When the British government last week released the report of Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry into abuses in the media, Australian journalists rushed to compare — and mostly conflate — Leveson's recommendations with those of Australia's Finkelstein inquiry. This rankled well-informed readers of both reports, such as Australian Press Council chairman Julian Disney, who pointed out fundamental differences between the two.
The blurring of Leveson and Finkelstein in the minds of journalists, publishers and the wider public is, however, an important fact in itself. It is a reminder of the anger that spawned the inquiries, and a broad hint about their likely consequences.
Both inquiries came about because of political decisions by governments — arguably a reluctant one in the UK, and arguably an opportunistic one in Australia. In the course of their investigations both accumulated abundant evidence of a reality that the public already knew all too well, and which journalists and publishers almost never acknowledge: that media self-regulation has been a demonstrable failure.
Both inquiries have proposed new regulatory regimes that would replace the wrist-slapping penalties of self-regulation with real ones. Neither has proposed anything that remotely resembles censorship or government control of the media, but people who rely solely on media reports for their knowledge of the recommendations can be excused for not knowing that. The Australian media's coverage of Finkelstein, in particular, provides an astonishing case study in distortion, misrepresentation and self-interested pleading.
British readers have fared rather better in the coverage of Leveson, perhaps because the abuses that inquiry scrutinised, such as phone-hacking, could not be defended even by those who had systematically perpetrated them, and perhaps because at least some sections of the UK media, notably The Guardian, had been instrumental in uncovering the abuses and calling for the inquiry.
For the record, and in extreme summary form, what Leveson and Finkelstein have both recommended is the creation of all-media regulators that would not be effectively controlled by proprietors, which is what has happened under 'self-regulation'.
(Australia's Press Council notionally has equal representation for publishers and the public with an independent chairman, but anyone who has ever endured its proceedings could not seriously doubt the influence of the publishers within it. And historically, the influence of News Limited,