Paul Dacre blasts blogosophere as ignorant about PCC
If you follow a load of left-leaning London media types on Twitter, you’ll know that there’s not a lot of love for Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre.
And today it emerges that the feeling is mutual, with Dacre criticising the blogosphere, among others, not for criticisng the Daily Mail endlessly but for being ignorant about the Press Complaints Commission.
Dacre is chairman of the Editors’ Code of Practice committee, which draws up the guidelines that the PCC must then use to adjudicate complaints.
His beef is that people simply do not understand how the PCC works. This has been highlighted, Dacre says, by reviews of the Code of Practice and the overall workings of the PCC, during which members of the public were invited to engage.
Dacre says that along with helpful insights, “many of the submissions expose a huge ignorance about how self-regulation works – often from those who should know better, in Parliament, in self-appointed media accountability groups and, more generally, in the blogosphere”.
He goes on to say that there are myths about and even prejudice towards the PCC, and that the commission needs to sort them out.
Hard to blame him for being concerned. His own newspaper regularly receives a daily beating on Twitter (which, I think, counts as part of the blogosphere), often followed by debate about the morality of even linking to the Daily Mail and boosting traffic to the site.
It was clear from the tweeting last year about Jan Moir’s column regarding the death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately that people didn’t understand what the PCC was there to do. While people widely tweeted links to the info on how to complain, they overlooked the fact that the committee doesn’t exist for members of the public to complain about articles they disagree with or find offensive.
The problem is that if Dacre gets his way and people become more informed about what the PCC does, they’re going to realise how powerless it is.
Won’t that strengthen the call for an end to self-regulation? Something that Paul Dacre clearly opposes?
All Comments
I think the general feeling is that there is very little control of the press in general. Regardless of how many thousands of complaints they receive about articles they are never held to account.
I’m an adamant supporter of free speech, but the constant lies, racially motivated articles, scare stories and pure tripe published by papers like the Daily Mail, with little regard for meeting any standard of quality or morality are disgraceful.
Being the editor of the Daily Mail, I struggle to understand how Paul Dacre sleeps at night knowing that he is continuing to mis-inform and lie to general public on a massive scale.
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