The UK press regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, promised to create guidelines for reporting on major terror incidents, UK media site Hold the Front Page reported.
An IPSO spokesperson told iMediaEthics, “We’ve already begun this work and will be taking in forward throughout the year. The IPSO guidance is in development now.”
The promise came in IPSO’s response to the Kerslake Report, a government review of the response to the bombing at the 2017 Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. The Kerslake Report was released in March of this year and noted that “most participants [of the review] who commented on their experience of the media in the attack aftermath were negative.” Victims’ families said they were “hounded” and “bombarded” by the media, and one family even said they learned of their son’s death from the media.
“IPSO’s first priority has been to try to establish whether any regulatory action that can be taken to address these accounts,” IPSO said in its mid-May response to the report. IPSO called for the public to let it know any details about specific media breaches during reporting on the attack, noting that the Kerslake report didn’t include any identifying information about which news outlets ran afoul. An IPSO spokesperson told iMediaEthics it hasn’t heard from anyone with details for any potential complaints about reporting on the attack.
IPSO said it would “produce guidelines for editors and for the public based on the current Editors’ Code covering reporting on major incidents and provide newsroom training and resources.”
In addition, IPSO said it planned to
- “work with the Society of Editors and others in their convening a cross media roundtable to discuss issues raised in the review
- develop an organisational major incident plan that is automatically triggered after any event leading to mass casualties”