Professor Paul Wragg tackles press malpractice in Press Recognition Panel report
The Press Recognition Panel (PRP) cites Professor Wragg in their annual report.
Paul is a Professor of Media Law within the School of Law who specialises in press regulation. In December of last year, he submitted a report on the state of press regulation in the UK to the Press Recognition Panel. The Recognition System was created to address longstanding failures in press accountability while protecting freedom of expression.
His submission draws upon his body of research, including his books A Free and Regulated Press: Defending Coercive Independent Press Regulation (Hart, 2020) and Free Speech Theory: A Radical Restatement (Hart, 2025).
The Leveson report of 2012 called on government to ensure the press were properly regulated to ensure the public were adequately protected from press malpractice.
However, Kathryn Cearns OBE, Chair of the PRP states:
People continue to experience intrusion, misrepresentation, misleading reporting, and discriminatory narratives.
Despite this, newspapers are still regulated by a body called IPSO which sits outside the UK's official regulatory system.
Professor Wragg does not believe that IPSO is a regulator, but rather ‘a butler, of sorts, conveying messages from aggrieved complainants to publishers and back again over many months.’ He says:
As the PRP reports – and as my submission made clear – press malpractice continues to be a serious problem that a) IPSO isn't tackling (and isn't capable of tackling) adequately and b) the government is not taking sufficient notice of, nor addressing.
The report is presented to Parliament as part of its regulatory obligations. Professor Wragg’s citations in such an important report are reflective of how School of Law academics can turn research into real-world impact.
- Read the PRP annual report here.
- Professor Wragg is a member of the Centre for Business Law and Practice, and can be found on LinkedIn here.
