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October 12, 2011

Leveson told state-imposed regulation would be ‘war’

By Dominic Ponsford

A lawyer who sat on the Press Complaints Commission for seven years has warned that statutory regulation of the press would lead to a war between the regulator and the newspaper industry – one that the regulator was bound to lose.

Eve Salomon, who is chair of both the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the Internet Watch Foundation, was speaking at a Leveson Inquiry seminar in London this morning.

Sullivan said that any system other than self-regulation would lead to ‘a battle between the armies of the press and an unarmed regulator”.

She added: ‘I don’t believe that phone-hacking was a failure of self regulation any more than it was a failure of the criminal law”.

But she said that she believed self-regulation of the press had failed because of the withdrawal of Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, publisher of the Daily Express and Daily Star, from the PCC without any consequences.

She said that in order for self-regulation to work there had to be benefits for those publishers that were in the regime. Salomon urged publishers to advertise to their readers why reading a regulated newspaper was better than reading an unregulated one.

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