What are the arguments for and against statutory regulation of the newspaper industry?
Your answer should be at least 750 words and feature a minimum of five paragraphs.
Some people may argue for statutory regulation as past events such as the phone hacking scandal have exploited the publics trust by hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone to listen to her voicemails in order to create a news story. This created false hope for the family of Milly Dowler as they were led to believe that their daughter was still alive as one of the journalists had deleted a voicemail. The journalists who were caught during the Milly Dowler enquiry were given no punishment and were able to get away with it. These victims of press intrusion are a reason why statutory regulation should be put in place, in order to regulate and punish media institutions accordingly for going out of line. The media’s role in a democratic society is to “provide an essential check on all aspects of public life”. Media industries in today's age use a lot of clickbait content in order to sell papers and generate more sales. The quality of journalism because of this has decreased and more and more newspapers are using information which may be completely irreverent in order to make a story out of it. An example is the Daily Mail who used the royal family as a news article which covered Megan attending an event, despite this the story was practically irrelevant and had covered no important topic worthy of being in the news.
However, going back to the phone hacking scandal some people may argue against regulation of the newspaper industry as incidences such as these are a police matter and already considered illegal and therefore regulation is not needed in order to punish the journalists and papers who have broken the law. The law also already compensates for the victims of press intrusion however this does not make it okay for newspapers to hack into the public phones. Celebrities are exposed to harassment by media institutions and papers as they often write about their flaws and personal issues, however some may argue that celebrities have to accept the good and bad publicity and even say this abuse is a prove worth paying for, for free press.
In conclusion I think that there shouldn’t be a need for statutory regulation as it then gives more power to the government and they would also be able to essentially control what they can put out. Newspapers in the past have been the ones to expose corruption in governments and to regulate them would prevent them for being able to do any more investigations in the future.
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