Mark Bolland ran the Press Complaints Commission from 1992 to 1996. He has some damning views on Leveson, that celebrity led witch hunt backed by the BBC:
Politicians destroyed the PCC to take revenge on the media, says the man who helped to create it
Today we are all supposed to be “Leveson compliant”. I am not sure why, when large chunks of what The Economist rightly condemned as a “shoddy” report following a dodgy inquiry have been torn apart or discredited – but let me ensure I am suitably transparent, with a declaration of interest. I was the first director of the Press Complaints Commission, appointed by its first chairman, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord McGregor. My partner, Guy Black, was its second director and is now chairman of its funding body. So every reader will know where I am coming from.
What began with the Calcutt inquiry ended with the monstrosity of the Leveson inquiry. I have no doubt that its proposal – swiftly and rightly rejected by the Prime Minister – to introduce press controls underpinned by statute was pre-determined from day one. That was why assessors like Sir David Bell who, as chairman of the Media Standards Trust, had conducted a long campaign against the popular press, were chosen to sit alongside Leveson. That is why he packed the first few months of his show trial with the so-called “victims” – a celebrity circus in which bile against the media was assiduously reported by the BBC and others day in day out.
It was a fix from the very start, and it certainly didn’t need £6 million of our money.
It is unclear to me what follows from the Leveson report. Is it something that will be quietly forgotten or are there real implications for press freedom that are yet to be implemented? As the report above says, the frenzy of attacks from people such as Hugh Grant (doesn’t he have some shameful skeletons he wishes were still secret?) appeared to me to be more bluster than substance with individuals getting in their retaliation while the opportunity presented itself. And in all of this there was no mention of the bbc having an overwhelming presence in the new media in our country, or the Mirror and its disgraceful behaviour, or the guardian and its incessant anti-Israel rhetoric. So, do the press outlets just forget Leveson?
Hacked Off is merely a front for a covert network of Leftist pressure groups which want to see the suppression of any opinion which does not fit their groupthink.
Excellent article here by Andrew Gilligan:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9963263/The-truth-about-Hacked-Offs-media-coup.html
‘But though Hacked Off acts in the name of victims of the press, victims are not its central concern. Unknown to most of the people it lobbies, Hacked Off is a campaign not just to tame the press, but to claim the country for the authoritarian Left. It does want to stop newspapers victimising individuals. But it also wants to force the press to serve defined social and political objectives – at the expense, if necessary, of the right to free expression.
As its key intellectual inspiration, Prof James Curran of Goldsmiths College, put it: “The problem is that the press was the principal cheerleader of the deregulatory politics that landed us in the economic mess we’re in.
Our concerns should be confined not only to individual abuses, but to media moguls who distort the national conversation.”
These are the same people who had a special audience with the leaders of the country’s three main political parties to influence their decision on press regulation.
Good work by Gilligan and only silence from the BBC. I wonder why.
Scary stuff.