Re: Conflicted
@ The Axe
Same AC here. I agree with you on the principle of punishing the class for the actions of an individual, but I don't think this really applies here. I'd also question the claim that those sections of the press were eventually punished. Rebekah Brooks is probably having a right old laugh at that one. The News of the Screws lives on, only with a different name - Rupert probably wanted to rebrand anyway, and this just forced his hand. The only people punished in that whole nasty episode were low level hacks who lost their jobs when the old name closed, plus a couple of scrotes who were too close to the actual hacking to get off the hook. No-one senior enough to be truly responsible had a charge that stuck on them. It was an object lesson in "something must be seen to have been done" from the police, and in cover-up tactics from the senior figures in the Murdoch empire.
S40 isn't a way to punish the whole class for the actions of a few. The default award of costs only happens if the publisher doesn't join a regulator, or refuses to go to arbitration through that regulator first. So what S40 actually does is punish publishers if they refuse to play ball with the new regulation regime, which in itself is not a particularly bad thing.
When pushed on this, one of the Reg staff pointed out in this thread that the current wording of the regulations also puts the entire costs of arbitration onto the publisher too. Whilst these may not be as high as the costs of a court they may still be too high for the current business model of ad-funded journalism to support. If they tweaked this so that the initial stages of a complaint was funded by the complainant (capped at a couple of hundred quid, refundable if publisher loses) then it'd be enough to disincentivise idly vexatious complaints, but not too much to deter anyone with a genuine grievance. This could be workable, if the parties involved were willing to work towards a compromise.
However, as I said before, neither side is giving way here. The press industry is obviously hoping for an end run where the proposals get thrown out completely, the status quo is maintained, and Levenson is left as nothing more than a bad dream. To further this goal it's pushing out misleading articles like the one that spawned this thread to try to co-opt members of the public to help them.
I'm not happy when people try to manipulate me, so in this case I didn't write to gov.uk before the deadline as the call to arms stank to high heaven. If the reg had taken a more honest and analytical view of the subject I might have been more receptive to speaking up for their interests.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
