Hacked Off launches Ipso Watch to hold press regulator to account
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Version 0 of 1. Hacked Off, the campaigning group formed by people who regard themselves as press victims, has launched a website to monitor the activities of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso). Ipso Watch will enable people to air their concerns about what the group labels a “sham press regulator”. It claims that six months on from starting work, “newspaper consumers [who] have complained about press coverage and got nowhere”. Hacked Off, in accusing Ipso of being a failed body, lists seven reasons: It doesn’t meet 24 of the 38 criteria set out by Lord Justice Leveson; it doesn’t as a regulator, remaining “only a complaints body like the old discredited Press Complaints Commission”; it isn’t independent of politicians; It is dominated by the editors of the papers it is supposed to regulate; the same editors are running the same committees they ran on the PCC; there are still far too many breaches of the editors’ code that are unchecked by Ipso; and it can only launch investigations with the agreement of papers. The group also argue that Ipso has failed to investigate the Sunday Mirror’s sting on Brooks Newmark MP and failed to investigate the Daily Telegraph/HSBC scandal. On both occasions, it said it would do so. So, says Hacked Off, Ipso Watch will “provide a voice for all those that Ipso is failing. Anyone who has made a complaint to Ipso or a newspaper, and been given the brush-off, can report how they were treated. In addition, Ipso Watch will monitor complaints made directly to newspapers, “which might otherwise disappear into the papers’ user-unfriendly complaint-handling systems”. Joan Smith, Hacked Off’s executive director, said: “The public deserves a press regulator which enforces high editorial standards; which is willing to have its effectiveness assessed by a panel independent of the industry; and which is effective for the public. “Ipso fails to meet the basic criteria for a regulator, or to offer the redress rightly demanded by the public after the phone hacking scandal. Ipso Watch is being funded by a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Source: Hacked Off |