by Barry White
The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom which, for many years has campaigned for independent and effective press self-regulation, has welcomed today’s decision by the Press Recognition Panel, to recognise IMPRESS application for recognition under the Royal Charter.
Meeting today in west London, the Panel set up under the provisions of the Royal Charter following the Leveson Report, considered line by line whether the press regulator met the criteria set out in the Charter. After nearly five hours of consideration the eight member panel decided that it did.
The decision makes IMPRESS the only regulator which the public, readers and victims of press abuse can trust to regulate newspapers and safeguard freedom of the press, while offering redress when they get things wrong.
Investigative journalist Nick Davies has also welcomed the news, in a comment distributed by Hacked Off he said: “No decent journalist wants their work regulated by IPSO – an organisation which is vulnerable to the influence of some very bad people from the worst newspapers in the UK. Impress is a decent alternative, independent of government and of newspapers.
“It tells you all you need to know about the continuing scandal of press misbehaviour in the UK that these notorious newspapers will not join a regulator which can be trusted to enforce the code of conduct which they themselves have written and claim to want to honour; and that in spite of overwhelming public and parliamentary support, government is too scared of those newspapers to trigger Section 40, which would put pressure on those newspapers to join such a regulator.”
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