A note on the Leveson Report, ten years on

22nd November 2021

The report of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press was published ten years ago.

I happened to have been a witness at the inquiry, giving evidence on blogging and social media, and so I thought that – after ten years – it may be worth setting out some thoughts about the inquiry.

The Leveson Inquiry was a half-success and a half-failure.

The successful part was the evidence stage, where a huge amount of evidence was placed into the public domain about the culture, practices and ethics of the press that would have not been placed into the public domain, but for the inquiry.

This evidence is in the form of written witness statements, original documents and oral evidence.

We now know so much more about the culture, practices and ethics of the press in the years before 2012 than we otherwise would have done.

There is a substantial archive of public domain information that can be – and has been – mined for fine academic research and media commentary.

The evidence stage was a boon for the public understanding of the media – and how the law was (and was not) followed.

But.

The inquiry got all that evidence…

…and did not seem to know what to do with it.

The four volumes of the report are less interesting reading than the source material.

The volumes were published all at once, and – after a brief flurry of interest – were left unread.

A more staged release of the conclusions would have been far more useful.

And as for the recommendations, they – like Hume’s treatise on philosophy – fell dead-born from the press.

The model(s) of regulation adopted after the inquiry was not that which was recommended.

There are those who (still) are partisans for the Leveson recommendations – but the recommendations have not been of any practical consequence.

And – in the meantime – the nature of the media and of print news has changed significantly.

The Leveson inquiry was at the tail end of when there was an actual newspaper industry – where newsprint was published daily on an industrial scale.

Since the circulations have collapsed.

Now anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world.

If for example a reporter cannot publish something in a newspaper (or news site) there is nothing stopping a tweeter publishing the same to a potentially far wider audience.

And the envisaged second stage of the Leveson inquiry – dealing with media relationships with the police will now not happen – though the Daniel Morgan report gave us a steer for what that probably would have contained.

(See my post on why the Daniel Morgan report is the nearest we will ever get to Leveson Stage Two.)

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In my view, the solution for media misconduct – either in news media or social media – is to strengthen the legal rights of the individual vis-a-vis the news sites and social media platforms (and to strengthen the legal obligations of those sites and platforms), rather than setting up some regulatory scheme.

All regulators tend to be ‘captured’ by who they regulate, and regulatory remedies are more likely to be circumvented or simply ignored.

And the tensions between the news media and those who were affected by media misconduct were such that there would never be an agreed regulatory regime that would serve both interests.

Nothing the inquiry could have recommended would have been accepted by the press and press victims.

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The mantra of ‘more regulation’ presupposes that a thing can be regulated other than by the general law.

But the media cannot be regulated other than be the general law – such as data protection, misuse of private information, defamation, copyright, and so on.

This is not because one is blind to the misconduct of the media (and indeed during the Leveson Inquiry I was able to show one example of such misconduct), but to assert a simple point about things having to work in practice.

There is nothing to be gained by demanding that there should be sector specific media regulation if that cannot work in practice.

So, although the Leveson inquiry had all the paraphernalia of a legal exercise – a judge, statutory powers, barristers, oral examinations, and even taking place in a courtroom – it was ultimately a failure because – ironically – it was not able to take law seriously and was bound by its terms to propose an effectively non-legal regulatory regime instead.

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