LONDON - When the final report of the nine-month Leveson inquiry into the ways of the British press was published last week, it came as a boxed set - four chunky volumes totaling just shy of 2,000 words encased in brown cardboard and tipping the scales at about the same weight as a good-sized Thanksgiving turkey. (Read the 48-page executive summary.)
As I write in my latest Letter From Europe column, a possibly flippant question was whether, lobbed into the ever-churning pond of British public life, the report would make waves or sink without trace.
For the political elite, if not for every single reader of the newspapers under scrutiny, the answer seems to be th e former. The mini-tsunami, moreover, seemed to flip the stereotypes, offering a counter-intuitive line-up of foes and friends of statutory regulation of the press. Unusually, the opposition Labour Left was in favor of legalized regulation of the free-wheeling press, while much of the Conservative Right, including Prime Minister David Cameron, broadly opposed the kind of legal underpinning of stricter controls advocated by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson.
But there are sub-divisions, even among those who functioned as assessors in Sir Brian's panel as it heard the sworn testimony of 337 witnesses in the long months of televised hearings.
Shami Chakrabarti, the head of the Liberty advocacy group and one of six assessors, said the main division lay in what should happen if the British press did not take steps to clean its own house along the lines suggested by Sir Brian to create an independent board with real power to order penalties of up to a million pounds and o rder other censures of arrant newspapers.
“Leveson doesn't want compulsory regulation of the press but he says if they don't play ball politicians may have to consider it,†she told the BBC. “That is where I get off the bus.â€
David Hunt, a Conservative member of Britain's House of Lords who heads the current self-regulatory Press Complaints Commission â€" widely dismissed as obsolete and ineffective â€" and who was not an assessor, said 120 publishers, representing 2,000 editors had “all told me they will sign up†to a new independent regulator, making legislation unnecessary.
But that is not what campaigners in favor of legal constraints want to hear. Hugh Grant, a prominent member of the pro-regulation lobby who has complained about intrusions into his privacy, said Mr. Cameron's opposition to regulatory legislation was “very close to disgraceful.â€
