmin said.
Toulmin argued that PCC members were not “cowed” by editors’ presence, and that their presence gave”bite” to complaints rulings.
In his witness statement, Toulmin argued that it was “inappropriate” to call the PCC a regulator.
Leveson also put it to Toulmin that the PCC was believed by the public to be a regulator ” when it wasn’t actually a regulator at all,” Leveson said. Toulmin agreed, claiming that it was “a complaints handler (…) a sort of ombudsman.”
The PCC’s current director, Stephen Abell, who gave evidence this afternoon, said he too was “happy” that the term regulator not be used to describe the PCC. He said that at the heart of the newspaper industry is “people exercising their right to be polemic”, and that regard needed to given to the nature of the industry when coming up with an over-arching structure.
During his testimony he ran through cases of complaints made to the PCC, citing Jan Moir’s column in the Daily Mail about the death of singer Stephen Gately, which was originally headlined “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”. Abell said there were over 22,000 complaints about the piece — which was later amended to the print edition headline “A strange, lonely and troubling death” — but it was “just short” of a breach of the PCC code, despite being a “difficult” episode to judge.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with evidence from current PCC chairman Lord Hunt, former chair Sir Christopher Meyer and PCC member Lord Grade.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
Labour peer’s call to end the self-regulation system if newspapers do not “improve their behaviour within a year” would endanger press freedom. The PCC’s Stephen Abell asks: Does Puttnam really want a public body to dictate the tone of political coverage?
I am very glad of the opportunity to comment more fully on the comments made recently by Lord Puttnam. It is absolutely right that the work of the Press Complaints Commission is scrutinised, discussed, and criticised, so we can look towards making it better. I would, of course, prefer it if it were based on well-informed and considered comment about our role and performance. Last night, sadly, Lord Puttnam offered neither.
What he appears to have done is called the PCC (or the environment in which it operates) a “snakepit” and said that newspapers should be given a year to “improve their behaviour” in some unquantifiable manner. As it turns out, the Labour peer and deputy chairman of Channel 4 has actually entered the snakepit and used the PCC on two occasions. Both of which led him to praise the service we offered him. At the time he wrote to us saying the following:
I would also like to take the opportunity to say how very grateful I am for both the speed and quality of the service I received from the PCC. I had no reason to expect anything less, but I assure you it’s very much appreciated. [Emphases his].
Now this does not mean the whole system overseen by the PCC is perfect, but what it shows is that Lord Puttnam was willing privately to recognise our value, but publicly eager to heap calumny on us. I find that objectionable.
He has since sought to clarify his criticisms, telling MediaGuardian.co.uk:
I believe the PCC does a pretty good job of handling individual complaints from those who feel themselves to have been in some way traduced. What they cannot do is prevent the slow reduction of politics to a form of gruesome spectator sport. Nor can they ensure the general representation of young people is more representative of reality.
I think here we have the basis for an important debate, which would have been preferable to the sideline sniping. Lord Puttnam is keen to assert that the PCC “cannot” instruct newspapers to be nicer to politicians and young people (two items on his wish list), without pausing to ask the question: should it? There must be the argument that if any body — even a self-regulatory body like the PCC — were to dictate the tone of political coverage, or suggest that there should be more positive stories on youth issues, the result would be a very significant restriction on freedom of expression.
Free expression must include the right to be critical and polemical, partisan and strident. I am afraid that it has been distorted by some of its supporters to mean the freedom to express only palatable, consensus views.
However, and this is very important, he is right that the PCC must be active agents in maintaining newspaper standards. The coverage of politics, or of issues affecting the young, are two important areas. The PCC must ensure that we hold editors to account for what they report and how they report it. We must ensure that inaccuracies are corrected, intrusions and distortions prevented.
The method by which to do this is to ensure that everyone is engaged in the PCC system, and makes good use of it. We certainly want to ensure that the activities of young people (although I am reluctant to characterise “the young” as a special interest group, as it feels slightly patronising) are reported accurately.
The PCC has done quite a lot of work in trying to open itself to young people, so that we can make their voice heard about how they are covered in the press. Last year we took part in a consultation organised by the Institute for Global Ethics, examining portrayals of young people in the media. This year, we were involved in research being conducted by the Media Trust about the feasibility of creating a media centre as a resource for journalists and young people. We have been in touch with the recently-formed Youth Media Council to discuss common aims and objectives. We regularly speak to school groups to explain the role of the PCC. We are speaking tomorrow at a conference on the subject of child bereavement.
There is no doubt we can do more. So, the PCC will use these thoughts from Lord Puttnam constructively, accepting that another manifestation of free expression, alongside a partisan press, is undue criticism from grumpy peers.
Stephen Abell is director of the Press Complaints Commission