Some media regulatory practices are more effective than others

The two regulatory practices which i will be comparing which are the most effective at regulating are film regulation and press regulation. There is a different opinion of what effective means in this question, it can mean how well the regulatory practice controls freedom of speech of the publishers and then it could be how well the regulatory practices protect the public in different ways. Media regulation is the control or guidance of mass media by governments and other bodies.  There are multiple ways of regulating an example of a few ways are classification, this is preventing people from accessing material that is deemed unsuitable for their age. Another way of regulating is censorship and this is removing material from public material altogether, there are also other ways of in which media texts can be regulated.

The first regulatory practice which i will be looking at how effective it is is press regulation. Between 1990 and 2014, the press was regulated by a non-government voluntary regulation body called the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). It had no statutory/legal powers making it a 'toothless tiger'. There was an issue with the PCC and that was that newspapers often perpetuated the practice of 'publish and demand', by knowing that they had far more money that they could use in any legal battle than the public that were suing them. The PCC was not an effective regulatory practice as we found out from the Millie Dowler Hacking incident. What happened in this incident was the News of the World began an investigation into Milly Dowler who disappeared in 21st March 2002, they deleted some of her message in her phone in the process of this, her parents noticed this and it led to false hope that she was still alive and active on her phone. The PCC got a lot of criticism for what happened with the News of the World phone hacking affair. The heavy criticism concluded in the prime minister David Cameron calling for the PCC to be replaced with a new system in July 2011. This then resulted in the Leveson Enquiry, this was a public inquiry set up to examine the practice, culture and ethics of the press, so at this point it was clear that the press regulatory practices were not very efficient and unable to properly do their job which called for an inquiry to figure out how it would be changed and made better. The PCC was widely agreed to be discontinued so that the press were no longer able to self regulate voluntarily. The government then agreed upon a new system, a Royal Charter. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (ISPO) was established on Monday 8th September 2014 this followed after the windup of the PCC. ISPO claims to be an independent regulator of the newspaper industry and exists to promote and to support members of the public in seeking redress where they believe that the Editors Code of Practice has been breached. The Editors Code deals with issues such as accuracy, invasion of privacy and intrusion into grief or shock and harassment. This was a good sign because it looked as if the the press regulatory system would be starting to work again in favour of the public by processing them better than before making them more efficient in the process. The press now seem to be much better regulated after ISPO has been introduced and it seems like the public are protected a lot more but there are still many cases in which the press have been guilty of lying, intrusion, intimidation and many more inappropriate actions which make the public not feel 100% comfortable that they will be safe from any of these actions from the press and because of the high amount of cases there have been where the press have been caught doing these inappropriate actions. An example of when the the press have been caught Intruding is with JK Rowling. It was an incident where a journalist slipped a letter into the daughters school bag addressed to JK,she said that she felt a huge sense of invasion of privacy and was very angry, this is just one of the cases of intrusion that has been reported but it is unknown how many times this may have happened with people who are not celebrities and couldn't get their word out which is why people still not feel protected by this new regulatory practice.

The second regulatory practice that i will be looking into and comparing how effective it is is film regulation. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is a non-governmental organisation funded by the film industry, responsible for the national classification and censorship of films in the UK. The BBFC (originally called the British Board of Film Censorship) was established in 1921. The board faced strong criticism for over censoring films however this was before the 1960's where films were censored as a means of social control. Overall the attitudes to what material is suitable for viewing by children has been changing over the years, this has been reflected by the reclassification of older films being re-released on video, this shows that the board has noticed and acknowledged where they were too strict or wrong in the past and adapting and changing to fit with modern times. There is a problem which has arised within classification of media texts in recent years and this problem is around Web 2.0 and sites like Youtube. These sites allow anybody to watch anything all unclassified and uncensored. It is also possible for children to access an Amazon account and order films of any age classification. This new wave of technology means young children can watch any type of films of media material which may be highly inappropriate for their age. It is very difficult and almost out do the control of the BBFC meaning that its becoming the parents jobs to regulated what their children watch. One of the arguments against media regulation is that it is against freedom of speech and its up to the public to decide what they want to watch for themselves. This problem with this argument is that the point of media regulation is to protect vulnerable members of society from harm and completely removing regulation would result in many more problems than keeping it. Media regulation does a very good job at being efficient within protecting people from films but it is facing problems within the new age of technology which allows people to get round these barriers, this is something which needs to be looked into explored and find a way how to regulate these methods of watching films. However this isn't done by everyone and not everyone knows how to get around the barriers and watch these censored films.

In my opinion i believe that the press regulation is more effective than media regulation. Press regulation has gone through its criticisms and its changes to make it better, it may not be 100% right but it does work more in the favour of the public now, it may have been very in effective and wrong but its changes has helped it protect the public in a number of ways. Although press regulation is not fully effective i believe that it is much more effective at what its trying to achieve than media regulation right now. Media regulation is not effective at all with the new wave of technology and the amount of young people which use this technology results in media regulation having nearly zero effect on young people. Media regulation works is people try to see a film in the cinema but that is not the most popular way of watching a film anymore, the most popular way is on your laptop through a streaming service. On these streaming services right now there is no way for the BBFC to regulate properly what people are viewing, some sites may ask you to confirm your age but it is easy to lie about this and get through anyway. Right now media regulation is not as effective in what its hoping to achieve as press regulation because there are so many easy ways to get around it. However there is the argument that media regulation doesn't need to be as strict as press regulation because the consequences of media regulation not working are not as serious as press regulation failing. For example if false information is reported onto a newspaper this could ruin someones career and life resulting in long term consequences but if media regulation doesn't work well and someone watches a film that they shouldn't be watching they aren't as permanently effected by it than if false information was reported about them. Taking into account this point i still believe press regulation is moe effective because it does what it is trying to do better than media regulation and cant be cut around as easily.

Final Cut

This is a link to the final version of my video. The big change compared to the previous rough cuts is that this version has a different version of the song used, this version has the vocals and is the final version of the song. Im happy with how the video turned out and when put next to and compared to other music videos in the same genre it fits well when watching it in between other videos which is what i was aiming for.