Fears over new press monitor's power

A NEW era of media regulation has been unveiled under plans that would require the independent Press Council to answer to a federal official.

A NEW era of government media regulation has been unveiled under plans that would require the independent Press Council to answer to a federal official.

If the Press Council applies standards that do not satisfy the new statutory office-holder, the Gillard government plans to strip all newspapers that belong to the Press Council of legal protections under the Privacy Act.

This would require them to open their files for inspection, reveal confidential information about articles before they were published and seek permission before publishing what the Privacy Act referred to as pesonal or sensitive information.

Press Council chairman Julian Disney warned that the plan, unveiled by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday, could leave the way open for the government's proposed "public interest media advocate" to "micro-manage" the Press Council's standards.

He said "the devil will be in the detail" and it was crucial that the legislation creating the new regulator should confine the discretion of the new office to limit its ability to interfere with the Press Council.

Legislation enacting the new scheme is expected to be made available tomorrow.

Senator Conroy said yesterday his scheme "keeps the government out of the print media regulation".

"The government will not fund or oversee press standards bodies," the Communications Minister said.

"They will be run, funded, and operated by the print media themselves."

Media lawyers said the power of the proposed public interest media advocate to remove a publication's exemption from the Privacy Act would give it great influence.

Peter Bartlett, of law firm Minter Ellison, said it would be extremely impractical, and sometimes impossible, for the media to do its work without the exemptions from the Privacy Act.

The proposal to strip away those exemptions - if the new regulator disagreed with Press Council standards - would mean that any journalist disclosing personal or sensitive information about Barack Obama in the Australian media would need to contact the US President "to ask for his consent".

Even if journalists located personal information about people from documents in the public domain they would, in the absence of the Privacy Act exemptions, be required to obtain the individual's consent before the information could be published, Mr Bartlett said.

Peter Leonard, of Gilbert + Tobin, said any newspaper that lost the exemption from the Privacy Act would be bound by the national privacy principles that would expose the media to "quasi-FOI" applications by people who believed their activities were about to become the subject of media coverage. The privacy principles state that any organisation that holds personal information about an individual "must provide the individual with access to the information on request".

"Removal of the exemption is a pretty sharp stick," Mr Leonard said.

Mr Disney said he was worried about the benchmarks that would be used by the new advocate to determine whether to accredit the Press Council's standards.

"If the benchmarks are too vague, it could leave too much scope for subjective judgment by the advocate, and the other concern is that it could lead to a race to the bottom in terms of standards of media regulation," he said.

The Press Council had undergone a period of reform and he was concerned that if the standards used by the advocate were not at least as strong as the standard of the Press Council, "then we will go backwards".

Because Senator Conroy proposes to allow multiple regulators to seek endorsement from the public interest media advocate, Mr Disney said there would be a risk of varying standards.

He said the benchmarks used by the advocate to assess the standards of the Press Council should be objective and should not be subject to change.