THE PCC TO REGULATE BLOGS? - YOU MUST BE JOKING

Ian Burrell, who edits The Independent's Media Pages, has a very disturbing blogpost about the ambition of the Press Complaints Commission to regulate blogs.  Baroness Buscombe, the new chairman  PCC,seems to want to extend her territorial claims without realising that she doesn't even control the press. The PCC's pathetic idea that it regulates the press is bad joke. She is merely a fig leaf for the lower end of the UK printed media and the sooner she realises that the better.

She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC's role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media's highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?

"Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated," Baroness Buscombe told me. "Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it's news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It's a very interesting area and quite challenging."

She said that after a review of the governance structures of the PCC, she would want the organisation to "consider" whether it should seek to extend its remit to the blogosphere, a process that would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC's umbrella).

The PCC regulates the press online as well as in print, and its remit also extends to the Sun's radio operation, SunTalk.

Blogging, with its tradition of being free and unregulated, sees itself as very different. But is it really?

The PPC is a wholly-'owned' puppet of the large-seling tabloids, let it continue with its traditional role of defending its own nefarious backers and not pollute the blogosphere.