The British Press Already Has a Regulator: The British Press

[Commentary] Lord Justice Leveson released proposals for new, voluntary regulation of the UK press. Well, sort of voluntary. Leveson: “[I]f a newspaper publisher who chose not to subscribe to the regulatory body was found to have infringed the civil law rights of a claimant, it could be considered to have shown willful disregard of standards and thereby potentially lead to a claim for exemplary damages.” So it’s voluntary in the same way that buying into your local mobster’s protection racket is voluntary.

Nice newspaper company you got there; it’d be a shame if anything bad happened to it. But as Emily Bell notes, there’s a bigger disconnect here. These are proposals for fixing the press as it existed in 1992, not in 2012 — unless perhaps Lord Leveson intends for everyone with a Twitter or Tumblr account to subscribe? Really, the whole frame of “fixing the press” ought to be discarded. It’s not broken.

For all the lip service he pays to self-regulation, Leveson’s proposal overlooks the extremely effective form of self-regulation that already exists: the gleefully aggressive reporting that British news outlets do on each other.