Bobbing Along

Ronald Stevens

• A Press Free and Responsible: Self-Regulation and the Press Complaints Commission 1991-2001 by Richard Shannon
  Murray, 392 pp, £25.00, September 2001, ISBN 0 7195 6321 6

Nearly everyone is happy with the Press Complaints Commission except people with complaints about the press. Governments like it because it provides them with a handy bolthole whenever demands to tame the tabloids become too insistent to ignore. Newspapers like it because it allows them to get on with entrapments, invasions of privacy and other unprofessional outrages, knowing that nothing worse will happen to them than having to publish an ‘adjudication’ on their transgressions. The vast majority of readers probably like it as well – or would if they knew of its existence – because it ensures a reliable supply of the triviality, sensation, distortion and trash which they expect of the popular British press. Only the victims of misreporting, harassment, invention and intrusiveness grumble about the Commission’s palsied reactions to their complaints; and that is only because they foolishly imagine that the PCC is a champion of truth, justice and fair play, whereas its real purpose is to safeguard the interests of mischievous and sometimes malevolent publications against the grievances of the innocent and the weak.