Posted on 17 May 2013
Self-regulation of the press is a better approach than direct accountability to governments, the research director at the London School of Economics’ Media and Communications Department has said.
“A social compact approach, where grand bargains are struck with the media – them serving certain purposes and having some autonomy in how they regulate themselves – would seem preferable to having a system of permanent accountability to parliament,” said Damian Tambini during a visit to the EUI on 15 May.
He said that press regulators often discuss regulation in terms of privileges enjoyed by journalists, such as the right to protect sources, as being granted in exchange for journalists serving public functions. Some have limited the debate to traditional forms of media, although Tambini highlighted the New Zealand Law Commission’s March 2013 report as one which paves the way for online media to be part of press regulatory bodies.
“What the Law Commission effectively does is go through and summarise legal privileges which are enjoyed by news media and propose ways in which these privileges should also be accessed by online and other platforms. It wants to strike a new compact in a platform-neutral manner,” he said.
The New Zealand report does not define a media organisation by commercial value or size, Tambini said, but by its willingness to adhere to media standards: “In that definition the judges are being asked to take into account self-regulation in order to identify whether news media should or should not be defined as such for the purpose of access to the various privileges described.”
Conversely, the November 2012 Leveson Report, which deals with culture, practices and ethics of the UK press, focused on traditional types of media it is recommendation to create a self-regulating body.
Online media organisations are not excluded from Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals, however, and can benefit from joining a self-regulatory press body. “The idea is that once online media reach a certain size, it will be in their interests to do that because they will be exposed to greater liability if they don’t,” Tambini said.
Yet a risk remains for small online media organisations, which may find themselves unable to cope with regulation decided upon by traditional media and large online news outlets. “If you are a little blog and you write about news, you could find you have too many internal procedures and lawyers going over stories,” Tambini said, suggesting self-regulatory bodies could be inaccessible to many in the online sphere.
Damian Tambini was visiting the Institute for the summer school organised by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, which is part of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. In addition, he also participated in an event organised by the EUI's Information Society working group during which the above comment were made.
(Text by Rosie Scammell)