Independent Media’s excuses for ditching the Press Council make no logical sense

In a dumbfounding move, Independent Media last week announced that it will opt out of the Press Council system. Instead the company has appointed its own in-house Ombudsman to administer and adjudicate on complaints laid against the content of all of its own print news titles. Now, one of this country’s largest print media companies will handle reader’s complaints against its news reporting itself. This has hugely worrying implications in the realm of journalistic ethics and media politics.

In ditching the Press Council, Independent Media listed as its main complaint the Press Council’s reluctance to reintroduce the highly contentious waiver as its reason for ditching the Press Council. In days gone by, persons who felt aggrieved about the contents of a press report were required to sign a waiver when laying a complaint with the Press Council, which meant that they agreed not to take their complaint to court if they felt unsatisfied with the Ombudsman’s eventual ruling. On the surface of it, it’s easy to see why media outlets would be in favour of the reintroduction of this little deal.

But here is the grind: instituting a waiver in the complaints procedure of any media regulatory mechanism is wrong.

The question of why it is wrong to include the waiver in the procedural mechanism of the Press Council, actually has little to do with the waiver itself. It has more to do with something called third party complaints. This is where any reader of a print publication can complain about a report directly to the Press Council, without having to necessarily be personally implicated in the content of the report. Prior to the Press Freedom Commission (2011-2012), the Press Council did not accept third party complaints, meaning that a reader could only object to a news story if they were personally mentioned, or had a personal interest in, the report in question.

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