The Jewish Chronicle Crisis Should Mean the End for Sham Press Regulator IPSO

Earlier this month a Labour backbencher asked the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, what she thought of IPSO, the self-styled ‘self-regulator’ of most of the national press. It was a written question and the written answer came from one of Nandy’s junior ministers, Stephanie Peacock. It simply said:

“Independent and effective self-regulation of the press empowers the public to have trust in what is reported, which is vital to a strong and functioning democracy.”

In some respects, this is a classic talk-to-the-hand ministerial reply, to be expected from a Labour government that is reluctant to provoke the billionaire press, but it can also be seen as a marker, or perhaps a hostage to fortune.

That is because, though it claims to be independent and effective, IPSO (the Independent Press Standards Organisation) is very obviously neither, and if Labour really sees independence and effectiveness as vital to democracy then it is going to need to do something about it.

Let’s look here at effectiveness, because this week – just days after that ministerial reply – a scandal has erupted that vividly demonstrates the hopeless and wilful ineffectiveness of the press industry’s tame ‘regulator’.

The Jewish Chronicle is alleged – on very good authority – to have published sensational stories about the war in Gaza fabricated by the Israeli government and presented under the byline of a journalist operating with, it is alleged, a fake CV.

This is a grotesque failure of journalistic standards at a paper whose standards are supposedly upheld by IPSO. It is hard to imagine how a small, niche London publication could have contrived to do anything worse.

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Brian Cathcart

But it did not come out of the blue. It was not a one-off failure by the Jewish Chronicle to verify serious allegations it was making. No, the publication of falsehoods has been a characteristic of the paper’s journalism for years, and importantly IPSO has known about it all along.

Since 2018 IPSO has ignored red flag after red flag. Though it was pressed repeatedly – both by victims of the Jewish Chronicle’s lies and by its own complaints committee – it stubbornly refused to take meaningful action. In the course of a six-year spree of fabrication and inaccuracy by the paper it has never once voiced even a word of public criticism.

Instead, it promised that it was operating a softly-softly approach of training and guidance that would bring the desired change – a stance it maintained even as it obviously failed, even as its own complaints committee continued to identify harmful instances of inaccuracy.

And bear in mind two things. First, IPSO was set up to protect the interests of the big press corporations, so it has to be extremely probable that any failings it actually identifies are only the tip of the iceberg. And second, these offences of inaccuracy are not victimless: people’s reputations and sometimes their livelihoods have been very seriously affected by Jewish Chronicle lies.

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Brian Cathcart

So now IPSO’s abject passiveness has contributed to a scandal in which one of its members, by neglecting its responsibility to check who and what it publishes, appears to have become a vehicle for propaganda fabricated by a foreign government to influence an ongoing war in which people are dying every day.  

Not for nothing have the victims of the Jewish Chronicle written again to IPSO’s chair, Lord Faulks (a former Tory minister), saying: “IPSO should consider now whether, had it acted effectively and in a timely fashion as we urged both in 2021 and 2023, this might have been averted.”

And this is only the latest catastrophic failure by IPSO. In the ten years since it was set up in defiance of the recommendations of the Leveson Report it has failed almost every significant test put before it. Here are two more examples among many.

When the television presenter Caroline Flack was hounded to her death in a vicious campaign led by the Sun, IPSO was nowhere to be seen. This was a highly vulnerable woman whose struggles with stress and depression even the Sun had reported, yet she received no protection from a so-called regulator that claims to care about mental illness. 

In 2017-2018 the Times reporter Andrew Norfolk published a series of headline-making stories which had in common that they presented Muslims as threatening and that they had little or no basis in fact. IPSO did next to nothing at the time and nothing at all when these damaging failures of accuracy in a leading newspaper were exposed by Paddy French and me, and by a BBC radio documentary.

(Norfolk, incidentally, was behind the Times’s claims about so-called Asian grooming gangs – claims which have fed racist fantasies ever since, but which were proved groundless by a two-year Home Office study.) 

Every British journalist should feel shame that such things have happened in their industry and that they have been allowed to happen. But far more importantly, these outrages have a huge and damaging effect outside the journalistic bubble, causing untold harm to innocent people and to society as a whole.

As the Government statement this month put it:     

“Independent and effective self-regulation of the press empowers the public to have trust in what is reported, which is vital to a strong and functioning democracy.”

The well-being of democracy is at stake here, and it is time to call time on the self-serving charade that is IPSO. Leveson gave us a model for regulation that can be truly independent and effective; Labour should back it.