Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Sir Christopher Meyer, Martin Moore, Julian Petley, and John Kampfner—Oral evidence
(QQ 404–444)
members of it? Do you not need the level of enforcement that applies to the advertising
industry?
Sir Christopher Meyer: The short answer to your question is no. Do not forget
that it is almost three years since I was chairman, and things have moved on. To back up a
little, it is common to say that the press is disciplined by the PCC and a system of
self-regulation. That is not accurate. What disciplines the press, indeed all the media today,
is a hybrid system of regulation that involves the courts, the police, the Press Complaints
Commission and to a degree the Advertising Standards Authority. There are four different
components in the mix and they are all linked.
If you are looking for the severely punitive element in all of this that acts as a
deterrent, or should do, to bad behaviour, the ultimate is imprisonment, as happened to
Clive Goodman. Then there are the courts, where every manner of financial punishment
emerges in costs, damages and fines; and there is then the PCC and its rulings and sanctions.
Q410 Martin Horwood: I apologise that I have to leave shortly after this
exchange. The reason the advertising industry tried to be legal, decent, honest and
truthful—we joked about it but we tried to stick to it—was not that we feared prison,
which is an extreme and, in a way, rather irrelevant sanction, but that it posed an existential
threat to our profits and, in the case of mailing houses and media owners, possibly their
viability. There is no comparable threat, is there, in the case of the media?
Sir Christopher Meyer: There are similarities between the advertising industry and
newspaper industry, but they are not identical. Where do the sanctions lie against bad
journalism and irresponsible editorship? It is that question I was trying to answer. There is
no profession, whether it has an external regulatory system or a self-regulatory system, that
is exactly the same as the press. Only the press deal with the issue of freedom of
expression, and that is why the approach has to be somewhat different.
Q411 Martin Horwood: What about a sanction to stop publication for five days,
for instance? That would have a pretty salutary effect on editors, wouldn’t it?
Sir Christopher Meyer: If I was chairman and that was put to me as a practical
proposition, I would reject it immediately. It is entirely impractical. You would be taken to
court; it would probably end up in Strasbourg, and it would be struck down for being a
curtailment of freedom of speech. Even if that existed, you would have a subsidiary problem
of when to introduce a sanction as draconian as that.
Forgive me if I am being impertinent, but I think you underestimate the power of the
sanctions already available to the Press Complaints Commission. There is a tendency in
London to dismiss them as a slap on the wrist. I can tell you that when a negative
adjudication is coming down the pipe for an editor, the screams and howls of outrage, and
the threats to leave the PCC system if we dare do such a thing, do not reveal a kind of
insouciant view of this kind of penalty. I would ask the Committee to bear that in mind.
Julian Petley: I think Sir Christopher has forgotten he is no longer chair of the PCC.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I have just reminded the Committee that I was not.
Julian Petley: I will remind them again. The real problem is that the PCC does not
have any effective sanctions. I simply do not agree with Sir Christopher’s point about
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