by Brian CathcartOnly the Guardian among national newspapers has reported new opinion poll figures confirming that the public strongly supports the Leveson scheme for press self-regulation, as backed by Parliament. The poll also showed that British people overwhelmingly reject the idea that big newspaper publishers might continue to regulate their own affairs on their own terms – as they have announced they plan to do.

But besides the Guardian, so far every national paper seems to have either missed or deliberately ignored this development.

Contrast this with the coverage of something that newspaper proprietors wanted their readers to know about. Two weeks ago, when they unveiled their plan for a new regulator to be set up purely on their own terms, their editors thought this was a story worth making a fuss about.

Three papers in particular set out to puff this proposed new body, labelled the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). They were the Daily Mail, the Times and the Daily Telegraph – all of them represented on the powerful proprietors’ body, PressBoF.The Mail declared in a leading article that IPSO was ‘serious and constructive’, would have ‘real teeth’ and ‘would deliver all the Leveson Inquiry’s key recommendations’. The Telegraph insisted it would be ‘independent and robust’ and would ‘address all the failings of the old PCC’, while the Times hailed ‘a landmark in the history of British journalism’ and pronounced IPSO ‘a bold and full response to the proposals made by Lord Justice Leveson’.

So the owners of the Mail, Times and Telegraph are ready to use the leader columns of their papers to promote their own scheme to sidestep the Leveson recommendations, but it seems that they are not prepared to spare any news space to inform their readers of what the public thinks about this scheme.

This is consistent, of course, with their long history of attempting to hide important news from the readers. For example, none of these well-funded papers ever mounted any kind of investigation of phone hacking while that story dragged on between 2006 and 2011. Instead most of them participated in a collective press boycott of the subject, leaving it (again) to the Guardian to reveal the scale of the scandal.

These newspaper companies also failed to report the subsequent Leveson Inquiry with balance or fairness, and they have a particularly bad track record with the long sequence of opinion polls which show how out of tune with public opinion they are on this issue.

In case you missed it, here are the highlights of the latest poll, as summarised by the Media Standards Trust, which commissioned it.– By a factor of almost 4-1 (50% vs 13%) the public supports the Parliamentary Royal Charter over the draft charter put forward by the press.– 61% believe that newspaper publishers should accept the new system agreed by the three main parties and Parliament.– 68% would not have confidence in a system of press regulation established by the major newspaper publishers (up from 56% when the same question was last asked in May).– 82% think there is a risk that there would be a repeat of unethical and illegal practices if the system of press regulation proposed by newspapers went ahead (up from 73% in May).– 63% say either that implementation of the Leveson-based Royal Charter is overdue or that it should happen now. Only 16% support a delay over the summer for negotiations.– 59% of newspaper readers want the newspaper they read to join the new system of regulation and would be disappointed if it did not.

Brian Cathcart is director of Hacked Off.