by Brian CathcartPeter Preston, the media columnist of the Observer, hardly allows a week to pass without writing something perverse about the Royal Charter, the Leveson Report and press self-regulation. Here’s his latest, with our comments in italics. Situations vacant ads from headhunters seem strewn across the national press. Wanted: an outstanding person of "independence, sound judgment and resilience" to head the new Independent Press Standards Organisation. Oh! and alternatively wanted, if you don't like IPSO and prefer the politicians' royal charter regulator instead, a "person of resilience, independence, confidence and experience" (plus "sound judgment") to chair the recognition panel that will recognise – or de-recognise – regulatory regimes, probably themselves delivered by people of independence, sound judgment and resilience appointed after applying via Advert 1.Yes, two jobs are being advertised at once, but they are very different. One is to run IPSO, the cynical, shabby Press Complaints Commission (PCC) rebrand, and the other is to run the Recognition Panel established by Royal Charter. PCC-IPSO purports to be a self-regulator; the Panel, acting for the public, will establish whether self-regulators meet basic standards put forward in the Leveson Report. (And if it is ‘the politicians’ charter’, it is also the Leveson charter, the public’s charter, the victims’ charter and the charter supported by a legion of people to whom free expression is their lifeblood. But Mr Preston would rather not draw attention to that.) Confused? If you're a member of the public seeking ‘appropriate confidence’ in whatever this mishmash of either conflicting or (later) merging schemes provides, then confusion comes with the cornflakes.No, confusion is merely what Mr Preston wants to encourage because it is a simple way of concealing PCC-IPSO’s shortcomings. If people want something in which they can have confidence, after all, how likely are they to turn to something so vigorously promoted by the Daily Mail and the Murdoch papers? Those are the organisations that gave us the utterly discredited PCC and they are not sorry for that, so how likely are they to come up with something that can be trusted now? Yes, confusion is definitely Mr Preston’s best policy. Both ads ooze great-and-goodness. The first boss of Ipso – chosen under prevailing "standards in public life" guidelines – will be selected by Sir Hayden Phillips, lately permanent secretary at culture, media and sport; Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, lately justice of the supreme court; Dame Denise Platt, lately chair of the commission for social care inspection; Paul Horrocks, lately editor of the Manchester Evening News, and John Witherow, presently editor of the Times.What Mr Preston does not say is that Horrocks and Witherow, as ‘industry representatives’, can veto anything that the others on the panel suggest. And both Horrocks and Witherow are indelibly tainted by association with the old, discredited, PCC system. Would you call that great and good? The first recognition panel – chosen under the same guidelines – will be appointed by Dame Anne Pringle, lately British ambassador to Moscow; Dr Chitra Bharucha, lately vice-chair of the BBC Trust; Andrew Flanagan, lately Scottish media executive, now a civil service commissioner; and Elizabeth France, current chair of the Office of Legal Complaints.No, the guidelines were very different, though again it suits Mr Preston not to say this. The IPSO crowd were selected in an entirely behind-closed-doors process by a handpicked retired judge with the help of handpicked advisers – after a shifty change of the publicly-announced procedure. The appointments group for the recognition panel were chosen in a transparent process by the independent Commissioner for Public Appointments. These differences are just symptoms of something worse: PCC-IPSO is a puppet of the big newspapers, while the recognition body will be independent. What's the difference? On the G-and-G scale, none at all. Lately is as currently does. They could, every one, come to a No 10 Christmas party. They're uniformly resilient, confident etc. But there are a few nuances down the line, to be sure.There he goes again, promoting confusion. These two bodies are not ‘uniformly’ anything; they are as different as apples and cheese. One is that Ipso's prospective leader could be a peer, while the charter – hymning "outstanding reputations for fairness and probity" – leaves lords, as well as MPs, ministers, publishers etc, on the bench. Who wants working party-political peers running press self-regulation? Peter Preston does. He’s happy that they run it now and he is apparently happy that PCC-IPSO would allow them to run it in future. Politicians having influence over journalism? It’s just a nuance to Mr Preston, who is happy with his ‘politicians‘ IPSO’. Another is that the press is paying for its own ads and systems while Joe Taxpayer (bequeathing a £250,000 starter fund) is stumping up on the recognition front, hiring back office staff, lobbing £400 a day per attendee at Dame Anne and her colleagues when they meet and discuss.If there is a money scandal here it is the PCC, which takes cash from small, hard-up news publishers to enable it to cover up wrongdoing by big, rich newspaper companies. IPSO will go on doing that. Then there is the £180,000 a year paid to the PCC chair for a three-day week. By contrast the Recognition Panel, once it is up and running, will pay for itself. The difficulty is they have nothing to discuss for now – perhaps for ever. No body seeking charter status yet exists, and Ipso, once launched, doesn't want recognition anyway. They are the symbols of what Hacked Off calls "Leveson compliance" that Leveson didn't choose: he recommended monitoring by Ofcom, not this expensive, lugubrious, sanitised edifice.Mr Preston has not read or remembered the Leveson Report. It recommended Ofcom as the audit body, yes, but it also said - Vol 4, Park K, para 6.23 - that if that wasn’t acceptable there should be an independent body, like this one. Would Mr Preston have preferred Ofcom? No, so he is trying to have it both ways. And if PCC-IPSO is not proposing to seek recognition, why is that? Because its backers can’t face being held to decent standards of independence and effectiveness. There must be an easier route through the forest. What about hiring KPMG or some such for a three-yearly audit of Ipso effectiveness? Why hire anybody if you've signed up people of independence, resilience and the rest in the first place? The curlicues of the recognition game are simply reader-, and thus understanding-, repellent. Meanwhile, everybody involved would probably be better off filling sandbags.Please. Those ‘curlicues’ are necessary because they protect the public and they protect freedom of speech. If Mr Preston’s friends at the PCC and at the old News of the World had been a little fussier about getting things right, we would not have had a decade of appalling mistreatment of the public that has destroyed much of what remained of trust in newspaper journalism. Let’s not have more of the same as Mr Preston would like; let's try something different this time.