News / Society

UK press regulator under fire over Jewish Chronicle’s defamatory conduct

Wednesday, 02 August 2023 1:54 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 02 August 2023 1:56 AM ]

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The Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO), a British press regulator, has come under fire for its refusal to investigate The Jewish Chronicle for numerous cases of defamatory breach of journalistic standards.

As many as 15 left-wing figures and Palestinian rights activists wrote an open letter to the regulator on Monday, demanding that it launch a proper standards investigation into the publication’s conduct that, they said, had featured committing libel against them.

The letter, addressed to the IPSO’s chair, Lord Faulks, outlined the history of the paper’s wrongdoings and the lack of meaningful action on the part of the IPSO.

“We are individuals, who have experienced the consequences of bad journalism and bad editorial conduct by The Jewish Chronicle. Each one of us has secured a ruling from IPSO against this publication and/or won libel settlements,” the signatories wrote.

The undersigned rapped the IPSO for deciding against initiating a probe into the weekly’s conduct in December 2021 over, what the regulator had claimed was, a “change of ownership” in 2020, and the coming to power of “new editorial leadership.”

They said they found the regulator’s justification to be “disappointing and based on spurious reasoning,” and censured it for sufficing to order a number of “training” sessions to supposedly rectify the conduct of the Chronicle’s editorial board.

“We write to you, once again, to urge IPSO to undertake a standards investigation into this publication,” the letter went on.

They noted that the IPSO had refused to probe the Chronicle, despite finding it responsible for a whopping 33 breaches of the code of conduct in three years, and four admissions of libel during the same period.

“This was in our view a shocking level of non-compliance, equivalent to one breach in every four issues…, yet the IPSO Board considered two training sessions to be a sufficient remedy.”

Reporting on the same issue, Byline Times, a British paper, speculated that the IPSO has been stopping short of taking the Chronicle to task out of fear of repercussions from the country’s mainstream newspapers.

“The Murdoch, Mail, Mirror and Telegraph groups, having designed IPSO to be toothless because they wanted to be sure it could never bite them, would undoubtedly regard action against The Jewish Chronicle as an alarming precedent,” the paper wrote.

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