英国报业自律困境与出路的研究.doc

 I II Abstract Press Complaints Commission PCC of the United Kingdom UK is one of the most successful media self-regulatory organization in the world. However it has been confronted with much criticism over the years. Culture, Media and Sports Committee of the UK Parliament and Information Commissioner’s Office have seperately published three reports in 2006, 2007 and 2010, which show that the ethical standard of the press and PCC’s performance in several major areas are disappointing. The 2010 parliamentary report suggests that PCC should have the power to impose fines and to suspend the publication of a newspaper or magazine if the Editors’ Code of Practice is seriously breached. Also PCC is recommended to act more proactively when dealing with those cases of public interests. Yet PCC disagreed arguing that these recommendations would signal the death of the press self-regulatory mechanism in the UK. To rebuild public confidence, PCC appointed an independent panel to review matters about PCC’s governance. The panel published the report entitled The Governance of the Press Complaints Commission: an Independent Review. The report on a whole endorses the self-regulatory scheme but at the same time recommends PCC to reform. This dissertation employs three research methods, i.e. recent documents analyses, statistical analyses and case studies. Based on the research results, this dissertation puts forward several recommendations for the reform of PCC. This dissertation firstly analyzes the recent reports of 2006, 2007 and 2010 to map out what criticism PCC is confronted with and what opinion on reform PCC ,the UK Parliament and other bodies separately hold. As for case studies, this dissertation uses News of the World phone hacking scandal and the case of Madeleine McCann because they have generated much discussion. The 2010 report argues that PCC’s performance  in these two cases is disappointing. As for the data analyses  section, this dissertation  compiles and