Tweeting in court

December 16, 2010
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Are there downsides to the decision by a district judge in the Julian Assange extradition hearing to allow tweeting from court? Or is this, as some observers maintain, an unequivocal victory for the principle of open justice?

We suspect there is some way to go before courtroom tweeting is embraced across the land. For starters, in this instance tweeting has been allowed by a magistrates’ court. The decisions of magistrates’ courts do not bind other courts, though they can be persuasive. However, the judge, Howard Riddle, undoubtedly had in mind the thoughts of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, in making his order:

How is the principle of open justice compatible with preventing an ongoing, live and text-based dialogue to the outside world from a courtroom? If a reporter or member of the public is permitted to write notes to himself or herself in court, and then ‘file them’ from a telephone outside the court, what is the qualitative difference if they are permitted to do so when sitting in court, say, by sending a email? If it is possible to file a story via email from a laptop in court, then why is Twitter any different? On the other hand, tape recordings are prohibited by statute. Why is Twitter in the form of text-based transmission of material from court any different?

Thus spoke Lord Judge in Belfast last month. Strong words, and laudable ones, too. But what of our learned friends, the libel lawyers? Do they see tweeting from court as a boon?

We asked two libel lawyers, one with a claimant practice, the other with a defendant clientele, for their thoughts. They spoke on condition of anonymity, and here’s what they said.

1. Claimant libel lawyer.

Tweeting from court will cause all manner of problems. How can a report of court proceedings be fair and accurate, as the law requires, in the space of 140 characters? What if a reporter, or member of the public, either doesn’t understand a reporting restriction or wilfully decides to ignore one, and tweets its content to the world at large? What if someone attaches a photograph of say, a rape victim, thereby breaching her right to anonymity? The danger of a trial having to be aborted because of a flagrant Twitter-inspired contempt of court is very real.

2. Defendant libel lawyer.

Given the current state of our media laws, tweeting from court will cause all manner of problems. How can a report of court proceedings be fair and accurate, as the law requires, in the space of 140 characters? What if a reporter, or member of the public, either doesn’t understand a reporting restriction or wilfully decides to ignore one, and tweets its content to the world at large? What if someone attaches a photograph of say, a rape victim, to a tweet, thereby breaching her right to anonymity? What if an accused’s previous convictions are tweeted to the globe? The danger of a trial having to be aborted because of a flagrant Twitter-generated contempt of court is very real. That said, our laws are arcane and absurd. They are due a fundamental overhaul. Open justice will not be compromised by Twitter; it will be stymied by our ongoing refusal to reform the libel laws.

Interestingly, despite this divergence, our lawyers agreed on one thing. Tweeting from court was sure to open up a legal minefield, the arguments over which would enrich them both for many years to come.

Image courtesy of Online Journalism News.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.