How London Does It

BRITAIN'S General Council of the Press has existed in its present form since January 1964. It is composed of 20 journalists and five "lay" members drawn from diverse occupations. Another five laymen will soon be added. The group meets every two months, and its eleven-man complaints committee, a cross section of the full body, gathers once a month to review charges that cannot be settled by negotiations. The annual budget of $70,000, provided by newspaper associations and publishers, is spent on investigation of the nearly 400 complaints a year.

Although it has no legal or coercive powers, the council exercises considerable influence over Fleet Street. When it raps a paper, that publication--and all others--generally print the decision. One of the council's most publicized condemnations led the News of the World to tone down a series of after-the-fact confessions by Christine Keeler, the feminine lead in the 1963 Profumo scandal. Last September the council chided London's Daily Mirror for being "too definitive" in blaming a crew member for a plane crash while an investigation was just beginning. The Mirror apologized in print. When the council argued last January against further legal restrictions on news reporting, the government committee considering the proposed new rules decided that they were unnecessary.

Each year visiting journalists observe council procedures and return home both awed and puzzled. "It ought not to work," says Vincent Jones, former executive editor and vice president of the Gannett newspapers, "but somehow it does."

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