Don’t worry about press regulation; the Daily Mail is going to start running a corrections column. It’s taken Paul Dacre 19 years as Mail editor to make the decision, which he announced while addressing the Leveson inquiry into media ethics — but I suppose you can’t rush these things. And it is to be commended that clarifications and corrections will be made more prominent in his very popular paper, as well as the Metro. Perhaps others will follow suit.
Dacre had previously said that “buried corrections” were “one of the great myths of our time“, yet has now seen fit to make his corrections less, well, buried. You can’t “bury” a correction on page two, much as it’s regarded as a bit of an editorial graveyard, so this move is to be applauded. The more cynical observer might venture that it’s a very convenient way of avoiding the need for front page apologies, should mistakes ever occur in front-page stories, but let’s not be churlish. Not yet, anyway.
If these corrections work, it should be a great advertisement for self-regulation, and would prove the arguments Dacre made today that the tickling stick of the PCC should remain, or at the very most be replaced by an ombudsman system led by retired editors… ah, if only one could think of a prominent newspaper editor with an interest in media ethics who is soon to be retired! Ah well, I’m sure the kind of person suitable for such a cushy job would make himself known when the time was right.
It remains to be seen whether readers will accept this kind of thing as the way forward, and whether this kind of move will be seen as protection enough for those who feel they’ve been wronged in the press, in the wake of the phone hacking scandal that enveloped the industry over the summer.
What happens, for example, if a newspaper decides against putting in a reader’s correction, and there’s a dispute over whether there really was an error or not? What happens if a couple of paragraphs on page two replace a larger correction that would have appeared elsewhere in the paper, on page three for example or the front page? Who decides whether that’s good enough or not? There are still details to be ironed out, regardless of this move today.
What’s faintly dispiriting, though, is the intellectual feebleness of some of Dacre’s arguments. If people want to license journalists they should go to Zimbabwe, he says. It’s the kind of reduction to absurdity that doesn’t befit someone of his stature or his position; “Well if you like it so much you should go to Zimbabwe and see how you like it”, is a lazy klaxon used by those who can’t think in terms of nuance or shades of grey, and one would rather hope that the editor of a national newspaper could. I’m sure Dacre can; it appears that he has chosen not to.
This kind of argument supposes that there is only vicious state regulation on one hand, or freedom on the other, and nothing in between. It’s just plain wrong.
As well as that, he argues that “Britain’s liberal classes” are somehow at fault because they dislike popular redtops and that “This liberal hatred of mass-selling newspapers has transmogrified into a hatred of self-regulation itself.” Again, Dacre is not a dunce, by any stretch of the imagination, so it’s disappointing and dispiriting to see him coming out with garbage like this.
People don’t like red-tops because of what they have done, because of the boundaries they have crossed, because of the crimes they have committed -not because of some political or class-driven desire to stamp down on the voice of the people. People don’t like self-regulation because they feel it doesn’t work. That’s the top and bottom of it.
And there’s the thing I suppose I take issue with the most: Dacre rails against “liberals” who hate red-top newspapers supposedly because they’re popular, and voice the opinion of the many rather than the few; yet he won’t countenance changes to regulation of the press, regardless of how many people support it, or how popular that is. Because he says so.
Is that really good enough? And who is representing the voice of the public at this inquiry? When do they get their turn?
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