The Clarkson ruling puts Ipso in violation of its own charter
At 10 p.m. on Friday night, the BBC sent out a ‘breaking news’ notification informing millions that a joke made by Jeremy Clarkson about Meghan Markle has been deemed sexist by Ipso, the press regulator. That such attention was given to a few sentences published on p17 in a months-old article is odd, but the BBC had cottoned on to an important point: the battle for press freedom had just suffered a major setback. Hacked Off, an outfit campaigning for state regulation of the press, reacted with typical illiteracy, announcing: ‘Ipso finally upholed [sic] sexism complaint’ marking ‘the first time in Ipso’s history that it upheld a complaint about sexism’. It is right to say that a bridge has been crossed, a defence of press freedom trampled upon.
