Born to rule at the PCC
WHEN BARONESS Buscombe was installed as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, people asked “Who? Never heard of her.”
They need not worry. Peta Buscombe was born to chair the PCC. She is a corporate lawyer who has been a Tory frontbencher in the House of Lords and vice-chairman of the Conservative Party; she worked for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and came to the PCC from the position of chief executive of the Advertising Association (AA).
The AA hired her, according to a profile in Marketing magazine, “to be a change agent who could speak to government at the highest level ... Under her stewardship, the profile of the organisation has rocketed and there is a real feeling that the AA has the ears of the people in power.”
The profile quotes her: “I can ring up David Cameron’s office and Number 10, but I’m not going to do that lightly. That’s where quite a lot of lobbyists get it wrong.”
The PCC has always looked to the self-regulation of the advertising industry as its model. Its first chairman in 1990 was Lord McGregor, who had previously chaired the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). He was succeeded by Tory peer Lord Wakeham, who brought in as director Mark Bolland from the ASA, who was followed by Guy Black, likewise. Both went off to PR and consultancy roles with royalty or Tory-linked institutions of one sort or another.
It always bothered me that the criteria for assessing contentious journalism should be the same as those for advertising which, to my naïve understanding, is based on skill in deceit rather than in reporting the truth. It doesn’t seem to bother the newspaper industry, though.
Indeed, it sometimes appears that the ASA wields its muscle somewhat more vigorously than the PCC. The ASA has just rapped the Daily Express for disguising adverts as editorial.
The Express had published features “that looked like articles” above ads for the products featured in them. This was “intentionally attempting to circumvent the [advertising] Code”.
The ASA’s damning indictment said that the “articles did not appear to be independent or unbiased ... were always and uniquely favourable to the product featured in the accompanying ad and contained claims that have been or would be likely to be prohibited in advertisements.”
The three products concerned were distinctly tacky: a supposed weight loss aid, a magnetic device supposed to relieve menopause symptoms and a copper device supposed to help joint pain. The ASA ruled that the claims made in the ads and the articles could not be backed up and breached its rules on truthfulness and substantiation.
Just imagine the PCC censuring Richard Desmond’s tacky papers in such terms!
Who needs people?
THE VOGUE for citizen journalism has led to a plague of sites that offer to publish any old rubbish that people take it into their heads to write. Freelances get annoying emails from them and one has drawn my attention to an offer from an American site called Allvoices.com
Allvoices has been attacked as a scam by another US site, ripoffreport.com, which trades under the slogan “don’t let them get away with it” and does seem to spread its allegations fairly widely, but this isn’t what worries me. I don’t care if amateurs do get ripped off, as long as professionals don’t.
No, this is the worrying bit in the blurb: “Allvoices has many significant qualities that distinguish it from other outlets and similar sites. Our site is completely unedited by humans, so what is published comes directly from the voice of the individual ...”
“Completely unedited by humans.” I suppose eventually computers will do the reading as well and save us the trouble.
Do try to keep up!
THEN there is the techie spam. Another freelance forwards me this “priceless” email:
“Hi,
“I wanted to let you know more about The NetEx HyperIP for VMware WAN solution which is the industry’s only software-based WAN optimizer that operates on a VMware ESX server to boost the performance of third-party storage replication applications ...”
Aren’t you just itching to know more?
Hey Prime Minister
WHAT’S WRONG with showbiz writers like the Sun’s Dominic Mohan becoming editors of national papers? He follows people like John Blake, Piers Morgan and Andy Coulson in the move from editing the Bizarre! column to the paper itself.
Aside from the hardly needed confirmation of the Sun’s devotion to mindless celebrity, there are three things wrong:
First is the way their journalism is produced: the celebrity industry is happily dependent on the whims of the stars and the chicanery of their agents. Not a good model for news journalism.
Second is the fact that it makes the editor a celebrity. Showbiz columnists love to write about their own obsessively partying lives and to get themselves photographed looking all matey with the stars.
And third is the authority they wield with our rulers. Piers Morgan is constantly bragging about the access he enjoyed to Downing Street, when Tony Blair would apparently drop whatever inconsequential matters he was engaged with to take his counsel. I do not hold Prime Ministers in high regard but I do recognise they are busy people and I find the notion that they should have to give their coveted attention to these vain and prattling groupies rather unsettling, don’t you?
Bring back Kelvin MacKenzie. He may be a boorish reactionary but his news values do at least relate to the real political world.
It's not what you ask
LEEDS freelance Ivor Hughes tells me he was following up a query with the Ministry of Justice press office. The dialogue went like this:
“Hello there. My name is Ivor Hughes. I telephoned you with a question last Friday ...”
MoJ PR, interrupting: “This line is for press enquiries only. You need to contact the general enquiry desk.
IH: “Why?”
PR: “You don’t sound like press.” Hangs up.
We can’t ALL sound like Jeremy Paxman.