ABSTRACT
Most of the organisations that regulate or control the media have websites where you can access information about their remit and membership as well as access their codes of conduct and study details of their adjudications:
www.asa.co.uk (Advertising Standards Association) www.bbfc.co.uk ((British Board of Film Classification) www.bsc.org.uk (Broadcasting Standards Commission) www.itc.org.uk (Independent Television Commission) www.ofcom.gov.uk/ (Office of Communications) www.pcc.org.uk (Press Complaints Commission) www.radioauthority.org.uk (Radio Authority)
The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was set up in 1991 to replace the Press Council, itself introduced in 1951 as a means of curbing the then perceived power of press barons like Lord Beaverbrook. The Press Complaints Commission, like its predecessor, is a self-regulatory organisation; in other words it has been set up by the newspaper industry itself and has no legal powers. It has a code of practice to which newspaper owners, editors and reporters (in theory) adhere. However, if a newspaper flouts this code of practice, the PCC has only limited ways of punishing it. If the PCC upholds a complaint, it will ask the newspaper to print the adjudication or an apology. When the Daily Mirror was criticised in 1993 over photographs it published of the Princess of Wales in a gym, it threatened to
➤ Look up the various organisations’ websites and examine their membership. How representative of their readers, listeners and viewers do you think these organisations’ members are? To what extent do they reflect what Petley calls ‘the great and the good’?
