The Independent Press Stands Organisation ('IPSO') regulates all the Fleet Street titles except The Independent, The FT and The Guardian, all of whom operate their internal complaints system, which is supposed to mirror the IPSO scheme.

IPSO publishes an Editors' Code, which, if it were properly enforced by IPSO (which it is not) would radically improve the quality of the British press overnight. But the IPSO Code, when deployed with sufficient savvy, is an essential tool in crisis PR - especially pre-publication.

Paragraph 1(i) of the Code reads as follows: 

“The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text."

The likelihood of a newspaper complying with this stipulation increases exponentially when it has been made aware that the subject of threatened adverse comment is both aware of this provision and has engaged a PR professional who has the requisite expertise to enforce it – something which I can state with confidence which comes from having 30 years’ expertise as an editorial lawyer. It is impossible to overstate the importance of that professional possessing, and being known to possess, the requisite knowledge of both the applicable regulations and the law which adds potency to those regulations.

While it will undoubtedly assist effective pre-publication crisis PR to communicate to the paper that a critical review of any publication decision by IPSO in the form of a formal complaint may follow a breach of the provisions of its Code, an equally persuasive subtext is the possible legal consequences of the provisions of the Code being ignored.

There is now a body of case law where judges have placed great emphasis on whether a newspaper has complied with its own code (the IPSO Code was written by newspaper editors) in determining whether that newspaper can rely on the key Section 4 Public Interest defence, which I outlined last week. If a judge finds, as happened in a recent case against the Mail, that the paper breached its obligations under the Code, then it is most unlikely the Section 4 defence will be upheld.

In the recent Mail case, which concerned its take on the statins debate and false allegations against two doctors who took a contrary view, the paper's failure to comply with its Code obligations proved to be fatal to its defence. It was subsequently obliged to pay damages and costs, and agree to a Statement in Open Court admitting that its publication on the issue of statins was false, and apologising to the claimant doctors which it had libelled.

The key reason why the claim succeeded was that the pre-publication right to reply correspondence included all the requisite detail to refute the threatened allegations. In a finding against the paper, the judge examined the correspondence in great detail. This effectively determined his finding that the Mail could not have "reasonably believed" that the publication served the public interest.

In this case while the pre-publication correspondence was drafted by experts in the relevant medical field, there was no expert legal input. The result was positive in that the libel action was successful. A far better outcome, which I suspect would have been achieved if that correspondence had also benefitted from the expertise of a media lawyer who is fully conversant with all the applicable regulatory and legal principles, would have been that the paper was persuaded not to publish the defamatory article.

Read last week's tip: how the law of defamation influences the editorial process