Paul Wragg of the University of Leeds assesses the impact of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations for press regulation on ordinary members of the public.
With reference to cases such as the treatment of the transgender primary school teacher Lucy Meadows by the Daily Mail, he argues that any future regulator will struggle to achieve any meaningful change to the ‘cultural indifference to individual privacy and dignity’ shown by sections of the press, given Leveson’s failure to clearly define, yet insistence on preserving, press partisanship.
In this policy brief, published in conjunction with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Lara Fielden examines the three key qualities Lord Justice Leveson recommended for future press regulation – that it is ‘voluntary’, ‘independent’, and ‘self-regulatory’. These characteristics, which form the basis of the government’s draft Royal Charter, are explored within the instructive context of differing approaches to press regulation in a range of democracies overseas.
