Election 2015 - Making the media an election issue

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You are warmly invited to a meeting in Parliament on Monday 1 December 6.30pm-8pm in Committee Room 10, Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London SW1 to prepare for an election media manifesto.

Working with John McDonnell MP, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and the Media Reform Coalition will publicly launch an initiative to promote communication rights and media reform in the run up to the General Election. At the event on 1 December we will launch a short consultation document in advance of a Media Manifesto to be published in March 2015. Inviting comments by 31 January, our aim is to present a set of proposals that have support from a wide coalition of civil society organisations.

At the launch event Chris Bryant, John McDonnell and other MPs will be joined by speakers from various media reform groups, trade unions and other civil society organisations.

Our initiative puts forward proposals in four main areas:

Controls on media ownership: To strengthen media diversity we need regulations to limit how much companies can own and require those with significant market shares to meet agreed standards.

Independent, trusted and effective self-regulation of the press: Implementation of the arrangements for press self-regulation put forward by the Leveson Inquiry in 2012. We need an effective right of reply to media inaccuracies, operated by a regulator that represents both the working journalists and the public.

Well-funded, independent public service media: A charter renewal settlement in 2016 that results in a strong, independent BBC that is able to support the central role of public service media and its expansion across platforms, local neighbourhoods, and communities of interest. Action to strengthen the governance and democratisation of public service media.

Protection for communication rights: After phone-hacking the new scandal is the State's snooping on a far larger scale—on journalists' communications and everyone else's. Government wants to legalise it and weaken the UK's human rights framework. This is an issue for media and the whole of society.

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