Press regulator Ipso is expected to come under pressure to investigate allegations that the Daily Telegraph allowed commercial pressures to dictate editorial coverage, at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday.
The culture, media and sport select committee is expected to discuss allegations made by Peter Oborne and echoed by other journalists that the Barclay brothers-owned newspaper refused to run stories about HSBC, when Sir Alan Moses, chair of Ipso, gives evidence.
Paul Farrelly MP, a former journalist and member of the media select committee, said: “This is all about press standards and Ipso needs to take it seriously … It’s high time that the board take a fresh look at the code in the interests of upholding press standards and backing good journalists such as Peter Oborne.”
However, an Ipso spokesman said the regulator, which was set up in the wake of the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, was unlikely to investigate the allegations as there had been no formal complaint and because there was no specific clause in the editors’ code of practice that deals with “the conflict between commercial and editorial interests”.
The spokesman added that given the concerns raised by the allegations about the Telegraph, the issue was likely to be addressed at the next meeting of the Ipso board on 26 March.
A would-be alternative press regulator to Ipso, the Impress Project, is also expected to tell the MPs on the committee that the Telegraph allegations raise important issues about press regulation.
Speaking to the Guardian, Jonathan Heawood, the founding director of the Impress Project, said: “I think there are grounds for an investigation into whether there is a breach … it seems there is at the least a breach of the spirit of a code governing press freedom if not the code itself.
“The code doesn’t address these issues but as the [commercial] pressures are going to get worse it should at least be discussed.”
Ipso’s code of practice, inherited from the former discredited press regulator, the Press Complaints Commission, does not specifically mention commercial pressures, unlike codes of conduct produced by the National Union of Journalists and other media outfits including the Advertising Standards Authority.
However, Farrelly and other press freedom advocates argue that allowing commercial pressures to dictate editorial breaches the spirit of press freedom.
On Saturday, the Daily Telegraph published a front page story linking workforce suicides at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK with employment pressures. It caused outrage on social media over the weekend, with some accusing the paper of using personal tragedy to try to score a point against a rival publisher.
Heawood said the Telegraph’s story needed to be addressed. “I wouldn’t want to prejudge any investigation but on the face of it newspapers should not be writing about suicide unless there is an obvious public interest.”
The code of conduct produced by the NUJ has a provision that journalists should not be pressurised into changing stories by commercial considerations.
The ASA code of practice says advertorials should be clearly marked as such. The Telegraph’s coverage of HSBC is news rather than an advertising feature but the ASA’s guidance on the code says that if a company is permitted to have control over the content of an article, “the result would be an advertisement feature”.
The first clause of Ipso’s code of practice says: “The press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information.” It is not clear whether commercial pressures could be considered as distorting published information.
All major newspaper groups have signed up to Ipso apart from the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times. Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of the Telegraph, sits on the Regulatory Funding company which organises the funding for the regulator.
“Looking at funding, we will be asking what has changed since the old PCC bit the dust,” said Farrelly. “It still remains to be seen whether Ipso has the courage to investigate.”