Prank prompts calls to bring back 'Australian Leveson'

 
Kathy Marks11 December 2012

Lord Leveson will deliver a speech on “news gathering in a time of change” in Melbourne tonight amid calls for changes to Australian press laws.

Last Friday morning, Sydney time, he took the podium in the Grand Ballroom of the Shangri-La Hotel to lecture his audience on the need for new privacy laws to curb the internet’s worst excesses.

The next morning, in the wake of the death of Jacintha Saldanha, journalists who had been reporting on Lord Leveson’s speaking tour of the country turned to their own press culture.

In the Sunday Telegraph, a Sydney tabloid, columnist Miranda Devine called for a ban on prank calls, which she said allowed “the cynical and cruel to humiliate the gullible and naïve”.

Last year Julia Gillard’s government ordered a version of the Leveson Inquiry into Australian newspapers, 70 per cent of which are Murdoch-owned.

Like Leveson, former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, QC, who was appointed to conduct the probe, recommended a statutory regulatory body.

But nine months later the government has still not agreed on the scope of media reform and has yet to respond to the report.

Mel Greig and Michael Christian, the DJs who put through the call puffed by 2Day FM as “the biggest royal prank ever”, appeared on television yesterday.

They said they were “shattered, gutted, heartbroken” to hear of Jacintha Saldanha’s death - and tearfully absolved themselves of all blame.

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