As David Elstein puts it:

Ed Miliband has proposed a 20% limit on ownership of national newspapers, measured by circulation. As the Sun’s circulation is more than 20% of all national newspaper sales, that would require News International to close The Times and either sell the Sunday Times or reposition it as a non-national newspaper (by ceasing to publish in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, where would-be readers would have to subscribe digitally). Even then the Sun’s circulation would need to be forced down, perhaps by restricting access to newsprint. In all likelihood any such measure would result in the combined circulation of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday rising above 20%, so requiring similar measures to be targeted at them.

Banning a newspaper from appearing in parts of the UK? Making it illegal for a newspaper group to buy ‘too much’ paper? There are just too few newspaper titles with a mass audience for restriction on ownership by circulation to be practical.

That’s why I think the debates this week about media ownership are largely looking for the wrong sort of solution, at least as far as newspapers are concerned. The route to practical improvements in our newspapers lies with changing the way editors and journalists behave, not in overly worrying about ultimate ownership.

The immediate and obvious is substantive and meaningful reform of the system of self-regulation. Part of the problem has been the way the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) sees itself as an arbiter of individual cases rather than a regulator of the industry and part of the problem has been the gaps in the code of conduct it enforces.

However fixing those issues on its own is very unlikely to be enough.

There needs to be a much greater sense of individual, personal responsibility by journalists and editors for how they behave. This is best illustrated by the classic doorstepping exercise trawling for a story that many newspapers carry out. That sort of exercise can be justified – it is, after all, how the Mail unearthed the David Abrahams Labour donations scandal, by doorstepping all the supposed Labour Party donors in turn until it discovered some that were not. That is the sort of investigative journalism we should not merely tolerate but welcome.

But – and it is a big but – I also know of several people who have been caused huge personal distress by journalists on similar fishing trips appearing on their doorsteps and then behaving in a rude and intrusive manner, trying to tease out information by scaring those they are talking to. The problem is that all the pressure is on the journalist to come back with a story. If they don’t, they – and possibly their boss – can get criticism for failing to produce a story yet taking up time and money on a wild goose chase. Yet if the journalist oversteps the mark and leaves someone in tears? There is no comeback. The pressure is all one way and so we should not be surprised by the result.

That sense of personal immunity can be changed. Rulings by whatever succeeds the current PCC could name the responsible journalists and editorial staff and hold them, rather than simply their title, to account for example.

Some examples of journalists misbehaving have, and will continue to be, unearthed or publicised by ‘the public’, especially with the increasing voice available to many people via social media. However, as we have seen with the most serious of recent allegations, it is often only when serious investigative resources are deployed that wrongdoing is discovered or rumours turned into facts. There is clearly a role for the police in this, but the need for a free press means we should not over-rely on police crawling over media outlets; there needs to be a different source of vigorous and effective investigation that does not come with the same risks of to a free press from the abuse of state power.

The answer is a simple, but almost always unused, one. There is a whole profession skilled at investigative work: investigative journalists. At the moment, with the rare and striking exception of phone hacking, journalists almost always shy away from stories about each other. The ‘dog eat dog’ style story is treated as something to avoid.

That cosy stand-off may suit the short-term interests of journalists, but it fails the interests of the public, of our society and indeed of healthy journalism too.

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.

The complaint was made by the MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, Michael McCann. The article related to his Parliamentary expenses, which had been published following the release of the figures by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). Mr McCann argued that a claim made in the article – that his expenses “include £1150 in hotel bills to fund his trips to Westminster, while he also claims for a rented property in central London” – was misleading because it suggested that he had claimed for hotel rooms at the same time as paying rent on a property. In fact, the hotel bills were incurred before he had the property.

The Commission found the claim in the article could have misled readers into believing that the claims for hotel bills and rent were made concurrently, rather than consecutively. The newspaper should have clarified this following the complaint. It failed to do so and the result was a breach of the Code.

The newspaper published the adjudication with due prominence last Wednesday. However, in doing so, it made some minor amendments to the text and failed to publish a proper reference to the PCC in the headline. As a result, it republished the adjudication in full today.

At the time of writing, and despite the original correction being published last week, the words which caused the complaint are still on the local newspaper’s website and in fact come out higher in a search for “Michael McCann” hotel than the PCC’s ruling.

UPDATE: The story has now been pulled from the newspaper’s website, though its headline and snippet are still currently appearing in search results. However, clicking on them or on the link above now takes you to the newspaper’s front page.

Conservative London Assembly member Brian Coleman has backed down from his attempt to ban questions to him at London Fire Authority meetings.

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is to investigate the Daily Telegraph, following complaints from Tim Farron and others that the newspaper had gone on a fishing expedition rather than having the sort of public interest case which justifies journalistic subterfuge. On the substantive policy issue at stake, Ofcom look set to recommend that the Sky bid should be referred to the Competition Commission.

We’ve occasionally covered the travails of the Conservatives on Sefton Council over the years. The latest news, as carried by Birkdale Focus, is that three Conservative councillors have suspended and one quit. In recent years the Conservatives there have had two leaders quit, one suspended and a fourth suspended twice. Tory Mayors have not done much better with one quitting, one being deselected and one – again – being suspended twice. Two treasurers have also been arrested in amongst the long list of incidents enumerated on Birkdale Focus.

All has not been wonderful on the Lib Dem local government front, however, with a deselected councillor in Eastleigh quitting the party and being followed by two colleagues who have also left, joining him as independents. Two councillors have also left in Winchester.

28. The Commission needs to do more work to ensure both that apologies are prominently published, and that people are aware of this. A working group on this specific issue would be a positive step (paragraph 46).

The Commission accepts that prominence is a significant issue, and is committed to ensuring corrections and apologies continue to appear with due prominence. Following positive engagement by the Chairman and Director of the PCC with the Editors’ Code Committee, the Code has recently been changed to make clear that prominence of corrections and apologies must be agreed by the PCC before publication. This represents a significant step forward for the system. While the Commission will consider a working group on the subject, it feels that the issue can be kept under appropriate review by its Review Panel (charged with an annual audit of the Commission’s work).

However, on similar lines:

32. The Commission and PressBof should consider setting up a joint working group further to consider sanctions. We believe there are a range of creative ideas about how existing sanctions could be made more effective – and be seen to be so – and that these should be investigated (paragraph 48).

The Commission accepts this recommendation, and is in discussion with PressBof.

PressBof is the Press Standards Board of Finance.

From next year, corrections involving the Press Complaints Commission – which oversees press self regulation in the UK – will be agreed with the PCC in advance, under new rules agreed by the Editors’ Code Committee, which reviews the Code…

Code Committee secretary Ian Beales said: “This amendment is designed to help kill the myth that newspapers and magazines routinely bury corrections. Research conducted by the PCC has shown this to be untrue – nearly 85% of PCC-negotiated corrections and apologies appear no further back than the original transgression, or in a designated corrections column.”

A small, but welcome, step even if the use of “nearly 85%” as if it were a good figure shows that there is still much which could and should be improved – and that’s despite the figure not catching cases such as a page 1 error corrected in a page 23 corrections column.

It takes all the rulings from the Press Complaints Commission since 1996 and makes them easy to browse, including sorting by titles or by section of the Code of Practice.

The latter is particularly useful if you are putting in a complaint to the PCC as the site lets you see the ‘case law’ on any sections your complaint refers to. Being able to cite how the PCC has ruled previously on an issue is always a powerful way of strengthening an argument.

All in all, very useful.

The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against the Daily Star about an article titled “Muslim-only public loos”, ruling that it was inaccurate and misleading in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

The front-page article had reported that a Rochdale shopping centre had installed “Muslim-only squat-hole loos” and that the local council had wasted “YOUR money” on them. The complainant argued that as the facilities would be available to everyone, it was inaccurate to state they were “Muslim-only”.

The Daily Star story was originally run on page 1 and it is a frequent complaint that correction or ruling on stories get much less coverage than the original error. In this case, the ruling ran on page 2, in a coloured box and clearly marked as a ruling about what the paper had done. That is much better than is often the case (though I strongly suspect that if page 1 errors resulted in page 1 rulings we would see quite a change in some quarters).

The other reason for giving the PCC some credit in this case is that the Press Complaints Commission took it up despite neither Rochdale Council nor the shopping centre lodging a complaint. The PCC has often been criticised in the past for its unwillingness to pursue cases where someone directly involved has not raised them, such as when someone in the public eye does not want to confront the media in public or when a wider group of people are affected by a story even if not personally named in it. In this case, the PCC pursued the case despite neither of the direct parties raising it, which is welcome and a promising sign for the future.

Both of these themes came together in the speech I gave at the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool, when the party was debating reform of the PCC:

It isn’t only on Liberal Democrat Voice that the PCC has been given a full column to express its views. Last week’s edition of the party’s newspaper, Liberal Democrat News, also contained a column from the Press Complaints Commission, this time in the form of its chair Baroness Buscombe.

On reading it I was moved to pen the following letter, which appears in the latest edition of the paper:

The size and prominence of PCC Chair Baroness Buscombe’s column in last week’s Liberal Democrat News highlights one of the major issues with current press self-regulation. She wanted to respond to points made about her organisation in a party conference motion and I’m glad to see that Lib Dem News gave her such space and prominence to do so. But look what happens in similar situations where it isn’t the Chair of the PCC and Lib Dem News but an ordinary member of the public and a national newspaper. A national newspaper’s response to getting stories wrong is still, far too often, to bury away a small, little apology long after the original story has appeared and been widely read.

Some newspapers, and some individual journalists, have shown how the world doesn’t end if you correct stories quickly and promptly and if you give significant column inches to people to respond. I hope Baroness Buscombe’s ability to get such prominence for her own views on this occasion encourages her to push the newspaper industry to give others the same space and consideration far more often in future too.

One of the examples I had in mind was my own experience of contacting the Evening Standard about errors, which has been broadly positive and, although not perfect, vastly better than many other newspapers. Far too often the default position seems to be ignore emails pointing out factual errors. Raising more newspapers to the Evening Standard‘s level and beyond should, in my view, be a key role for the Press Complaints Commission. That would of course require its role to be more as about raising standards overall rather than simply being the arbiter of individual complaints, but as I’ve argued before that is just the sort of change we should see.

Note: Liberal Democrat News appears weekly and you can subscribe to it via the party’s website.