Culture media and Sport Select Committee

The CMS select committee has finally released its report after months of deliberations.
Generally speaking there is a lot of good stuff there. Libel gets a good look and sensible recommendations are made about time constraints for making claims for defamation online. Privacy also gets the once over with a decision not to recommend that there should be a privacy law. They also agreed that it would inappropriate to provide a legal obligation on journalists to contact the subject of stories before publication. They did emphasise that this is good journalistic practice and called on the Press Complaints Commission to include a clause in their code saying journalists should do this.
The main thrust of the report is about press standards and the Press Complaints Commission.
The committee says the PCC should spend more of its effort on raising press standards rather than just taking complaints. This has long been a concern of mine. The PCC deliberately ignored the idea of supporting press freedom and standards when it was first set up, it wanted to be solely a complaints body. But it's not possible to be a complaints body that means anything unless you are also keen to improve standards.
I also agree with the committee that there should be a wider range of people on the code committee. Journalists need to be there as well as editors, for instance. They need to be able to push their own views on the code committee to ensure they are not made the scapegoat for bad decision making. The committee also called for the PCC code to be placed in Journalists' contracts of employment and this makes it even more important that journalists have a say and are also able to speak out for ethics in the workplace without putting their careers at risk.
Giving the PCC more power to decide on stronger punishments for newspapers that are reckless about their commitment to the code of practice is also a good idea.
The committee was right to point out that the News of the World's behaviour over the phone tapping scandal was appalling.