Ofcom-style regulator could work for the press, says lawyer representing NoTW hacking victims
Ahead of Lord Leveson's report on the future regulation of the press, one media lawyer involved in legal proceedings against the News of the World has said that a regulator in the form of Ofcom would work.
David Engle, who is one of two independent solicitors working on the News International hacking arbitration scheme and is representing some 70 victims making privacy claims against the News of the World, offered his views to The Drum on what Leveson may propose tomorrow.
"A regulator that the press will become accountable to is not incompatible with having a free press," Engle said.
"You can have a free but accountable press, just like you can have a free but accountable broadcaster as we have now and I don’t see anyone saying that the BBC and ITV are lackeys of the state and that they can’t broadcast something or else it will upset the government. It’s just not how our media works.
"What [Leveson] may do is create some kind of regulatory body, create a statute - but not necessarily an organ of the state – and recognise that statute as it is recognised by the Irish defamation act… so that it does have some investigative role if something like phone hacking happens again.
“They would then have a mandate to investigate a situation like that, but more importantly they would provide a resolution mechanism. Whether this is what Leveson is going to suggest or not I have no idea though."
Engle was skeptical about newspaper commentary of the Leveson Inquiry and the subsequent build-up to the release of the report, dismissing claims that a state controlled press would make us 'no better than Kazakhstan', as he had heard one person state, as self-serving.
"It’s not as though an editor will ask permission from a civil servant before publishing anything – I think there’s some disingenuousness going on here from the press, which doesn’t want to have to answer to a governing body. They’ve had 60 years of self-regulation and marking their own homework and now it’s quite difficult to find anyone who believes that self-regulation and the PCC has worked."
Engle said introducing legislation to allow such a regulator would be "relatively straightforward" and could be passed within the current defamation bill being put through parliament.
"The tricky bit would be the regulations deriding from that legislation that would explain how it would be set up,” he added. “It’s been done in other sectors – the FSA regulates the financial services for example - it’s nothing revolutionary, it’s a well tried model, including in the media, that’s the irony of it."
Engel speculated that the impact that the report could have, should the Government chose to act upon it, could be far reaching: "It could be anywhere on the spectrum from completely changing everything in terms of for example not allowing people to sue the media in courts, but making them go through a special, fast-track procedure – that would be a major change - to the other end, not very much change at all where we have a PCC mark two."
He also highlighted the need for recognition that the change in the legal system next April to prevent the process of 'No win, no fee' terms offered by legal firms against media outlets as taking the system backwards by 10 years.
"Suing the media is going to become a rich man’s game and if you are a family of a victim of crime, or your child has been killed in a racist attack, or your daughter has been raped and the News of the World has seen fit to broadcast that fact, you’re just going to be left with no way of relying on your legal rights to make any kind of complaint."
Today, 80 Conservative MPs wrote to two newspapers to highlight their stance against the possibility of state regulation of the press, while Prime Minister David Cameron has seen the report the lunchtime - 24 hours ahead of its release.