Now however the Press Complaints Commission has issued new rules:

When a complaint is upheld by the PCC, the editor is obliged to publish it with “due prominence”. Here is some guidance about online publication:

• As with corrections and apologies, consideration must be given to the adjudication appearing in the relevant section of the website. This can be discussed in advance with the PCC.

• If an article has been found to be in breach of the Code by the PCC, it should either be removed from the archive and replaced by the adjudication, or a link to the upheld adjudication should be prominently displayed on the article itself. This can be discussed in advance with the PCC.

• The adjudication, when published, should be tagged to ensure that it is searchable.

As with other recent tweaks to the rules the PCC implements and the way it goes about its work (such as here and here) this is a good small step forward, even if collectively they fall short of the sort of more radical reforms to press regulation that many have called for in the past. It also leaves in place a big gap between the rights that members of the public have when it comes to newspapers compared to how Baroness Buscombe, the Press Complaints Commission’s chair, was able to express her views in the party’s newspaper when she took objection to statements made in a motion for party conference. So good news, but this should not be the end of the story.

Note: I’ve updated the story to make the reference to Baroness Buscombe and Liberal Democrat News clearer.

As The Guardian explains:

Peta Buscombe, the baroness who chairs the Press Complaints Commission, has been sued for libel by a solicitor.

Writs have also been issued against the PCC itself and the Metropolitan Police by a London-based solicitor, Mark Lewis.

He is claiming damages for libel, including aggravated damages, plus an injunction to restrain all three parties from publishing the allegations that allegedly accuse him of lying…

[Giving evidence to a Parliamentary committee, Lewis] told of a conversation with a Met police detective sergeant, Mark Maberly, who had said 6,000 people had been “involved” in the NoW’s hacking activities rather than the “handful” originally claimed to have been victims of phone message interceptions.

When the PCC inquired into this statement by Lewis, a Met police lawyer told the then PCC director, Tim Toulmin, that Maberly had been wrongly quoted by Lewis. In other words, it suggested that Lewis had lied.

In November 2009, armed with this Met police response, Buscombe addressed the Society of Editors’ conference about the affair, saying that Maberly had been misquoted. She told a Guardian reporter: “He didn’t say it. He is said to have said it.”

Lewis was outraged by what he regarded as a slur on his reputation…

In April this year, following the publication of the select committee’s report, Buscombe wrote to the committee “to correct the record.” Her correction appears on the PCC website.

I hardly represent someone who is the “sweetheart” of the press, having had no background in the industry whatever.

That would be Baroness Buscombe, Chair of the Press Complaints Commission. Ho hum.

She’s in favour of the media attacks on the House of Commons, but against those on the House of Lords. (Source)

She’s in favour of the Press Complaint Commission’s remit being extended outside its core areas, but against that of Ofcom being extended outside its core areas. (Source: here and here.)

Oh, and she’s both a member of the House of Lords and chair of the Press Complaints Commission.

Intriguing pattern don’t you think?

This year, in fairness to the media (and perhaps partly a reflection of the growing power of blogs to embarrass journalists who find their names and errors plastered over the internet for their colleagues and friends to find?*) there have been not very many such stories so far. Probably the highest profile one – over the Christmas cards sold by the Conservative Party – did have the journalistic justification of being about the Conservatives being willing to make money out of selling the sorts of cards that David Cameron had previously mocked.

But the big exception to this more positive media outlook has been the Christian media, where I’ve found a series of examples of stories about Christianity being under threat where accuracy has been missing and the outlet has been unresponsive to messages pointing out mistakes.

First example: LifeSiteNews.com which wrongly states, “Birmingham City Council has changed the name of this year’s light-switching-on event to the generic ‘Winterval.’” (no, that’s not a story about this year nor last year nor the year before; it’s essentially a limited incident from a decade ago which involved mentioning Christmas anyway). The story also claims that “Councils around Britain are removing all references to the name “Christmas” from their 2009 events” without any supporting evidence (perhaps not surprising, because it isn’t true that councils are doing things different from the past – even in the case of Dundee Council, on which see below).

Second example: Catholic Online which ran the same erroneous stories about Birmingham and Dundee as highlighted by Martin Belam, who expertly pulled about the Birmingham Winterval story.

Third example: Anglican-Mainstream.net which wrongly claimed that, “Dundee City Council has come under fire for removing all references to Christmas from this year’s festive light switch-on ceremony.” The main evidence this story isn’t true? See the 175 references to Christmas I counted up, though Dundee Council’s response to the story was not as clear as it could have been. (This story was also run by The Times, which hasn’t responded to my email nor has it corrected its story.**)

Fourth example: Christian Today also ran the same erroneous story about Dundee.

Fifth example: the Christian Institute, who ran an inaccurate story about Dundee Council and also about Rochdale Council (a story that was thoroughly debunked several months earlier by The Guardian).

Martin Belam recounted counting Catholic Online, without getting a response (though the story was slightly changed, leaving the error remaining in the body of the story however). I’ve also tried contacting two of the other outlets mentioned above, in both cases without response and without the stories changing.

So is the story really about Winterval and the politically correct brigade? I think not. The story is about some Christian media outlets running wrong stories.

A cheery footnote mind you: only 37 people signed this myth inciting petition.

* I’ve been struck by the number of journalists, by no means all on publications with stunning records of accuracy and correction, I’ve spoken with in the last few months who do seem to be genuinely moved by such factors.

** Note for Baroness Buscombe: you see, this is the sort of thing that makes so many bloggers dismissive of the idea that they should have the same standards as the mainstream media.

“Let me make sure you know exactly who I am and what I am going to do at the PCC” – so said Baroness Buscombe, the new chair of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), at the annual conference of the Society of Editors.

Having read her speech in full, I fear I do know what she is going to do at the PCC – and that I’m not going to like it.

It’s a curious speech in several ways. She started off by recounting in some detail her Conservative Party roots. Leading off with the fact that she’s a Conservative, added to the jibes at Labour and the silence about other parties (even though her reference to civil liberties gave an obvious opportunity to mention the Liberal Democrats, for example), leaves an obvious question about what her motives were. I’m sure she’s a smart person and can’t have been unaware that the message many people will take from her speech is, “I’m a Conservative”. Is that really the right message for the chair of the PCC – which has to deal with complaints about political stories all in an equitable manner – to send? Is it the best way to reassure the public about how self-regulation will work on her watch?

There were also some rather astringent comments about Google and news aggregators:

“Together the press, all commercial broadcasters, film, book publishing and music industries must now work together to find a new business model with the Search Engines. The latter, the aggregators, think it is ok to enjoy the use of all your valuable intellectual property and ad revenues for little or no return.”

Whilst the chair of the PCC doesn’t need to be a technical aspect, I’m disappointed that she should make such an obviously wrong comment. If you look at many news aggregators they most certainly do not “use all of your valuable intellectual property”. Instead they take only the headline (and sometimes a following sentence or two) from a story and then link through to the original source. They are driving traffic to newspaper sites, not stealing “all your valuable intellectual property” from them.

It is as if the message was a comforting nod towards newspaper editors that she is on their side: she doesn’t like Google and she’d get on with any future Conservative government (so helping head off any moves for statutory regulation). That may be nice for them to hear – but choosing to stress her Conservative roots and her antipathy to search engines and aggregators is hardly taking the line of putting the public’s interests first.

Somewhat oddly, although she praised the media’s assault on MPs over expenses, when it came to her own chamber – the House of Lords – media criticism was not welcomed by her, for she asked, “Is it really in anyone’s interests for the media to be party to the undermining of our Second Chamber…?”

What was missing in her speech was an answer to the scale of the mistrust which engulfs journalism in this country. The latest MORI annual reputation survey puts journalists as the second least trusted profession in the country. Yet reading her defence of the current system of self-regulation and how it works you could be forgiven for thinking that journalism is one of the most trusted professions rather than scrambling to avoid the wooden spoon at the other end of the table.

In fairness, we did get six sentences about review governance structures and not being complacent. But for a profession so little trusted, simply slipping in the comment “I cannot ignore the strength of feeling that ranges from indignation to rage that exists among some of my colleagues in Westminster. So my priority is to do all I can to reassure politicians, opinion formers and – most importantly of all – the public that we are robust enough and responsible enough to be left alone” is not nearly enough.

Rather than get a plan to match the scale of the public distrust of journalism, we got a lengthy exposition of Baroness Buscombe’s Conservative Party roots. At best, that’s a serious misjudgement. At worst, it’ll let the public and journalism down.