On Monday the alarming news emerged that Baroness Buscombe, the new chair of the Press Complaints Commission, is considering extending the PCC’s remit to cover the blogosphere.
“Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated,” she told the Independent’s media editor, Ian Burrell. “Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it’s news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It’s a very interesting area and quite challenging.”
In response, the Liberal Conspiracy blogger “Unity” has drafted an open letter to the commission, warning against any intervention.
Here’s the key passage:
While we are grateful for your interest in our activities we must regretfully decline your kind offer of future PCC regulation. Frankly, we do not feel that the further development of blogging as an interactive medium that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and opinions will benefit from regulation by a body representing an industry with, in the main, substantially lower ethical standards and practices than those already practised by the vast majority of established British bloggers.
The PCC’s status as the self-regulatory body of the newspaper industry undermines any ambition it has to act as an impartial regulator of the blogosphere.
Many of the newspaper editors who sit on the PCC (including the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Wright and the Sunday Telegraph’s Ian MacGregor) have a vested interest in penalising those bloggers who highlight their papers’ misdemeanours.
It is disingenuous to present bloggers as entirely unregulated. Those who wish to challenge claims made on blogs already have recourse to Britain’s draconian libel laws (as many have learned to their cost).
If Baroness Buscombe wants to salvage the reputation of an increasingly discredited institution she would be wise not to make any more concrete proposals.
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