The press has a big problem: Its regulator wants to be nice

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02-05-2025

Who should be the ultimate arbiter of what a news organisation should or should not be allowed to publish? Who decides whether the words on this page are appropriate or not?
Those were the questions debated by MPs this week after the UK's press regulator decided to censure The Telegraph for reporting something that had been said in Parliament.
The row over the role of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) became so heated that Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, said on X that it 'must be abolished'.
You might wonder why you should care about a wrangle between the media and its watchdog, but the implications for the freedom of the press are far-reaching, and in turn have implications for democracy and explain why it was given time in the House of Commons.
Critics say that instead of protecting free speech, Ipso is starting to stifle it by allowing pressure groups to 'weaponise' press regulation to silence those who challenge their point of view.
There are concerns that Ipso has drifted away from its founding principles of preventing the sort of wrongful behaviour that led to the Leveson Inquiry more than a decade ago, and has instead started to insert itself in matters of taste, or issues that are best left to the courts.
For anyone new to this story, the row began after Ipso upheld a complaint by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) over a report that quoted Michael Gove, the former communities secretary, telling Parliament that the MAB was 'affiliated' to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation banned as a terrorist group in some countries.
Ipso ruled that despite Gove's comments being made under parliamentary privilege, The Telegraph's account of those comments in a subsequent story in January 2025 was misleading because it failed to include a response from the MAB, which denies any affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The ruling came despite there being no obligation for a publisher to seek a response when reporting the workings of Parliament, provided that care is taken not to publish 'inaccurate, misleading or distorted information'.
Gove has suggested that such rulings risk having a chilling effect on journalism, because reporters will feel less inclined to report freely on the workings of Parliament for fear of being reprimanded by the regulator.
In another recent ruling, Ipso censured The Spectator magazine (which Gove now edits) for allowing one of its writers to describe a transgender author as 'a man who claims to be a woman'. Since then the Supreme Court has ruled that trans women are not legally women, suggesting that if the person who complained to Ipso had taken their case to court they would have lost.
Lord Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, says: 'Ipso has certainly made some eccentric decisions recently. It's as though Ipso now regards freedom of expression as being less important than protecting minority groups from being offended, and that is a significant shift that has taken place over the past 10 years.'
Ipso is an independent body whose members, including The Telegraph, volunteered to be regulated by it after it was set up in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry to replace the Press Complaints Commission, which had been criticised for failing to prevent the News International phone hacking scandal.
Its focus was originally on preventing the sort of invasions of privacy and illegal behaviour that led to the Leveson Inquiry, but it increasingly acts as an arbiter of what is or is not in the public interest.
As a result, says Lord Young: 'Various activist groups have become very good at weaponising Ipso to silence their critics.'
There are also concerns from Lord Young and others that by presenting campaign groups with a 'win' by finding against news organisations on often highly technical grounds, Ipso will make its own job much harder by encouraging complainants to bombard it with accusations against the press.
In its ruling against The Telegraph, Ipso acknowledged that 'the article had accurately reported Gove's comments' in which he linked the MAB to the Muslim Brotherhood in Parliament, but this 'could lead readers to believe that the allegation had gone unchallenged and is accepted'.
A reporter paying attention to this ruling might interpret this to mean that they must seek comment from anyone who is the subject of a contentious statement in Parliament, which, as several MPs have pointed out, is at odds with the legal protections given to the reporting of parliamentary proceedings and might interfere with the speedy reporting of them. Reporters might, for example, be left wondering whether they are obliged to seek a comment from Hamas every time it is described in Parliament as a terrorist organisation.
The former Cabinet minister Sir David Davis is so concerned about this that he and two other former ministers this week urged the parliamentary authorities to investigate whether Ipso has undermined free speech with its ruling.
In finding against The Spectator, Ipso ruled that the magazine had not breached rules on accuracy because the columnist who referred to 'a man who claims to be a woman' was expressing a view to which they were entitled. However, Ipso decided that the description was 'belittling and demeaning toward the complainant' and upheld the complaint that it amounted to a 'prejudicial or pejorative reference' to their gender identity and 'was not justified by the columnist's right to express their views on the broader issues of sex and gender identity'.
In other words, the columnist has every right to hold their view, but it is trumped by the complainant's hurt feelings. News organisations have always operated on the basis that they have a right to cause offence, but any journalist reading that adjudication might conclude that their regulator is moved above all by the desire to be nice.
A free press, and a press regulator that is independent of government, are vital components of a healthy democracy.
But, says Lord Young: 'If Ipso continues to deprioritise freedom of expression then key members will eventually leave and Ipso will inevitably collapse.
'That would be disastrous because it would give the Government the excuse to bring in state regulation of the press.'
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