Nobody sensible wants to abolish libel law, to allow a free-for-all in which reputations are impugned without a right to redress. It’s about balance and proportion, says John Kampfner
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If it’s true that Avon and Somerset police excluded ITV News from its Joanna Yeates inquiry briefing today in response to criticisms on last night’s News at Ten, then the Dumb Cop of the Year award is sorted with only days of 2011 gone.
It is so obviously unacceptable for a public service such as the police to exclude representatives of a public service broadcaster that a demeaning apology cannot be far behind.
It’s the sort of crass news management I associate with the Nixon presidency in the 1970s, and the sort of behaviour we might expect from a spoiled and sulking schoolgirl.
Not, it should be said, that the general business of access to briefings, press conferences and interviews is remotely transparent, or managed in the interests of news consumers. Heavy-hitting interviewers such as Lynn Barber and Simon Hattenstone are used to being blacklisted by movie stars and movie studios, and PR agencies always have journalists they deal with and journalists they don’t.
To take a really big example of selection and exclusion in news delivery, the BBC and Sky are probably still cross that Prince William and Kate Middleton gave their engagement interview to ITV’s Tom Bradby, a reporter they apparently find sympathetic. Ideally, picking which reporter does which job is the editor’s job.
The police, with their often generously staffed PR departments, are not immune to the selection impulse, but in my experience it is normally possible for a reputable reporter, or one working for a reputable organisation, to gain access to police press conferences. Deliberate filtering on the grounds that you have a record of criticising the police is, I think, as unusual as it is indefensible.
The rules are different, of course, for other useful forms of access such as one-to-one interviews, off-the-record briefings and tip-offs. These depend on trust between officers and reporters, the kind of relationship that journalists always need to be be wary of.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the web’s power to drive social revolution is over-rated, but the Tunisian government still isn’t taking any chances. Its agents are hacking its opponents’ networks and sabotaging them, even as foreign hackers retaliate by doing the same to the state’s own sites. Rohan Jayasekera reports
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The dark forces of religious extremism have once again struck in Pakistan, with the assassination of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer.
Taseer was apparently killed by a guard, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. As is inevitable these days, a Facebook page has now been set up in support of the alleged assassin, stating: “We Support the action of Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri and want that Supreme Court of Pakistan take immediate action against his arrest and order to free him.”
Qadri is reported to have said he was motivated by Taseer’s stance against Pakistan’s rigid blasphemy laws. Blasphemy can carry the death sentence in Pakistan, though no one has yet been executed under the law.
The Washington Post’s Greg Linch has compiled several of Taseer’s anti-blasphemy law tweets here. Taseer also pledged support to Punjabi Christian woman Aasia Bibi, who was convicted of blasphemy late last year.
In an interview with Pakistan’s Newsline in December, Taseer was asked if he was worried about fatwas issued against him. He replied:
People also issued fatwas against Benazir Bhutto and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. They issued fatwas against basant. These are a bunch of self-appointed maulvis who no one takes seriously. The thing I find disturbing is that if you examine the cases of the hundreds tried under this law, you have to ask how many of them are well-to-do? How many businessmen? Why is it that only the poor and defenceless are targeted? How come over 50% of them are Christians when they form less than 2% of the country’s population. This points clearly to the fact that the law is misused to target minorities.