The UK print press acts largely with impunity, regulated by a toothless regulator. One that is afraid of taking on the organisations that fund it, undermining its very independence. The result is a media landscape where false and deliberately misleading stories are printed, undermining the fundamental notion of a free, fair and accountable press. The phone hacking scandal rocked the political world in the UK and beyond. It exposed a deep and murky web of dubious relationships between the powerful: newspapers, a media mogul, politicians and the police. Phones of celebrities, politicians, members of the British Royal Family, as well the deceased, such as Milly Dowler, British soldiers and victims of the London 7/7 bombings were hacked. The response, The Leveson Inquiry, was a public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, which resulted in the Leveson report.
A recent report by The Media Standards Trust makes clear that IPSO is failing 25 out of Leveson’s 38 recommendations for a ‘genuinely independent and effective system of self-regulation’. Key among these is the lack of independence. It notes ‘the extensive control the industry can exert through the Regulatory Funding Company…that present extremely high hurdles for standards investigations’. It is hard to imagine another industry regulator being funded by those its supposed to regulate and using pressure to stop any investigative work.
Beyond this, the report states that IPSO’s ‘inability to implement a single standards investigation over five years of operation is one additional key indicator of its lack of regulatory power and independence’. This investigative power is one of IPSO’s additional powers. It allows IPSO to mount a ‘standards investigation’ if a publisher persists in failing to comply with the Code, or if IPSO has serious concerns about its actions or behavior. It can impose a fine of up to £1m if it finds serious wrongdoing. And yet, it has not fined a newspaper so much as 50p.
IPSO changed recommendation 19 in the Leveson Report, from needing ‘serious or systemic breaches of the standards code’ in order to impose sanctions to the much higher bar of needing both ‘serious and systemic’. IPSO has subsequently failed to outline how such a threshold is met. Even if IPSO were inclined to conduct a standards investigation, it would be far harder to find any of its members in breach. If that is not hard enough, the publisher under investigation has up to six opportunities to intervene in the process, while complainants have no opportunity to participate or make representations.
IPSO is restrictive on which publishers can sign up to be regulated. Recommendation 24 in the Leveson Report was allowed for membership to IPSO being open to all publishers, yet it operates rather differently. Compounding this is the fact that the MST report found its voting system operates by how much a member pays in subscription to the RFC. The result is that membership for a new publisher is ‘unlikely to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory’.
It’s clear in whose interests this supposedly independent regulator operates, and in which way they would settle the balance between individual’s right to privacy and freedom of expression. Which other regulator allows those it is supposed to regulate to write the rulebook, and appoint the referee?
A newspaper advert for IPSO describing it as delivering ‘all the key elements’ in the Leveson Report and proclaiming that it would be ‘the toughest in the Western world’ was pulled by the Advertising Standards Authority due to it being misleading.
IPSO upheld a complaint regarding The Sun’s false claims of ‘one in five British Muslims supporting people who have gone to Syria’ to fight for groups like Islamic State as significantly misleading due to its inaccurate nature. However, the paper avoided having to print notice of the adjudication on its front page.
This approach works as an incentive to lie and then only publish a correction when found out. IPSO’s toothless rulings do not forbid online articles that are debunked from being read. This can be seen from the Times’s story reporting that a ‘white Christian child’ had been left distressed after being placed with two Muslim households in Tower Hamlets over a period of six months. This story proved to be a one-sided account, with it emerging that the girl’s grandmother, with whom she was ultimately placed, was a Muslim and did not speak English. IPSO upheld the complaint due to a breach of the Editors Code, concerning accuracy. And yet the story is still available online for voters to be misled.
This is troubling given how the Leveson Report noted that accuracy was "the foundation stone on which journalism depends".
Steve Barnett, media professor at the University of Westminster and member of Hacked Off, argued that the Times’ ‘white Christian child’ story should have prompted a wider investigation. He states that if "such a disregard for industry code happened in any other industry, the press would have been up in arms condemning the shocking negligence of these professionals".
Barnett has also questioned IPSO’s definition of a systemic problem, commenting how the litany of untruths published by the British press during the referendum campaign was a case study of what ought to have led to an investigation. The Sun’s ‘Queen Backs Brexit’ prompted the monarch to file her first complaint with the regulator.
A more recent failing by IPSOs concerns its failure to act in the face of blatant and misleading lies by the Daily Mail when it covered the launch of a report to the Labour Party titled ‘Land for the Many’. The Mail on Sunday turned an independent report for the Labour Party into ‘bombshell plans being drawn up by Labour leader’ before lying about its contents. It claimed that the proposals included ‘to scrap the capital gains tax exemption on main homes’, which was demonstrably false. The lie was subsequently picked up by senior Conservatives, and then used repeatedly in the party’s campaign materials, before being reproduced by other papers.
An author of the report complained to IPSO. It took five months, including intimidating partisan bombardment from the newspaper. Most complainants would give up or accept any complainants, leading George Monbiot, a co-author of the report, to conclude IPSO is unfit for purpose. The complaint was upheld yet a correction would only becoming after the 2019 December election. Such nonchalance about allowing a clear falsehood to be used in newspapers without issuing a corrective, at a time when such a story is misinforming and influencing voters ahead of an important general election, is wholly demonstrative of an organisation that is in the pocket of the print industry.
Cynicism in the media and ‘capitalist realism’
The powerful newspapers know they can print with impunity and only issue a small correction that will receive far less prominence after a complaint is upheld. This helps the toxicity of the print press, far from trying to inform voters on the details and nuance, they instead mislead and scare with deliberate falsehoods. The result being that the UK print press is the least trusted in Europe. This is hardly surprising given how the print press is largely unregulated, with it receiving 8,000 discrimination cases between 2018-2019 and upholding just one.
The rise of client journalism, with journalists acting as stenographers for the government and its power, is helping to increase the trend of journalists not being trusted. It is often seen in broadcasting with the likes of Robert Peston and Laura Kuenssberg, regularly retweeting and ‘reporting’ what is fed to them unquestionably, acting as a government mouthpiece, being manipulated by Downing Street. As Peter Oborne has noted, political editors are so grateful to be given ‘exclusive’ information "they report it without challenge or question". This is often the case when either of these journalists refers to a ‘senior government source’. It happens whenever Laura Kuenssberg tweets from a ‘No.10 source’ including what is essentially a press release, repeated to her 1.2 million followers, without any scrutiny. It is chilling that reporters and broadcasters are increasingly peddling Downing Street’s lies.
The public grows in their distrust for the press when journalists and reporters repeat the lies that are fed to them by deceitful politicians and stretch credulity beyond plausibility. With this, cynicism and apathy grow and the chance of reimagining let alone recreating a better society becomes increasingly harder. Therefore it “becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, this is ‘capitalist realism’ as Mark Fisher put it. Though this ‘realism’ is not a representation of the real, it is a determination of what is deemed politically possible.
Cynicism about the media helps serve capitalist realism. As the media stands in for the public sphere, if journalists and politicians are perceived to be “all liars” as they widely are, then there is no hope to be had in public life at all. It is beyond saving or improving.
When it becomes almost impossible to imagine an improvement in material conditions, ‘negative solidarity’ grows. The idea, as Mark Fisher put it is: “More than mere indifference to worker agitations, negative solidarity is an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension pot, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too”. With an almost unregulated press spewing hate and punching down, an agenda of divisiveness is implanted in the psyche. This benefits the defenders of capital and its gatekeepers in both the Conservative Party and the majority of the ‘free’ press.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) was recently accused of undermining the free press and attacking our democracy after blockading a Murdoch-owned newspaper printing works. Priti Patel, as expected, was salivating at the prospect of having XR proscribed as an organised crime group. Yet such knee jerk authoritarian reactionary impulses, notwithstanding their broad support across the Conservative party membership, completely miss the point. Our press could hardly be less free, for three main reasons.
First, the billionaires that own the press set the agenda . Owners interfere with what is published, as Harold Evans, a former editor at the Sunday Times, made it clear to the Leveson Inquiry how Rupert Murdoch interfered with the editorial policy. Evans said how Murdoch was constantly telling him what the paper should be. Such an account was corroborated by David Yelland, a former editor of the The Sun – who said that Murdoch editors look at the world ‘through Rupert’s eyes’.
With six billionaires as majority voting shareholders for most UK national newspapers it is of no surprise that they mostly supported the Conservatives in the last election. The Conservatives in 2017 paid back their support by dropping the second part of the Leveson Inquiry from their manifesto, which was supposed to investigate the relationship between journalists and the police.
Second, corporate advertising revenue censors the content. Peter Oborne, former chief political correspondent at the Telegraph, resigned from his job after he was censored from writing about HSBC as it was one of the paper’s larger corporate advisers. As David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens have put it, the corporate structure excludes entire frameworks of understanding. “If writing something disagreeable about HSBC or animal rights is problematic, imagine editors consistently presenting corporate domination as a threat to human survival in the age of climate change”. There’s a reason why climate change denial is organised by powerful political and industrial interests and supported by conservative newspapers, their financial backers, and the whole system that supports the status quo is in drastic and urgent need of a radical overhaul to eliminate the threat of climate extinction. Why would conservative proprietors allow such a message to be published in their newspaper, contradicting their advertisers and arguing against the economic model that has provided all their wealth?
Third, privately educated white men dominate the print press. Nearly half of UK national newspaper columnists graduated from Oxbridge, compared with less than a percent of the population. 54% of the nation’s ‘top 100 media professionals’ attended private schools compared to around 7% of the population. This helps cement a bourgeoisie worldview in much of the media. As Frank Boyce explains, this means austerity can be read as ‘regrettable but pragmatic’, whereas to ordinary working people it’s anything but pragmatic and utterly devastating. Further, women are under-represented in journalists and the coverage received with male experts on flagship news programmes outnumbering female experts by 3:1. Compounding this, research has found ten times as many UK male journalists on the news as female politicians.
It is hard to believe that an overwhelmingly privileged and predominantly white, male, privately educated Oxbridge graduates would understand the situations and choices faced by most people in the country, let alone truly represent modern Britain in all its diversity.
The Conservatives and the billionaire newspaper proprietors have shared interests and a mutually beneficial relationship. If the newspapers focus on the culture war, with disproportionate attention being given to Muslim enemies, refugees or asylum seekers and out of touch lefties, over the far more important issue of material conditions of the majority of working people, it provides an opening for the Conservatives. The Tories can avoid discussion of how their 'levelling up' agenda is anything but, or their disastrous decade in office, instead uniting a broader coalition against a supposed enemy. More punching down and distractions, with justified anger being redirected away from the billionaire offshore tax dodgers (incidentally these are the people owning most of the print press), the financial speculators and the financial parasites that caused the 2008 financial crash. With the printing press effectively being allowed to print falsehoods due to a partial and supine regulator works to benefit both the Conservatives, and billionaire newspaper proprietors, who can drive the culture war and continue to set the agenda. When they profit off this, we all lose out. Often an individual’s right to privacy is lost. The minorities that are constantly scapegoated lose out. The standards of journalism sink ever lower. Lying politicians coupled with lying journalists mean a more misinformed public and a weakened democracy.
The essential purpose of the free press should be to discover and tell the truth. Yet the UK print press, which is anything but free, regularly fails to do this. A function of the corporate media has been to isolate, making people distrust their discontent with a world controlled by business interests. And with a sham regulator like IPSO, it is becoming increasingly clear that those newspapers get to decide how they will be regulated too. This has a corrosive effect on democracy in the UK. It becomes ever harder for facts to be reported on, and voters become increasingly distrustful of the media and politicians. With this cynicism, the view that a better world is possible becomes ever harder to imagine. Instead, if the view that the state is only good for making life harder, it becomes easier to imagine that citizens want others deprived of rights and freedoms because they have had to suffer themselves due to deregulated finance capitalism.
We are governed by a group of serial liars. The need for newspapers to report accurately, informing voters and being accountable has never been greater. With a multitude of crises, such as the fall out from the pandemic, the refugee crisis, the crisis of income and wealth inequality, the mentality health crisis, a productivity crisis, a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, the social care crisis, and the most catastrophic of all, the climate crisis, it is more important than ever that we have a press working to hold power to account. The first step to improve this would be for IMPRESS, IPSO’s competitor, to be recognised as the main print regulator. Unlike IPSO, it is fully compliant with all recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry. It can also launch an investigation when a code breach is either 'serious or systemic'. Crucially, it is not funded through those it seeks to regulate. Though this would be no panacea in reforming a deeply corrupt industry, it would help reestablish a balance between the rights of individuals and freedom of expression, giving greater prominence to accuracy and the truth. In the age of disinformation and politicians lying more than ever, the need for the press to tell the truth and provide accurate journalism has rarely been greater. And the longer the press is able to spew misleading hate, the longer the real crises will worsen.
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