Public Confidence in the Media and Police

All I would say is that I would apply the same rule as the Prime Minister: people are innocent until proven guilty. If there are charges and an investigation, that is one thing, but no charges have been brought against Mr Baldwin, so he is innocent until proven guilty, just as anyone else would be. There is a great challenge of looking at the boundaries of investigative journalism and at what is right and what is wrong. There must surely be a cultural failure within many news organisations if people believe they are being pushed to do things that might lead to their breaking the law, and that must be addressed. What has been said in the debate so far about the regulation of the press is key and part of that involves internal regulation, the corporate governance of news organisations and how they regulate themselves. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), who is no longer in his place, talked about his concerns about self-regulation. Although it is different in different industries, it can be made to work. My experience working in the advertising industry was that a code enforced by the industry on itself would work. One of the big differences between advertising and the press is that there are real financial penalties for advertisers who break the code. If a company has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds producing commercials and advertisements that then get pulled, there is a big financial loss, and a big loss of face for a number of organisations that might have their messages pulled, too, which damages them in the eyes of consumers.