Mark Pack

The future of the Press Complaints Commission is up for debate at the party’s autumn conference in Liverpool. A motion from Truro & Falmouth echoes many of the criticisms made of the PCC by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in its recent report. The motion calls for a fully independent regulator to take [...] »

An eleven month review into the workings of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has made 75 recommendations but is not suggesting any fundamental alterations in the ways in which the PCC works. The relatively modest total set of recommendations is in contrast to the views of the Culture, Media and Sport committee in the House [...] »

In an unusual and dramatic turn in the long-running story of the News of the World (editor at the time, Andy Coulson) and the hacking in to the voicemail systems of people in the public eye, a lawyer whose claims were initially dismissed as wrong by the Press Complaints Commission is now sueing for libel. [...] »

A common thread running through the Press Complaints Commission’s defence of its work is that it has been primarily created to deal with individual complaints, rather than being a regulator whose role is to improve the press overall. That’s why, for example, the PCC emphasises the proportion of complaints made to it which are concluded [...] »

At one level the legal threats by Facebook against the Daily Mail are fairly straight forward: newspaper runs horror story about a firm, firm says story is all wrong and threatens to sue for libel. At another level though this story highlights how much difference there is about correcting a story in the online sphere. [...] »

Reacting to the DCMS select committee report on “Press standards, privacy and libel”, which has just been published, Chris Huhne has said: This report blows a gaping hole in the News of the World’s line that only a sole rogue reporter was involved in illegal hacking of phones, and reveals enormous worries about the feeble response of the [...] »

A series of proposals to reform the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) have won the backing of the public in a new IPSOS-MORI poll (8-17 January, 980 individuals) commissioned by the Media Standards Trust: By a 61% margin the public believe the chief purpose of this body should be to monitor compliance with the code of practice [...] »

Yesterday I blogged about the campaign from a group of bloggers for a 5 point plan to improve the Press Complaints Commission and the Code of Practice for editors. Now the campaign has its own video, complete with jaunty music and some guest space invaders. Take a look here and don't forget to sign the [...] »

The Press Complaints Commission is currently reviewing its Editors’ Code of Practice so a group of bloggers, including myself, have got together to propose five changes – and we’re running an online petition which you can sign too. Amongst any group of people, the exact reasons for supporting the suggestions will vary but for myself they [...] »

The news that Cambridgeshire Chief Constable Julie Spence has been appointed to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is likely to divide people. Depending on your point of view, Julie Spence either has fed just the sort of whipped up fears of immigrants stories based on flawed 'facts' that the tabloids so love (and so will [...] »