The 2012 Leveson Inquiry report on the culture, practices and ethics of the press recommended that any press regulator should impose fines for serious or systemic breaches of a set Code of Practice.
However, the publishers who set the rules for the press’s main complaints body, IPSO, have only given it the power to impose fines where there are both serious and systemic breaches of the Editors’ Code. Crucially, this fails to acknowledge that some breaches of the Code may be extremely serious and need redress but may have happened only once.
The IPSO rules set a significantly higher bar for an adequate remedy than the equivalent Leveson recommendation. This change in emphasis and wording significantly undermines the approach and principles that Leveson sought to apply. No matter how bad a breach may be in an individual case by a publication, the only remedies open to IPSO are to order a correction or publication of an adjudication.
However, as Leveson states in his report, “While it may be embarrassing for editors to publish adjudications, this sanction is not enough to deter repeat offending.”
The right to privacy
As expected, the right to privacy in the Code of Practice applied by IPSO is balanced against the public interest in publication. However, how the Code and IPSO interpret the public interest leaves ordinary members of the public unprotected.
Our new report IPSO Rulings Review – a follow up report by the Press Recognition Panel 8 May 2024 includes a case study that illustrates this. It explains how, in February 2023, MailOnline ran a story about the death of a mother in Pakistan, publishing pictures of her children and their names and ages – meaning they were easily identifiable. Their father said that the article had a hugely negative impact on his children and that he had never consented to the publication of images of his children, nor their names and ages.
The IPSO Complaints Committee found that this had been an unjustified intrusion into privacy by the publisher, but the only remedy was the publication of an adjudication. The ruling allowed MailOnline to continue publication of the original article if it wished to do so, meaning there could have been a continued risk of identification of the children. In any event, the rights to privacy of other children in the future would also be unprotected, given the lack of a substantial deterrent.
As we stated in our 2024 Annual Report on the Recognition System:
“…news publishers are able to apply liberal and self-serving interpretations of the exemptions to data protection legislation in the interests of freedom of expression if they can justify it in the public interest. In the Editors’ Code of Practice, the industry has then managed to define the public interest as including largely unfettered freedom of expression.”
Our new report outlines another “egregious breach” of privacy that happened last year when the Greenock Telegraph named an alleged victim of sexual assault and revealed her and her family’s residential addresses.
Despite the “strong concerns” over the behaviour of the newspaper during the complaints process, IPSO had no means of imposing an effective deterrent and was only able to order the publication of an adjudication.
Any punishment imposed by a press regulator will, by its nature, always be after the event and, therefore, inevitably too late to help the original victims. Strong powers of deterrence, such as fines, are essential so that they protect future victims of the press before the damage is done.
This was also true of a case where a journalist at the Halifax Courier revealed their anonymous source of a story, with serious and detrimental consequences to that source. In March 2020, the complainant contacted the paper to voice concerns about conditions at the store at which she worked, alleging that her employer had placed profit above the protection of staff against Covid. The complainant stressed she needed to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job. In May, she was dismissed by her employer, partly for making comments “to the media”. She accused the newspaper of revealing her identity to her employer.
IPSO expressed its serious concern over the breach of the requirement in the Editors’ Code to protect sources, which had led to the complainant losing her job. Despite this and the paper’s apparent attempts to cover it up, there was no remedy available except publication of an adjudication.
In perhaps the most worrying example we found, the threat to human rights by the press even extended to jeopardising children’s safety with another IPSO ruling last year. In it, a journalist and photographer from the Scottish Sun pursued the complainant in separate cars over 40 miles (including on a motorway) whilst she had a young child in the car, forcing her to drive at speed to evade the harassment.
The IPSO Complaints Committee found that:
“The behaviour employed by the photographer and reporter had been intimidating and harassing; the complainant was followed for a period of time, via car, while travelling with a young child. This was a serious and egregious breach of the Code.”
Again, the only remedy available to IPSO was to require the newspaper to publish an adjudication, but despite the “serious and egregious” nature of the breach, the Committee decided not to require this on the front page “…which the Committee acknowledged is valuable editorially”, thus explicitly placing the newspaper’s financial interests above deterrence.
Kathryn Cearns OBE, Chair of the Press Recognition Panel (PRP) says:
“This latest research, which follows our report published in January, builds a picture showing that, as a result of IPSO’s regulatory capture by its publishers, the public remains almost completely unprotected from bad behaviour by the press. No matter how lamentably a newspaper has conducted itself, including during the complaints process, there is simply no method of adequate deterrent open to IPSO which would help prevent any repetition of the behaviour”.
LINKS TO REPORTS:
Report published 22 January 2024 – A Review of the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Complaints Process and Related Issues
Follow up report published 8 May 2024 – IPSO Rulings Review – a follow up report by the Press Recognition Panel 8 May 2024