IPSO caught with its pants down
JVL Introduction
In this blog reposted from Hacked Off, Brian Cathcart takes the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) to task.
IPSO is the organisation that the corporate press, the government and their friends present to the public as an effective guardian of standards.
It is simply not up to it and Cathcart does not pull his punches: calling IPSO the “sham press ‘regulator’”, he exposes its weakness and cowardice, exemplified in its dealings with the Jewish Chronicle.
IPSO’s standards department was alerted to the problems at the Jewish Chronicle as long ago as November 2019, by IPSO’s own complaints committee!
It seems to have done little or had little effect. Since then, there have been since there have been 14 more code breaches and three more libel settlements…
It is, as Cathcart relates here, a sordid record.
This article was originally published by Hacked Off on Tue 17 Aug 2021. Read the original here.
IPSO caught with its pants down
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IPSO – a waste of space!
This article is published by the Hacked Off Campaign, of which Brian Cathcart was the first Executive Director. Over the years they have done heroic work campaigning for independent regulation of the press, and exposing IPSO (the press-owned regulator) as a sham.
However, I was less impressed by another recent Hacked Off article where it contrasts Ofcom (the broadcasting regulator) to IPSO, saying that Ofcom “isn’t perfect, but it is a competent and independent regulatory body”. It would be difficult to be worse than IPSO, but Ofcom doesn’t deserve such a positive assessment. As JVL members are well aware, it failed to hold the BBC accountable for the execrable BBC Panorama documentary “Is Labour anti-Semitic?” which, given the date on which it was broadcast (July 15th, 2019 ), may have influenced voting in the General Election. With good reason, the Media Reform Coalition described it as “a catalogue of reporting failures” both with regard to accuracy and impartiality. So I would like to see Hacked Off focus more attention on one of the leading failures of our mainstream media, i.e. the way it reports Israel, Palestine, so-called antisemitism and the witch-hunts currently going on in the Labour Party.
I completely agree with Brian. To answer Mary Davies- if you can use IPSO to your own advantage then do it. Most complaints that are upheld do not make headlines. It can be a hard slog. But you can turn it to advantage if you know what you are doing. I took the Sun to IPSO over a front page splash on Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and won a front page apology -at that time the first in the Sun’s history. I PR’d it myself when the IPSO PR people were going to bury it, by giving an exclusive to a major national and others then picked it up. The only poor response was from Corbyn and his office who were sent the story in advance but did not even bother to recognise the value nor the effort -because at that point in their learning, of what it is like in the UK to lead from the left, perhaps thought they were above all that. While I know only too well what they were up against, they were naive and seemed ill -skilled at PR dark arts, in my view, a purist’s dereliction of socialist ambition. Of course as John Booth has so well highlighted elsewhere in his review of Owen Jones book and its complete misunderstanding of the weaponisation of antisemitism, the Reut (Institute) Template on how to delegitimise those deemed to be against Israel’s interests, uses a range of methods. By dropping a cartload of antisemitism accusations on the
left, they created ideological shock and awe. The Guardian , one of the worst offenders in Corbyn attacks, has not woken to the fact that it was played, albeit, in parts, willingly. Apart from the perpetrators (Hodge, Ryan, Smeeth, Berger, Austin etc.,) those who were targets were caught in a net cast by master strategists to eradicate all opposition. No one in Corbyn’s office would escape ‘alive’. Resistance came late. Corbyn’s people even went to IPSO themselves in the end, three years after ignoring the Sun apology. There is a train of thought which says that by engaging with the IPSO process we legitimise them. But they are legitimised by others anyway, for endless media complaints that rarely make headlines. Those who take politics seriously must use all the means of resistance and defence they can. It might even be worth it.
Congratulations for this research Brian Cathcart. It’s important work.
Jonathan Coulter is absolutely right with regard to the BBC. The strategy of the corporation in response to individual complaints by members of the public is to wear them down. One tactical move within this approach is to ask the complainant whether he or she thought the broadcast objected to was part of a pattern. Then they ask you to prove it – giving dates and quotes. As if you sit listening to the Today programme, for example, pen in hand recording interviews and drawing up a chronicle of offences.
When I referred to such an interview a couple of years before in support of my contention, giving the date within a couple of days, I was asked to be more specific and told that the BBC had no way of referencing my claim.
All total hogwash designed to grind the complainant down.
In defence of the Jewish Chronicle, they are inaccurate in non-political topics too.
Their editor Stephen Pollard fancies himself as an expert on music and appointed himself to be the opera critic of the Jewish Chronicle. He gets plush free seats for Royal Opera House performances and perhaps even a fee from the Jewish Chronicle. What he does not get is sufficient understanding of what he sees/hears.
The English establishment media is the worst in the world and this is inclusive of nearly all newspapers, including the Guardian, and television and radio, including the BBC. The establishment media slants what is going on and tells us whoppers regularly. Self regulation means no regulation, of course.