The Leveson Report: accuracy matters for both journalists and the public
Lord Justice Leveson's report should be judged by the standard Alan Rusbridger set at the beginning. It needs to "find ways of bolstering all the good that flows from the best journalism while cutting out the worst."
It is an opportunity to make journalism better, more effective, and better protected.
In our area of expertise, factchecking, we set out some of the worst among the 80 pages of examples of inaccuracy we submitted to the Inquiry. They are serious failings, some did serious harm, and they show the current system does not work.
But the other side of coin is the many stories that do stack up, that break important news, that inform important debates, that on occasion help to fix injustices.
What undermines journalism isn't that all journalism is untrustworthy, or even that most journalism is untrustworthy, it's that enough journalism is untrustworthy that it doesn't make sense to trust journalism in general.
That could change, and journalists and the public would be better off for it.
If, instead of four out of five of us not trusting journalists to tell the truth, four out of five of us did trust journalists, then good journalism would be more powerful. If in time our jaded first reactions to newspaper headlines were not so often "if that's true, then…" then this Inquiry's recommendations might have helped to make journalism more effective.
Amid the noise and sometimes nonsense about a report that nobody has read yet, it's easy to forget that accuracy is the major business of the PCC, featuring in nine out of ten complaints judged to have merit.
Whatever system Leveson recommends, that is what it will be dealing with day in and day out.
So our task for the next few days is to try to work out whether the recommendations will work, not for relatively rare victims of sometimes appalling intrusion and illegality, but for the more mundane day-to-day work of press standards and for the ordinary complainant. It will take some time.
We will start this afternoon simply by trying to bring you a factual description of what the report says and what it recommends.