Downing Street's proposal for a new system of press regulation based on a royal charter (unveiled in Parliament by Maria Miller yesterday) has a good deal to recommend it. It would create an independent recognition panel that would, in effect, regulate the regulator, and sets out various conditions that the new press regulator would have to satisfy if it is to meet with the panel's approval – conditions that would guarantee the regulator remains independent of both the government and the newspaper industry. It would create various incentives for newspapers and news magazines to sign up to the new regulator, such as access to an arbitral process whereby civil legal claims could be resolved quickly and inexpensively. But it wouldn't threaten those organisations with being regulated by Ofcom if they declined to subscribe. It would also grant the regulator the power to impose fines of up to a million pounds on those papers and magazines that do sign up. In short, it embodies the vast majority of Lord Justice Leveson's recommendations while avoiding the most sinister of them – in particular, the "statutory underpinning" that defenders of press freedom are so concerned about. (To read more, click here.)
