London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Bill

My Lords, I did not speak in Committee on the similar amendments then moved by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. I do not nowadays have an interest in the media to declare, but I was once a non-executive director of the Mirror Group, and I stress a strong bias in favour of freedom of speech and of the press, of wanting that freedom of the press to be restricted by legislation only in the most extreme of circumstances—restrictions imposed by the common law in relation to defamation, and so on. The press is of course also subject to the non-statutory rules of the Press Complaints Commission. I want to underline the key distinction emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, between the advertising content and the editorial content of a newspaper or broadcast. The advertising content is paid for and controlled by a third party, and that includes advertorials, which I can roughly describe as advertisements dressed up to look like editorial but paid for by a third party. Advertising content is paid for and controlled by a third party. Editorial content, on the other hand, is controlled by journalists and editors. When the Minister, in his letter to the noble Lord of 27 February, says reassuringly, as the noble Lord has already quoted, that:"““all journalistic practice is exempt from the Association right created in Schedule 4””," he seems to accept the distinction that both the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I have made between advertising content and editorial content. The question then arises: why the need for a ““necessary incident”” test? Under the Bill, unless it is amended, a journalist in the future might have to answer, with regard to a news broadcast about an Olympics event or an item in the press or on television detailing Olympic events to take place in the future, questions about whether he is suggesting a commercial association with the Olympic Games. Why should the news item have to be scrutinised by LOCOG to see whether any reference to the Olympics was a ““necessary incident””, and be regarded as legitimate only if it passes that test? Surely if the reference to the games is in the editorial content of a newspaper or broadcast, and not advertising content controlled by a third party, there should be no question but that the content falls within the safe harbour of paragraph 8, without the writer having to justify either the selection of news and editorial material or the words used in that material. I suspect that while the Minister, in the words I quoted from his letter, seemed to be accepting the distinction between advertising content and editorial content, he has not quite brought himself to do so. He will do so only if, for example, he gets rid of the phrase ““necessary incident”” in paragraph 8.