The Daily Mail and the Sun accounted for more than half of all complaints about newspapers in 2013
The Daily Mail was the most complained-about newspaper in 2013, racking up more than a third of all complaints made, figures released by Hacked Off have shown.
Figures: The Daily Mail was complained about most
According to a column by Hacked Off director Professor Brian Cathcart in the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail accounted for 1,214 complaints about national dailies to the Press Complaints Commission last year, 36.4 per of the total, ahead of the Sun in second place with 638 (19.1 per cent). Together, the two titles received more than half of all complaints, with the rest of the objections in 2013 spread out among another 17 titles.
Professor Cathcart’s column criticised the PCC for a lack of transparency and said the public would get “an idea of who benefits” from statistics being difficult to access.
“The PCC has been told to change, and has refused,” he wrote. “It is obvious that the PCC’s mission is to do the opposite of the naming and shaming that many national newspapers insist is so important in other walks of life. Instead the PCC covers up.”
He went on to warn that the proposed new press regulatory body backed by a number of major newspapers – including Associated Papers, which owns the Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch’s News UK – the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) could be “confidently” expected to “carry on covering up this way”.
The newspaper industry is pushing ahead with plans for its own regulatory system to replace the PCC amid a battle with the government over the new Royal Charter legislation. Publishers claim that the legislation amounts to state interference and threatens press freedoms.