Jan
28
Press Complaints Commission’s farcical investigation of Keith Vaz affair
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The Press Complaints Commission has rejected a complaint by Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP against the Daily Telegraph. The commission said that the Telegraph had not reported inaccurately the story of Keith Vaz’s support for the government’s proposal to detain terror suspects for 42 days. This is a farce of unbelievable proportions.
I read the PCC ‘adjudication’ which claims “The articles under complaint did not claim that the complainant had, as a matter of fact, been offered a reward in return for his support.” and thought ‘oh, that’s odd, let me check the story in the Telegraph’. So I did. This is what it says:
“Gordon Brown is under pressure to reveal whether Keith Vaz, the influential head of a Parliamentary Committee, has been offered a peerage or honour in return for backing the Government’s controversial counter-terrorism measures.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/2234527/Gordon-Brown-under-pressure-over-%27reward%27-for-Keith-Vaz-over-terror-bill.html
So the next time you hear a newspaper editor, such as Paul Dacre, complain about “how inexorably, and insidiously, the British Press is having a privacy law imposed on it” by the courts, consider the following:
- Why are the majority of complainants dissatisfied with the PCC?
- Why are press complaints at record levels?
- Why do the most serious complainants (such as the McCann’s) not bother with the PCC at all and go straight to court?
Related posts:
- Well done, Press Complaints Commission
- Why the ASA gets more complaints than the PCC
- Why reform of press self-regulation is harder than it looks
- Citizen driven media complaints
- Andreas Whittam Smith: right and wrong on press self-regulation reform