British Press Regulation

The Press Council (1953–1991)

After centuries of guerrilla warfare with government, this council would offer a new approach for a new postwar era. A responsible press would police itself—but it would also campaign against oppressive restrictions such as the Official Secrets Act of 1911 (amended in 1989), a law imposing areas of government secrecy and making imprisonment possible for journalists (or anyone else) who pulled aside that curtain. The council's members intended to “Publish and Be Damned” (as the great Daily Mirror slogan proclaimed) but also to break some of the chains of libel and defamation litigation that made the United Kingdom one of the most difficult developed countries in the world in which investigative reporters and their editors had to work.

Those who gathered for this first meeting, though, were not exactly starry-eyed about the initiative. As was also the case nearly 40 years later, when the Press Complaints Commission supplanted this first Press Council, newspapers and magazines invented their own solution to a perceived problem to ward off worse official action. Self-regulation was a response to constant government and backbench pressure. Three Royal Commissions on the Press—in 1947, 1962, and 1977—made a continuing case for change; and events, including the beginning of a new tabloid circulation war after publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch bought the restrained middle-market Sun in 1969 and transformed it into something more populist, produced an inescapable rise in complaints about the press by the public and an equally inescapable demand for further press reform. There were “still flagrant breaches of acceptable standards,” wrote the chairman of the 1977 commission, Sir Oliver McGregor. Though the idea of a Press Council had been welcomed—and copied—around the world from Australia to Sri Lanka, the original concept was steadily battered into irrelevance. It had seemed a big enough step in 1953 to set up a committee of senior journalists and managers under an independent chairman and ask them to investigate cases of supposed bad behavior by newspapers as well as laying down standards of conduct and stepping in to defend and promote the profession (rather like the Bar Council defended lawyers and the General Medical Council defended and policed doctors). But times grew rougher and faith in the council gradually diminished.

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