Tag Archive for: IPSO

Press Regulation

Some mixed news relating to press regulation.

The good news is that our petition has passed the 10,000 mark meaning the government must now respond to it. Thank you to everyone who signed it

The not so good news is that I have received the following e mail relating to the complaint I made about the Express article entitled “Food shop alert as YOUR supermarket bill set to soar due to EU red tape”

Dear Dr Poole,

The Complaints Committee has considered your complaint, the email of 14th June 2021 from IPSO’s Executive notifying you of its view that your complaint did not raise a possible breach of the Code, and your email of 14th June 2021 requesting a review of the Executive’s decision. The Committee agreed the following decision:

The Committee noted that the headline incorporating the term “EU red tape” introduced the article, which at one point contrasted the UK Government’s position of unilaterally delaying the implementation of some of the border checks, with the EU’s recourse to legal action in order to enforce full implementation of the checks.

For this reason, and the reasons already provided by IPSO’s Executive, the Committee decided that your complaint did not raise a possible breach of the Code. As such, it declined to re-open your complaint.

The Committee would like to thank you for giving it the opportunity to consider your concerns.

Best wishes,

This is very disappointing as it effectively allows the Express to falsely blame the price rises on the EU and shows that reform of how the press is regulated is desperately needed. We need a situation where regulation is carried out by individuals who are genuinely independent from the press and politics to ensure that newspapers like the Express cannot get away with what they are doing.

I will be challenging this outcome as soon as I have chance but we do need to continue to press for changes to the way the press is regulated which I would suggest we do in a number of ways.

Firstly, we should keep complaining about articles such as the one I refer to above published by the likes of the Express. This will make it clear to the likes of the Express and indeed IPSO that we are serious about the issue of fair and accurate reporting relating to the EU. Indeed I will be posting details of another Express article we should all complain about – just about the only good thing about IPSO is they do actually make it very easy to complain!

Secondly, we should put pressure on those that advertise in the likes of the Express asking them if they are happy for their organisation or brand to be promoted in publications that regularly mislead their readers and publish false information that is often of a nature that is offensive. We saw that this tactic can be effective with the recent launch of GB news when several leading brands pulled their advertising.

Thirdly, we should consider demonstrating outside the offices of publications such as the Express and the Mail, and indeed IPSO itself. Again, this will let them know we are watching what they do and that we are serious about putting a stop to it.

Fourthly we should press through political channels for the regulatory regime to be improved, indeed the petition starts this process. We should write to MPs about this, especially MPs we think would be sympathetic to the issue and attempt to place motions onto the agenda of party conferences.

We are of course open to other ideas so please do let us know if you have any.

Why should the media get away with it?

Despite this last weekend being far quieter on the political front than the previous one, I still had quite a sour taste in my mouth over the news media coverage of the Article 16 issue that previous weekend.

Even now, ten days later, I have yet to see any evidence that Article 16 was in fact triggered.

The is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the EU considered it, but that does not justify claims in the British News media that they had triggered article 16 or the one-sided frenzy that the media subsequently created with virtually no mention of Boris Johnson’s threat to trigger article 16 a few weeks earlier.

Since then, a Parliamentary Petition calling for Article 16 to be triggered has been created and is being heavily pushed by Arlene Foster. And yet the News Media has said next to nothing about that.

Sadly, neither this inaccuracy or bias is news to the Rejoin Community. I am sure I have no need to give names but several of the more popular daily newspapers are very based towards the Pro Leave argument and accuracy is not something that certain of those newspapers have a reputation for.

The inaccurate and biased reporting over article 16 however appears to have extended well beyond newspapers into other media, including the BBC.

Not only does this whole affair demonstrate the need for the system of press regulation to be overhauled as I suggested in my last blog post on this subject, but it also demonstrates that there is a need for the Rejoin community to be more proactive in this area and actually do something about it rather than just moan about it amongst ourselves.

To that end I have put together and submitted a new parliamentary petition on the issue which hopefully will be accepted and we can lush to highlight these issues.

But we do need to do far more as a movement, and one of the things we need to do is complain to the relevant organisations and regulatory bodies every time we see a story that is wrong or in the case of the BBC, biased.

IPSO, who look after complaints about newspapers and organisations, have put together the very useful graphic I am posting with this, but here are a few other useful links.
This is the article where I found the graphic which outlines the whole process of complaining about the news media

https://www.ipso.co.uk/complain/

This is IPSO’s complaint form

https://www.ipso.co.uk/complain/complaints-form/

This is where you start a complaint about the BBC’s news coverage

https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints/make-a-complaint/#/Complaint

This is OFCOM’s complaint form https://ofcomforms.secure.force.com/formentry/SitesFormCSLEStandardsComplaints

So next time there is something in the news media that is factually wrong or inaccurate rather than just moaning about it we must be proactive and formally complain. If enough of us do we might actually get something done!