Govt media regulator should be avoided

The head of the body overlooking print media in Australia says a government regulator of the sector should be avoided.

An independent inquiry into print and online media released this month recommended a News Media Council to set standards and handle complaints from the public because self-regulation had failed.

The proposed body would be funded by the government.

"The (Press) Council is very keen, and I am very keen, to avoid the statutory authority option if we possibly can," Australian Press Council chair Professor Julian Disney told Sky News on Sunday.

Unlike some in the sector, Prof Disney said he was not concerned that the body being proposed would be too government-dominated.

"My main concern is to do with the tendency for those bodies to become very bureaucratic, legalistic, slow and that means if they are valuable to anyone, they're usually valuable to the more relatively advantaged people in the community," he said.

"We must have a system that is informal, quick, doesn't daunt people from engaging with it and also doesn't engender too much of an adversarial approach whether from the complainant or the newspaper."

Prof Disney said the key test would be for a system independent from government and sufficiently independent from the publishers to command pubic confidence.

"That is the challenge for us and the challenge for publishers in terms of the resources they provide," he said.

Publishers fund the Press Council.

Prof Disney said his body needed more funds to hire more staff to cope with the increased work.

The council has three and a half people now and is soon to add an extra worker but "that's not enough", he said.

"Our complaints have doubled in the last six months."

Prof Disney acknowledged the council had failed to adequately monitor and punish offenders.

"It is fairly generally agreed that we haven't been able to be effective enough and really our top priority at the moment is to fulfil our existing responsibilities properly," he said.