Untrusted & unaccountable: another year of failure for the sham press “regulator” IPSO

While broadcasters and social media platforms are overseen by Ofcom, the rest of the media – newspapers and their websites – remain unregulated.  

Instead, most newspaper publishers are in IPSO, a complaints body controlled by the press itself, which has a dire record of failing to protect the public since it was established over ten years ago.

IPSO’s latest report confirms that 2025 was no different, and here are the statistics which prove it.

1. Just 1% of complaints were upheld
   

In 2025 IPSO received over 5,000 complaints about press standards, but it upheld just 53.  Of those 5000, 3785 were dismissed out of hand, at the first stage of IPSO’s lengthy process.  IPSO does not publish its reasons for dismissing all those complaints, but Hacked Off has seen strong and legitimate complaints unfairly rejected without any investigation.

Of the remainder, some are rejected based on technicalities in IPSO’s own self-serving rules.  For example, coverage of international affairs is exempt in certain circumstances, as are complaints about articles subject to legal challenge.

Of the small minority of complaints which make it through IPSO’s initial assessment, almost 200 were then rejected as “duplicates”.  In principle that appears reasonable, but IPSO do not explain how they define or manage duplicate complaints.  They tend to choose a “lead complaint” – which may or may not be the strongest one – and dismiss the others, even if other complaints identify further breaches of the code.

“Mediation” is another of IPSO’s favoured methods to wave away complaints about the press – a resolution in which, often, a complainant is so exhausted by IPSO’s burdensome and protracted complaints process that they accept whatever token remedy the publication offers.  In these circumstances, IPSO just downs tools, and fails to rule on whether or not a publisher has breached standards.

2. Almost a thousand complaints were abandoned
   

Of all the unsatisfactory outcomes to complaints, one of the most common is simply, as IPSO put it, “Not pursued”.  In other words, the complainant just gave up.

And who can blame them – an IPSO complaint takes an average of 5-6 months to reach the stage of adjudication, with waves of correspondence between publisher and complainant over that period.  The publisher’s side is represented by paid and experienced legal professionals.  The complainant is someone giving hours of their own time, unpaid, and with little hope of a decent outcome at the end of it all.

How would a competent, impartial regulator respond?  It would streamline its processes, give more assistance to complainants, make the process simpler, keep to a tighter timeframe, take on the burden of pursuing the substance of complaints itself and, where complainants nonetheless withdraw, run and assess the complaint proactively against its code.

What does IPSO do?  Drops everything and records the outcome as “Not pursued”.

3. Zero standards investigations, zero fines
   

Yet again, IPSO has recorded no investigations or fines.

A standards investigation ought to happen when a publisher or publishers have committed serious or systemic breaches of the code.  The press executives who control IPSO made that threshold even higher, by requiring breaches of the code to be serious and systemic.  That’s a tall order when the code itself is written by newspaper editors, and designed to be as feeble as possible.

Despite such a high threshold for an investigation, some publishers have clearly met it.  But IPSO has nonetheless failed to investigate.

Nor has IPSO fined a single publisher, even in the few cases where it has upheld a public complaint.

These records do not just stand for 2025; they stand for IPSO’s entire existence.  It has never fined or investigated a single one of its publisher members.

Altogether, 2025 was another year of failure for the sham regulator.  Public-interest minded journalists and the public deserve better.

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