LONDON: The British government has insisted that bloggers and posts on social media would not be caught by a new system of press regulation, but campaigners warned the new rules could be open to interpretation.
Britain’s newspapers are urgently considering whether to sign up to the new system agreed by political leaders on Monday in the wake of a phone-hacking scandal at the now defunct Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid.
The new watchdog, underpinned by law, would have the power to issue harsh sanctions on misbehaving publications, including fines of up to £1m ($1.5m).
While the Leveson Inquiry into press standards resulting from the hacking scandal did not cover online publishing, the new royal charter hammered out by political leaders specifically covers “news-related” websites too, sparking uncertainty.
Meanwhile newspapers have railed that details of court rulings preventing them from publishing stories about celebrities have been openly circulated online, effectively making a mockery of the rulings.
Though the Department for Culture, Media and Sport stressed that small-scale bloggers and comments on Twitter and Facebook would not be subject to the new royal charter regulating publishers, campaigners feared that the new system could still be ambiguous. “It won’t affect bloggers,” a DCMS spokesman said.
“What Leveson was talking about was newspapers — national and local — and newspaper-type websites. It’s not people who are writing a blog.” To be considered a news publisher under the charter, outlets must meet each of three tests. They must be “publishing in the course of business”; publish news-related material written by a range of authors; and be subject to editorial control.
National and local papers and their online editions fall under the remit, as do lifestyle magazines and “online-only edited ‘press-like’ content providers”, such as the Huffington Post, said the DCMS.
Those outside the boundary include “news aggregators and social networking sites”, small special interest publishers, student and not-for-profit community newspapers, scientific journals and broadcasters’ websites, such as the BBC’s online arm.
“Ultimately, it is a matter for the court to decide on the definition of a relevant publisher based on assessment of the facts, in accordance with the three interlocking tests (course of business, range of authors and editorial control),” DCMS said. AFP
