MPs signify well, not much, really, on Press Standards

February 25, 2010

The recommendations of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee’s report on Press Standards have been greeted with praise in various quarters, not least the media. No wonder, for its recommendations add up to precious little.

MPs called for a new requirement that journalists notify the subjects of their articles in advance to be enshrined in the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) Code. They added that failure to do so in advance of a critical article being published should exacerbate costs in the event that the subject of a story successfully sues for breach of privacy. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, save for the fact that newspapers routinely ignore the PCC Code for the simple reason that its sanctions are all but non-existent and, such as they are, have no fiscal effect whatsoever.

How, indeed, is it envisaged that costs will go up if this watered down ‘prior notice’ provision (aka, ‘Mosley’s law’) is not met? By statute? No, for the MPs reject the idea of a privacy law being on the statute books (they also, quite rightly, give the lie to the absurd idea that Mr Justice Eady single-handedly ‘created’ our law of privacy). How then? By way of an addendum to the toothless PPC Code? And what of English law’s time-honoured adherence to the rule against prior restraint?

The above is but one element of a less than rigorous analysis of contemporary media law by the MPs. Another comes in the quaint idea that the burden of proof, in libel, should be reversed in cases of ‘corporate defamation’ so that companies have to prove they have been wronged. What, then, of the company’s chairman, whose individual reputation is intricately bound up in his company’s? Will a different burden of proof apply to a libel action he chooses to bring?

More on this soon, not least the superficially laudable notion that success fees awarded to claimant lawyers should be cut from 100 per cent to 10 per cent (as the Ministry of Justice has recommended). Have the MPs forgotten that we’re dealing with lawyers here? A cut in success fees has a simple quid pro quo - a rise in hourly rates. What would be truly radical would be a cap on the level of recoverable costs at various stages of proceedings. But then again, many MPs were once, or still are, lawyers themselves, so perhaps this is too shocking a proposition.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.