Last month the Press Complaints Commission made a judgement in a case involving discriminatory comments on a newspaper article. The case highlighted the issue of journalism on mental health and how it is treated by publishers alongside similar considerations such as sexuality, gender, religion and ethnicity. The complaint also led to a change in The Guardian’s moderation rules. In a
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It appears last week’s guidance from the PCC on correcting URLs as well as the contents of stories has not reached The Sun. Serene Branson’s on-air slurring was initially mocked by the tabloid with the headline “Grammy’s reporter goes gaga”. When it emerged that the presenter may have* suffered from a stroke the article was rewritten – but not the
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More from the PCC following yesterday’s Twitter ruling: new guidance on online corrections shows a surprising awareness of search engine optimisation techniques. Among other points of the guidance are that: “Care must be taken that the URL of an article does not contain information that has been the subject of successful complaint. If an article is amended, then steps should
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The PCC has made its first rulings on a complaint over newspapers republishing a person’s tweets. The background to this is the publication in The Daily Mail and the Independent on Sunday of tweets by civil servant Sarah Baskerville. Adrian Short sums up the stories pretty nicely: “We could be forgiven for thinking you’re trying to make the news rather
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You may remember ‘investigation’ by The Hull Daily Mail into HU17.net, a hyperlocal publisher that was operating on its patch back in March, and the resulting backlash against the newspaper by observers who saw this as a commercially motivate hatchet job. Now the Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint on the basis “that readers would have been misled as
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Fascinating decision by the Press Complaints Commission today on a privacy complaint against Loaded magazine that involved images of a then-15-year-old girl’s breasts taken from the social network Bebo. Web User puts it more succinctly than the decision itself, but for publishers it boils down to this: the complaint was rejected because the image had been circulated widely on the
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The Press Complaints commission, which is the industry body which attempts to regulate the printed media, and now the corresponding websites, is engaged in a “Governance Review” – and is wanting responses by January 25th 2010.
The commission last had the attention of bloggers when a proposal was made by the PCC Chairman Baroness Buscombe that they should be regulated by the PCC. Unity, at Liberal Conspiracy, organised a response which drew expressions of support from perhaps 300 bloggers over the following 3 days.
Tim Ireland has been organising an excellent response , based around these five specific proposals:
SUGGESTION ONE: Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).
SUGGESTION TWO: Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).
SUGGESTION THREE: The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.
SUGGESTION FOUR: Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.
SUGGESTION FIVE: A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.
And he has done an excellent (and noisy) video involving space invaders, which you can see here.
The PCC has a special website set up, from where you can send your submission.
The closing date is January 25th 2010.
Following recent coverage of the PCC’s Baroness Buscombe’s Independent interview where she possibly mooted the idea of the PCC regulating blogs, I thought I would share some correspondence I had with the PCC recently over the same issue. In a nutshell: blogs can already choose to operate under the PCC anyway. I asked Simon Yip of the PCC whether a
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Baroness Buscombe, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, gave a speech this week to the Society of Editors, followed by some comments to Ian Burrell of the Independent about a desire to “regulate the blogosphere“.
The Baroness has taken several steps backwards from her previous statements to Mr Burrell, and has attempted to emphasise that any proposals would be “voluntary”.
I am sceptical as to whether this is a true change of mind, or a simply more nuanced journey aiming for the same destination by a more circuitous, and perhaps better hidden, route. Ian Burrell has pointed out that he had a direct interview with her for 40 minutes, so making that mistake would not be easy/ However, that has been addressed elsewhere by perhaps hundreds of people, with an excellent and vigorous collective letter from hundreds of bloggers.
For me, in addition to the “will we … won’t we … will we … won’t we … regulate the bloggers” game of Hokey-Cokey, this affair has highlighted a number of problems with both the Press Complaints commission, and perhaps with Baroness Buscombe herself.
Was the campaign against Jan Moir that crashed the PCC website “heavily orchestrated”? Jan Moir herself thinks so. Was it “organised”? The deputy editor of the Telegraph said it was. If this was the case, who was organising this? “The big gay who runs the internet“? Stephen Fry? And what do they mean by organised? Let’s start with 3 definitions: Functioning within a formal structure,
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Serene Branson: The Sun changes its story – but not the URL
It appears last week’s guidance from the PCC on correcting URLs as well as the contents of stories has not reached The Sun. Serene Branson’s on-air slurring was initially mocked by the tabloid with the headline “Grammy’s reporter goes gaga”. When it emerged that the presenter may have* suffered from a stroke the article was rewritten – but not the
Read more…
newspapers, regulation, law and ethics • Tags: comments, daily record, Dave Lee, ethics, grammys, PCC, serene branson, stroke, sun, url • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post