29 November 2012
The Bishop of Norwich has today called for an end to the current
self-regulation in light of the publication of the Leveson Report.
The Rt Revd Graham James, who sits as a member of the House of
Lords Select Committee on Communications and is the Church of
England's lead spokesman on media and communications policy, today
commented on the need for a genuinely independent body which "must
have as one of its primary tasks the protection of citizens from
unfair and damaging portrayal in the press and give them a proper
chance of redress. When members of the general public are
unfairly traduced in a major press story, it is not a necessary
consequence of press freedom but an abuse of it."
In an article on the Leveson Report to be published in the
Church Times next week, Bishop Graham says: "The Leveson Report
must surely bring the era of self-regulation to an end. We do
need a genuinely independent body able to investigate the practices
of the press without the trigger of a complaint bringing it into
action. It must be properly resourced by the industry itself
but that doesn't mean it needs to build a large
bureaucracy."
Reflecting on the wider issues in the Report, Bishop Graham will
also call in the Church Times article for a deeper examination of
the moral and theological themes raised in the Leveson
Inquiry: "The public release of photographs of Prince Harry
in Las Vegas merited public disapproval while there were almost one
hundred million Google searches in the UK for those same
photographs within 24 hours. Law and sin, regulation and
grace, freedom and our capacity to abuse it: these are the
theological themes of the report."
Notes
The full article will be published in the
Church Times on Friday, December 7, www.churchtimes.co.uk