Media Content Regulation

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In this assignment I will be studying the ways bodies regulate the media. Media regulation is the regulation of the media, such as enforcing rules and regulations and how they deal with the breakers of these rules.

The Press Complaints Commission is an independent organization which deals with the complaints from the public about content in magazines or newspapers. As and Independent body it has no government funding and the government has no influence in its affairs. The Press Complaints Commission was put together for two reasons. One being the right for the public to know information which should be printed by the press for public interest reasons. The second reason being to protect the individual from misrepresentation, discrimination, harassing or intrusion of privacy in by the media.

The Commission has a panel of 17 people who make the decisions, to stop bias decisions being made only 7 of the 17 people on the panel are involved in with the press industry this keeps decision making unbiased as possible and with such a mixed panel they can offer a wider opinion on cases.

One of the problems in the press is inaccurate reporting, the PCC has to deal with this on a regular basis. The first code in the PCC is accuracy. The press must not publish misleading, inaccurate information or edited distorted pictures. The editor of the press in question must make sure that none of this happens. If a complaint is made against someone they will receive a period of time to reply to any inaccuracies. An Example of the code is Barry Khanan of Lancashire; he complained that an article in the Sun inaccurately reported that his niece, Alicia Riaz, had made a telephone call to her friend on the night that she, her three sisters and her m...

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...out authorization. An example of this is Clive Ponting he had been charged with leaking an internal MoD document concerning the General Belgrano, the cruiser which British army sank during the 1982 Falklands War, killing 360 people. The governments' argument had been that the Belgrano was threatening British lives when it was sunk. But the document leaked by Ponting claimed it was sailing out of the danger zone. He walked free from court after a jury cleared him of breaking the Official Secrets Act. This was because his actions were not a threat to national security and the information leaked was in the public interest.

Bibliography:

Books

Media Student's Book – Gill Branston, Roy Stafford, Routledge

Politics and the mass Media – Mark Wheeler Blackwell 1997

Websites

www.pcc.org.uk

www.asa.org.uk

www.ofcom.org.uk

www.news.bbc.co.uk

Newspapers

The independent

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