Press regulator IMPRESS is the UK’s only regulator to comply with the recommendations of the Leveson enquiry into phone-hacking and other misdeeds of the Establishment-friendly media. It regulates over one hundred UK publications and is the regulator to which the SKWAWKBOX subscribes.
By contrast IPSO, the UK press’ own ‘regulator’, has been described as a sham set up to create the ‘illusion of reform’ and is run by the publications – the press judging itself, resulting in decisions such as an adjudication that the S*n’s Trevor Kavanagh was not using hate speech when he used the nazi-like ‘The Muslim Problem’ to describe the UK’s Muslim citizens.
Unsurprisingly, the Establishment media regulated by IMPRESS are not fans of the Leveson-compliant regulator – and have been involved, under the News Media Association (NMA) umbrella, in a long legal battle to try to overturn the Press Recognition Panel (PRP) decision to recognise IMPRESS as the UK’s only compliant regulator.
The ‘MSM’ suffered a humiliating setback more than a year ago, when a court rejected in its entirety their application to undo IMPRESS’ recognition and confirmed that IMPRESS meets all the required conditions. But the NMA appealed the decision and continued to pursue its action.
However, the NMA has just abandoned its challenge.
A statement released today by IMPRESS summarises:
NMA abandons legal challenge to IMPRESS’s status as an approved press regulator
IMPRESS
15 January 2019. The News Media Association (NMA) has abandoned its appeal against a Judicial Review ruling made by the High Court in October 2017. The Court rejected the NMA’s attempt to challenge the status of IMPRESS as the first ‘approved’ regulator, and the NMA lodged an appeal against this decision to the Court of Appeal.
Today the NMA has dropped its appeal a few days before the case was due to be heard, agreeing to pay the majority of IMPRESS’s legal costs.
IMPRESS CEO Jonathan Heawood said: “We are pleased that the NMA has finally dropped its groundless legal challenge against IMPRESS. We always believed that the NMA’s case was bound to fail – a position it now appears to have accepted by dropping the case and agreeing to pay most of our costs.”
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“they’ll be back” – even Private Eye support them, do I doubt they’ll lie down for long.