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The PCC is closing down. Will anyone notice?
Tim Gopsill
DATELINE: 9/3/12
The Press Complaints Commission has announced it is to close. It had to do so with something of a fanfare because no-one would otherwise have noticed and in any case nothing has changed. The organisation will carry on dispensing its feeble gestures at "self-regulation" until something else comes along.
In other words it is just another unconvincing exercise in rebranding. Every time over the last 20 years that some crisis has exposed the PCC's failings it has announced some footling reforms – tinkering with its Code of Practice, conducting a perfunctory investigation or a bogus internal review, appointing a fresh Tory peer as its chair ....The announcement demonstrates that it has not overcome its biggest problem, which is that it believes its own lies.
The PCC was constructed on a lie – that it was the only alternative to the evil of state control of the press. For years the press and politicians colluded in the fiction that a draconian privacy law was hanging over their heads, while in truth no government would ever have summoned the courage to put any kind of restrictions on the Big Media owners.
For all the while political leaders of all parties were kowtowing to them in the most embarrassing way – not just to Murdoch but to all of them.
The PCC's favourite lie has been that that under its firm tutelage the national press was "cleaning up its act" and the excesses of intrusion, harassment and misrepresentation were all in the past. Whether anyone believed it or not was not the point: what mattered was the message. From its inception the PCC was a public relations excise, and that they got away with it for 21 years might be regarded as something of an achievement.
In truth, the PCC made press standards worse. Its function was to construct a barrier between editors and the readers, which served to protect them from public ire. This allowed editors to behave less responsibly without worrying about the consequences.
Complainers did not have to be appeased or reasoned with. The PCC would look after that and twist their arms to take whatever measly recompense they recommended as the best they could hope to get.
Now the editors, owners and their PRs in the PCC are engaged in a rearguard damage limitation exercise to create a new brand that retains these essential characteristics of the old – just as they did in 1991.
Then they wound up the old Press Council (PC) under the threat of a statutory intervention from the Calcutt inquiry and produced the PCC as if from a hat. The politicians were satisfied – despite the fact that the PC was actually more effective than the successor.
They have become so good at this game that they will certainly come up with something sufficiently tough-looking to convince the gullible.
The question then will be whether politicians and public fall for it. It is hoped that the post-News of the World climate will be too frosty for a new fake to flourish, but that can't be certain.
To a large extent it depends on what Lord Justice Leveson recommends. It also depends on campaigners like the CPBF to keep up the pressure and stiffen the public resolve for media justice.
(Source The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom)
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