Common Purpose versus News International
The Daily Mail has published an in-depth report (the printed edition is several pages long) into the way that front organizations for a group called "Common Purpose" have been seeking, not just to impose statutory regulation on the Press in the UK, but also to ensure that their own people would be the regulators. They also created a "non-profit" organisation, the "Centre for Investigative Journalism" which they intend one day to be funded by a levy (tax) on newspapers. In effect, they are proposing that the State should conduct all necessary investigative journalism. Needless to say, the CIJ's first major outing, to produce a report under contract to the BBC's Newsnight programme, managed to create a completely false impression that a senior conservative politician, Lord McAlpine, was a paedophile. Not just libeling him, but also creating a smokescreen and a great deal of covering fire for some other political figures, against whom such an accusati...