LONDON — The editors of Britain’s principal national newspapers met Wednesday under pressure from Prime Minister David Cameron and agreed to the establishment of an independent newspaper regulator with far greater powers than those available to the existing watchdog.
But the editors, meeting over breakfast at a London restaurant, steered a careful course, embracing most but not all of the measures recommended in a report last week by a high-ranking judge, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson. They rejected the judge’s most contentious proposal, for a new law that would put teeth into a state-sanctioned system of oversight.
That placed the editors broadly in line with the approach taken by Mr. Cameron, who has courted political opprobrium, particularly on the left, by saying that writing any part of a new regulatory system into law would risk eroding 300 years of press freedom in Britain. Reacting to the Leveson report last Thursday, the prime minister warned that once such a law existed, politicians would be tempted to broaden it, and start the country down the road to state control of the news media.
Lord Justice Leveson led a nine-month inquiry into a scandal surrounding abusive and illegal newspaper practices, including hacking into private computers and voice mail and bribing police officers and other public officials to obtain confidential information — practices that appeared to have been rife in some newsrooms.
The Leveson inquiry and the parallel investigations by the police have focused especially on two mass-circulation tabloids that anchored Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain, The Sun and The News of the World. The company shut down The News of the World in July 2011, at the height of the scandal.
In effect, some analysts said, the editors’ agreement reflects the price that Britain’s famously freewheeling newspapers are now paying for the tabloid papers’ excesses.
Though Britain has no formal equivalent of the First Amendment, its tabloid newspapers in particular have prided themselves on being the scourge of the establishment, of privilege and of claims to a right of privacy by celebrities and others in the news. That attitude could now be curbed, perhaps even radically, by a new regulatory body responding to the public outrage stirred by the recent scandals, these analysts said.
The newspaper The Guardian reported on its Web site on Wednesday that the editors — including representatives of the sensationalist “red top” tabloids like The Sun, the country’s most lucrative daily — had endorsed 40 of the 47 principal recommendations made in Lord Justice Leveson’s 2,000-page report.
They agreed to scrap the weak and widely discredited Press Complaints Commission, set up by newspaper barons 20 years ago, and replace it with a new body appointed from outside the newspaper industry and the government. It would have a much larger budget, a strong investigative staff, and the power to order errant newspapers to publish prominent apologies and pay fines up to £1 million, or $1.6 million, or 1 percent of a publication’s annual revenue, whichever is less. Effectively, subscribing to the new system would be compulsory, since failure to sign up would deny newspapers access to a new system for arbitrating libel suits that could be far cheaper than fighting suits in the courts.
“We endorsed virtually all the report, barring the clauses that dealt with statutory underpinning,” one of the editors who attended Wednesday’s meeting said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing an agreement among the roughly 20 editors not to comment individually on the record while details of a new system are being worked out.
Newspapers represented at the meeting included broadsheets like The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and two Murdoch-owned titles, The Times and The Sunday Times; two weekly journals, The Spectator and The Economist; and mass-market tabloids like The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express and Mr. Murdoch’s Sun, with readerships in the millions.
The editor who spoke said that the group voted clause by clause on the 47 Leveson recommendations in a 90-minute meeting marked by a sense of urgency because of the mounting political pressure for tougher measures to rein in the news media. “There was a feeling that if we were to avoid something nasty, we had to do something quickly,” he said.
On the political left and center-left, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are pressing for a statute that would put the newspapers on notice that they would defy the new system at their peril. With his own Conservative Party deeply split on the issue, Mr. Cameron told the editors at a meeting on Tuesday that they should endorse the principles behind the Leveson proposals, and that if they did not, they would “get a statute,” an editor who was present said.
With the editors now in line, senior aides to Mr. Cameron have said they will try to defuse the situation with a more detailed blueprint for an oversight system that would be independent but not depend on statutory backing, perhaps with a senior judge to act as a referee on appointments to the new regulatory body and on contested findings.
The editors’ action put newspapers with a combined daily and weekend circulation of more than eight million copies — said to be read by more than one-third of Britain’s population of 62 million — on record in favor of substantially toughening the system of self-regulation by the newspapers that has been in place since 1953.
In its current form, set up in 1991 after an earlier threat of government regulation, a voluntary body passes judgment on accusations of wrongdoing by the newspapers that participate. But critics who testified before the Leveson inquiry, including victims of the tabloid excesses, said the commission has been too pliant, especially in dealing with rambunctious tabloids like The Sun, which have had little to fear from the commission’s reproaches.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 6, 2012
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the jurisdiction of a proposed independent regulator in Britain. The new regulator would be charged with oversight of newspapers, not of the broader news media.
