The press should hug the Leveson report in a grim embrace of welcome
The irreducible core of the Leveson report will be the informal guiding principle: ‘The press cannot be allowed to mark its own homework’
By Charles Moore8:27PM GMT 23 Nov 2012
My industry must stop behaving like trade union leaders and show a willingness to change
The Leveson report on the press will be published on Thursday. The press should welcome it. Note that I just said welcome it: I did not say agree with it.
In the nearly 20 years in which I edited various papers, including this one, I became ever more strongly convinced of two things. The first was that statutory regulation of the press was a bad idea. The second was that the self-regulation of the press was little better than a farce. Being an editor, I naturally put more weight on the first point than the second. But I was always anxious about the volatility of this situation. In the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 – the last really big bust-up about the press – I made strenuous but mostly unsuccessful attempts to get colleagues across Fleet Street to see this.
truelabour 