Hacking inquiry – Hacked off

by Brian Cathcart Lord Hunt says he is winding up the Press Complaints Commission, of which he is chairman, and will launch a new body “with teeth”. He has discussed this planned body at the Leveson inquiry and elsewhere, and his ideas have at least four significant weaknesses. The first weakness The new body will [...]

The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission has been asked to keep Leveson informed of his progress on drawing up plans for a new regulator. Lord Hunt explained some of his proposals for a new regulator for the industry during his evidence at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon. Robert Jay QC, inquiry counsel, asked Hunt [...]

You do not become Lord Chief Justice without being very bright indeed and awfully judicious. But if I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest that he might have made quite an important error in his speech last week about reform of press self-regulation. Lord Judge, in his defence of the current system of [...]

*From Media Standards Trust Talk about missing the story. The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, The Guardian, even Newsnight all failed to lead with the genuinely newsworthy aspect of Wednesday’s Leveson Inquiry seminars. The Sun highlighted Paul Dacre and Kelvin MacKenzie’s attacks on David Cameron – for setting up the Inquiry in the first [...]

The Press Standards Board of Finance (PressBoF) has annouced the appointment of Lord David Hunt as the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission today. The appointment comes just over two months after Baroness Peta Buscombe decided to step down, on July 29. The PCC has been heavily criticised following revelations on the phone hacking [...]

Roy Greenslade makes a number of valid and helpful points in his proposal to come up with a ‘PCC Plus’. In particular he notes the experience and conscientiousness of the current PCC secretariat (i.e. those who run the organisation on a day-to-day basis). Anyone who has dealt with the secretariat would almost certainly agree with [...]