Press regulator to look at Daily Telegraph and HSBC allegations

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/24/press-regulator-daily-telegraph-hsbc-peter-oborne

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The press regulator is to look at allegations that the Daily Telegraph allowed commercial pressures to dictate editorial decisions following Peter Oborne’s resignation over its coverage of HSBC.

Sir Alan Moses, the chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, said he wanted to hear from Oborne, the paper’s former chief political commentator, other journalists and Telegraph management over claims that the Barclay brothers-owned newspaper refused to run stories about the banking giant because of concerns over advertising.

“We haven’t had multiple complaints … we should look at it but we haven’t had the meeting or got in the information that we should have got in,” Moses told MPs on the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee on Tuesday.

Related: HSBC and Telegraph: owners cannot afford to ignore paper’s credibilty

Moses said he hoped the regulator, which replaced the Press Complaints Commission in September last year, could be a forum for discussion of industry issues, even when there was not a clear breach of the editorial code which it looks to enforce.

Asked about Oborne’s resignation and his subsequent allegations, Moses said it raised the “fundamental importance of credibility”.

But the former judge said it would be hard to enforce a separation between commercial interests and editorial judgment.

He said: “It is very difficult to devise a rule which says ‘you are in breach if you fail to publish something’.”

He said the regulator was seeking to get information from Oborne, the Telegraph and others to address the question of how to come up with a “meaningful rule within a code” on editorial independence.

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Moses denied that Ipso’s credibility had been undermined by Paul Vickers, chairman of the funding body behind the regulator and former legal director of Trinity Mirror.

Vickers, who left Trinity Mirror last month, told the committee in 2013 that the company had done “huge investigations” and “not found any proof that phone hacking took place”.

The publisher later paid compensation to a number of victims of phone hacking and printed its first open apology for phone hacking in the paper earlier this month.

Labour MP Ben Bradshaw asked: “Are you not concerned in terms of the credibility of your organisation that he is chairman of the body that funds you?”

Moses said: “I can’t speak for him nor am I prepared to defend him. You must put those questions to him and he must be given an opportunity of answering. I really don’t think Mr Bradshaw you can use me as a punch ball to bounce off your accusations against Mr Vickers.

“I didn’t appoint him, my credibility and the credibility of the organisation I chair will depend … on the achievement of the objectives we have set out.”

Asked by Bradshaw whether he knew why Vickers had left Trinity Mirror, Moses said: “No. I haven’t asked him. We asked Trinity Mirror what the position was. We don’t know.”

Labour MP Paul Farrelly said at the committee hearing: “We pursued phone hacking because Les Hinton at News International told us there had been investigations when there hadn’t been. He misled us. It appears from the recent record that Paul Vickers is the Les Hinton if not the Tom Crone of Trinity Mirror.”

Moses told the committee that he was “determined” for the press to take its own code of practice seriously.

“We are determined to be, for the first time, a regulator. The PCC was not a regulator, it was a complaints handler and we wish to be an independent regulator,” he said.

“The press said they wanted an independent regulator and we are going to hold them to that and we believe that we can achieve that.”

He added that it was his belief that complaints were being dealt with more speedily and taken “far more seriously than previously”.

After the hearing, Ben Bradshaw MP, a former culture minister, said that Moses had “an impossible job”. “[Sir Alan] can’t disguise the ineffectiveness of the organisation with florid vocabulary. He has an impossible job.”

Farrelly said the continued presence of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre as chair of the editors’ code committee, responsible for the set of rules on which Ipso bases its decisions, meant “nothing had changed” from the days of the PCC and Moses was the “new copper on the beat surrounded by the same old suspects”.

Moses said five new people had been appointed to the committee. “I am not here to defend any particular newspaper or speak on the behalf of them,” he said.

Asked by Farrelly whether he felt “uncomfortable at all that the person who has been chair of the editors code committee, at a time when the charge has been never let the code stand in the way of a good story, is still in the post” Moses said: “When it comes to discomfort, I feel that all the time of course I do, it would be inhuman not to.

“These are people with enormous power and I speak of the press generally, the power not only to do good but to bully, to be cruel and to destroy. Of course I as a regulator, starting out trying to prove my independence, feel enormous discomfort and fear.”

Bradshaw said he had evidence that three independent members of the regulator’s board and complaints committee had links to newspapers which were the “worst offenders”.

Moses said as far as he was aware all of its independent members complied with rules that stated they must have no connections with the newspaper or magazine industry. “All I can say is they are doing what they were chosen to do, namely to exercise independent judgment.”

Bradshaw told him: “I will send you a copy of a dossier which lists at least three independent members of your board and the complaints committee with clear connections to some of the newspapers which are the worst offenders. I am not going to name them but I would like you to respond in writing.”

Questioned about his £150,000 salary – £30,000 less than the regulator’s chief executive Matt Tee – Moses said: “What am I to say? I am doing this job because I believe it worthwhile, in the face of deep, deep suspicion, because I believe it is worth doing.”

“I was in the fortunate position when I stopped being a judge of not having to work again and [was] not looking for any other work,” he added. “Of course I am as greedy as the next man.”