Image: James Murdoch closes News of the World after phone hacking scandal (Surian Soosay/Flickr) - but what else has changed, after all that?
Last week the culture minister Matt Hancock announced the government’s response to the public consultation on the Leveson Inquiry and its implementation. The government announced it will not continue with the Leveson Inquiry Part 2 that was supposed to consider corrupt relations between police and media (the part of Leveson that was unable to proceed at the time because of court cases that were ongoing). And it will repeal Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 – the section that deals with effective press regulation.
For those who have lost track of this protracted process it is worth a quick flashback to November 2012 when the Leveson report was published after an 18 month inquiry. Leveson detailed how the newspaper industry had become too powerful and how meaningful reform was needed to restore public confidence. Leveson emphasised that his recommendations were about enshrining press freedom and ensuring that any subsequent regulatory system was independent from government, albeit underpinned by statute. He also had to satisfy the many victims of press abuse that his recommendations would bring about an independent system with teeth, ensuring that the press could not “mark their own homework”.
