The British press could soon be at the mercy of its enemies

Jan 5, 2017 by Jill

by Alex Wickham, CapX:

Imagine for a moment that members of the board of Ofcom publicly declared that they “hate” ITV and that Channel 4 are “scum”. Or if the executives at the British Board of Film Classification expressed a desire to ban movies made by 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. Or if a spokesman for Ofgem, the energy regulator, said that the “Big Six” were a bunch of Nazis.

It may seem fanciful – but the equivalent is happening today with the British newspaper industry.

In October, “Impress” gained recognition as an official state-backed press regulator, after a body called the Press Recognition Panel agreed that it met the requirements set out in the Royal Charter that resulted from the Leveson Inquiry.

There are two farcical elements to this. The first is that none of the 23 criteria by which potential press regulators are judged includes the requirement to actually have any members. Impress claims to regulate 31 publications – a tally achieved only by double-counting print and digital editions. And with all due apologies to the Caerphilly Observer and Waltham Forest Echo, none of them is a household name.

More alarming, however, is the fact that several of Impress’s senior board and committee members are on the record confessing their hatred of some of the newspapers they want to regulate.

Read here

Read also: Impress Accused Of Using ‘Scare Emails’ To Sign Up Outlets, News Media Assn