The Press Complaints Commission needs its editors to supply information on issues such as phone-hacking
So a shameful rash of phone-hacking (up till 2006, after which there's only been an odd unproven spot or two) prompts calls for more legal controls on the press. So the Press Complaints Commission launches its own inquiry, led by a former chief constable and a professor of law. So the big question for the PCC is: what went wrong?
Answer: in a way, not very much. The commission isn't an investigatory body. When the police and the information commissioner blew the whistle on newspapers' illicit blagging for bank accounts and so on before all this, there had been no complaints.
The PCC issued stern, uncoded warnings, and the crookedness more or less stopped. One reporter from the News of the World went to prison for hacking ? a separate offence, covered by a separate act of parliament ? and the stables looked a sight cleaner. Asked to survey matters afresh in 2009, the PCC didn't find cause for alarm.
But all that looks a little on the denuded side now (even before Baroness Buscombe, the commission's chairman, bristles about less than full information). Maybe the situation post-2006 did drastically improve, but what happened before then ? which the News of the World, reading its own emails, could easily have deduced ? was utterly out of order. News International, in short, didn't strive hard enough to come clean.
Should some of the national editors who served as commissioners through the noughties have sounded the alarm for themselves? The Information Commission report identified six national papers whose editors sat on the PCC at one stage of this saga or another as regular customers of a blagging private eye.
The alarm could have been rung long and hard from within. The code of practice could have been followed from day one by editors required to enforce it. But, obviously, nobody said anything, an issue of trust left swinging, a failure not of the commission but of those members it relied on most.
Another trip to the Last Chance Saloon, then? Let's hope not. Criminal sanctions for all the dodges complained of are now in place. Two years in prison for blagging as well as hacking closes that door as far as it can be closed ? and the statutory Ofcom regime on broadcasting didn't exactly stop the phoney contest cheats in their tracks. As for the new inquiry, it needs to be short, sharp and incisive ? and to start with a simple request. Could those around the table who know when something's wrong from personal experience, please put their hands up?
? Mark Thomson at Atkins Thomson and Charlotte Harris at JMW are the respective solicitors on the Sienna Miller and Max Clifford hacking cases. Sorry I tangled that last week.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/06/phone-hacking-press-complaints-commission-comment
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