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Are today's ads too truthful for their own good?

Are today's ads too truthful?

What other people wrote about it but not the report itself. So were it not for Matthew Parris’s column in The Times of October 22, I’d never have known what Lord Justice Leveson had to say about the internet. Of those 2,000 pages, the internet warranted just 12. Had the report been written in 2002, that might have been understandable, but this was 2012. When comparing the relative reputations of the internet and printed newspapers, Lord Leveson had this to say: “People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular assurance or accuracy; it need be no more than one person’s view. There is none of the notional imprimatur or kitemark which comes from being the publisher of a respected broadsheet or, in its different style, an equally respected mass-circulation tabloid.” Parris calls this opinion charmingly naïve. He’s being charitable. Not since 1960 has a senior judge so guilelessly revealed his ineligibility for the case in hand. Then, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, leading the prosecution of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, asked of the jury: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

Leveson’s observations are no less lofty. Indeed, he’s quite breathtaking in his sweeping assumptions: “People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy…” That’s all people, all three billion of them, deciding not to trust anything they may find on a billion or more websites.

Given Leveson’s unqualified conviction that nobody believes anything they glean from the internet, as they might from “a respected broadsheet… or an equally respected mass-circulation tabloid”, he is confident that the internet clearly needs far less in the way of policing. And that’s why the internet warrants only 12 pages from the report’s 2,000. The implications of this conclusion, if followed logically, are far-reaching. The first is that all those who publish on the internet (“it need be no more than one person’s view”) must take punctilious care to leaven their pieces with errors and omissions.
Were they to take pride in their research and in their rigour – to check every fact – they would run a serious risk of earning a reputation for accuracy and trustworthiness: at which point, they’d immediately attract the attentions of the ‘content police’.

Established news brands, who have striven for centuries to see that facts are held sacred, must now recognise that, if they are to escape mandatory supervision, they must be seen to be consistently unreliable. It’s far from clear how a monitoring body would measure the strength of that “notional imprimatur or kitemark” – from the report it seems to be merely a matter of his lordship’s personal judgment – but if it seemed, towards the end of a reporting period, that a publication was deemed to have acquired a dangerously high reputation for accuracy and trustworthiness, it might well have to
fabricate a couple of outrageously baseless stories in order to rebalance its books. Specialist journalists might have to be brought in for just such a purpose. Leveson’s underlying principle would seem to be based on an extended version of caveat emptor. As long as the reading public can be assured that what they are reading is wholly without substance, they can’t be seriously misled. No further consumer protection is necessary. It’s only when a source is trusted that a concerned society needs to intervene.

If Leveson were to extend his principle to advertising, he would soon turn a corner and meet himself coming the other way. Since all advertising is overtly, unashamedly and proudly partial, it can lay no claim to balanced truth. Nobody, surely, would assume that advertisements, any more than the internet, were trustworthy or carried any particular assurance of accuracy. Leveson logic therefore suggests that consumer wariness is all the policing that advertising needs. But hang on a moment. Thanks to the Advertising Standards Authority, advertising comes with its own, widely publicised proprietary kitemark; so people are encouraged to believe that advertisements are legal, decent, honest and truthful. And it’s precisely this, according to Leveson, that would require them to be subject to scrutiny and potential control.

In other words, it’s only because the ASA makes advertising so dangerously trustworthy that it needs a body such as the ASA to monitor it. If Lord Justice Leveson’s belief prevailed, the only way that the advertising business could protect its future freedom would be to encourage and subsidise reckless and unprincipled inaccuracies in all media. I offer his thought, with my best wishes, to the Advertising Association’s incoming chief executive.

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