The UK news media are subject to a quite impressive number of mechanisms that control their performance and there is considerable lively discussion of the media’s watchdog function, though this is more a matter for the concerned elites than the general public. Aside from ‘official’ regulators, notably the BBC Trust, Ofcom, and the Press Complaints Commission, all of which can be considered to be creditable regulators, there exist a number of ‘non-official’ media monitoring organizations. The Voice of the Listener and Viewer (VLV) is an independent, not-for-profit society focused on ensuring independence, quality and diversity in broadcasting.23 Aligned with media unions, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF) has monitored the media industry and campaigned for diverse, democratic and accountable media since it was founded in 1979. 24 yet another monitoring and campaigning organization is MediaWise (formerly PressWise), an independent charity, established in 1993 and supported by concerned journalists, media lawyers and politicians in the UK, which professes to ‘operate on the principle that press freedom is a responsibility exercised by journalists on behalf of the public, and that the public have a right to know when the media publish inaccurate information’.25 Significantly, the Media Standards Trust, an independent charity that exists specifically to promote high standards in news, has recently established a website called ‘churnalism.com’26 designed to identify news based on press releases and thereby help the public distinguish between journalism and ‘churnalism’ (see F3).27
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