All major news organisations in the UK implement a code of practice in their newsgathering and reporting activities (see Indicator E7 – Code of ethics at the national level). Those significant news organisations that are not subject to regulation by an external body (The Guardian, The Independent, and The Financial Times) operate their own internal self-regulatory systems. Broadcasters are bound by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code (and BBC News is additionally subject to the Corporation’s Editorial Guidelines that build upon aspects of the Ofcom Code). The extent to which all self-regulatory systems operating in the UK’s new media are effective is more debatable. Questions have been raised about the extent to which IPSO – the regulator set up by parts of the newspaper industry is able to police the compliance of its own members, but gaps in data collection by IPSO obscure any evidence of systemic failures in compliance.
The three national newspapers that have elected not to join IPSO, or its competitor the Independent Monitor for the Press (IMPRESS), now operate their own complaints and compliance systems. The Guardian has appointed a Readers’ Editor as an internal ombudsperson since 1997, and the newspaper continues to apply a variant of the Editors’ Code of Practice used by IPSO’s members (The Guardian, 2014). On top of this standards code governing content, The Guardian also applies its own editorial guidelines covering professional practice and the personal behaviour of its journalists (The Guardian, 2020). The owner of The Independent applies a company-wide code of conduct to its print journalism that also covers the company’s broadcast news content on local television news channel London Live (subject to the Ofcom Broadcasting Code). The code of conduct covers pre-publication issues (such as respect for privacy and discrimination) and post-publication complaints-handling and correction guidelines (Independent, n.d.). Finally, the self-regulatory system operated by the The Financial Times consists of an Editorial Code of Practice that incorporates the Editors’ Code of Practice maintained by IPSO (Financial Times, 2020), with unresolved complaints being handled by a Complaints Commissioner, who is in turn overseen by an Appointments and Oversight Committee (Financial Times, n.d.-a).
The remaining national newspapers and the majority of the local newspaper industry are members of IPSO and are therefore contractually obliged to implement the Editors’ Code of Practice and to specify in publicly available annual statements to IPSO the extent to which they comply with the regulator’s rules and regulations (including adherence to the Code of Practice). Annex A of IPSO’s Regulations (revised most recently in September 2019) specify the information that must be included in members’ annual statements. Section 2 specifies that members must include copies of any internal manuals, codes, or guidance used by journalists, while section 3 requires members to include brief details of the compliance process, including “Compliance with the Editors’ Code” (IPSO, 2019b: 17). In practice, however, IPSO does not effectively enforce this aspect of the regulations. The most recent annual statement by Associated Newspapers on the IPSO site shows that the publisher of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Mail Online does include internal manuals for journalists (on the process of verifying stories), but does not contain any statistics on complaints handled internally by the Associated Newspapers titles, instead including only statistics on complaints that had subsequently been escalated to IPSO’s complaints-handling mechanism (Associated Newspapers, 2018). A review of the 2017 annual statements of all of IPSO’s national newspaper publisher members has found that none provided evidence of their internal complaints-handling statistics, and that other large publishing groups such as News UK & Ireland (publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun) did not include their internal manuals for journalists (Ramsay & Barnett, in press).
The independent regulator, the Independent Monitor for the Press (IMPRESS), operates a regulatory system in line with the recommendations of the report issued following the 2011–2012 Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press (better known as the Leveson Inquiry, after its Chair, Lord Justice Brian Leveson), set up in the wake of the 2011 phone-hacking scandal (e.g., Ramsay & Moore, 2019). Like the IPSO system, IMPRESS requires that all members supply the regulator with information about their internal governance processes, including their adherence to the IMPRESS Standards Code, and periodically audits the internal compliance systems of each member through a system of annual compliance returns. IMPRESS publishes all complaints statistics for members (including internally handled complaints) online (IMPRESS, 2019: 26–29).
While broadcast regulation is not purely self-regulation, in the sense that the duties of Ofcom are set out broadly in the Communications Act 2003, and the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines are set out in the Royal Charter and agreement, they do represent a set of compliance procedures integrated into the operations of broadcast news providers. Ofcom’s licensing regime is based on licence holders adhering to the Broadcasting Code, which has detailed guidelines on news reporting. The regulator publishes weekly summaries of all programmes that receive ten or more complaints (Ofcom, 2020d). Despite the BBC ultimately being regulated by Ofcom, it is obliged to maintain its own complaints procedures and statistics, and publishes fortnightly complaints reports (BBC, n.d.-b). The BBC also publishes its compliance record with the Ofcom Broadcasting Code and its internal compliance with its own Editorial Guidelines (BBC, 2019a: 134–135).
