Comment Chilling threat to free press that holds the rich, criminal and powerful to account...
THE Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail are robust and combative popular titles that fiercely champions the interests of Brummies.
We hold the powerful to account and pursue fraudsters, child abusers and the corrupt to bring their misdeeds to the public eye.
We take our legal and ethical obligations very seriously and strive to resolve all and any complaints to the satisfaction of the complainant.
However, we also, like every regional title, face extraordinary and unprecedented financial pressures from structural changes in advertising revenues and behavioural changes by consumers.
We are making great strides in meeting those challenges, but our margins remain squeezed more than ever before, and cost savings over the past ten years have seen our editorial resources reduced considerably.
We are part of Trinity Mirror plc, but each local centre has to be profitable in its own right, and there is no central fund – or ‘get out of jail free’ card – to fall back on.
We therefore have to manage – and pay for – our own risks, including those potential legal costs incurred by actions arising from our investigative and campaigning journalism.
We subscribe to the editors’ code and regulation under IPSO, and follow that body’s stringent regime to resolve complaints.
Most complaints that come directly to us are resolved quickly and amicably with the complainant, usually by amending online articles and/or publishing corrections and clarifications.
Complaints that go directly to IPSO are also usually settled directly with the complainant.
Since IPSO’s founding, the Post and Mail has been subject to five IPSO investigations, only one of which was partially upheld, and was resolved through the publication of a correction.
I can find no record of the Post Mail in modern times having to defend a libel case in court.
Were Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 to be enabled, however, I seriously fear the impact on our ability to continue to report in the way I have described.
The sanction which would see us liable for all costs in a case, even if we won, would in my view incentivise complainants to bypass existing informal and formal routes to trigger litigation immediately.
Just one small action resulting in a costs award of £100,000 could lead or to irreparable harm to our finances.
Any more may well be fatal. A parent group rightly expects subsidiary businesses to be profitable, and couldn’t sustain such a continued attack on its viability.
Even the threat of such an action in the early stages of a journalistic investigation, pre-publication, could well deter us from further enquiries.
IPSO, as a regulator, is supported by the industry and informed by a code drawn up by practising editors, both requirements made following the Leveson Report. The alternative body satisfies neither of these criteria, leaving the whole industry exposed to risk that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press.
Leaving aside that all of the substantive matters investigated by Leveson involved law-breaking, it should be noted that not one regional or local newspaper has ever even been accused of the kinds of practices that were central to that enquiry.
Hundreds of such titles, all vital to the well-being of their communities, are now threatened with completely unfair and disproportionate sanctions that represent a serious threat to an industry that contributes so much to community cohesion in the UK. Leveson called for ‘voluntary and independent’
The prospect of submitting to state-sponsored regulation wipes out two centuries of press freedom in the UK
self-regulation, but the proposed model of a state-sanctioned regulator is a step in entirely the opposite direction.
Not one publication or publisher of any industry significance has played any part in the formation of the alternative regulator, and its funding by an individual with a proven vested interest in stifling the press makes its independence questionable to say the least.
Moreover, the prospect of submitting to state-sponsored regulation wipes out two centuries of press freedom in the UK.
That is a line that, for the sake of our readers, the Birmingham Post and Mail will not cross. Marc Reeves is Editor-in-Chief of
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