27 Oct 11 | Uncategorized
Today’s interview with Jeremy Clarkson in the Daily Telegraph provides an interesting line on living with an injunction.
Clarkson had an injunction on stories detailing his relations with his ex-wife, Alexandra Hall.
They are incredibly expensive to maintain and there’s an assumption of guilt about which you can do nothing because I’m as bound by it as everybody else.
So you sit there with everyone and you go, huh, ex-wife, and you can’t say anything, so I just thought I wanted to get rid of it and it will save us a hell of a lot of heartache.
I must admit it’s something I’d never really thought about. Once you have an injunction concerning an area of your life, you are subject to it just as everyone else is, and have added a layer of censorship to something that probably already causes you considerable anguish.
29 Sep 11 | Index Index, minipost
Footballer Rio Ferdinand has lost his privacy case over a “kiss and tell” story.
Ferdinand was taking action for “misuse of private information” following an article in the Sunday Mirror newspaper in April 2010, in which Carly Storey detailed their 13-year relationship for a sum of £16,000. Mr Justice Nicol said that the “balancing exercise favours the defendant’s right of freedom of expression over the claimant’s right of privacy.”
MGN said it was in the public interest to run the story, following Ferdinand’s replacement of John Terry as England skipper after stories of Terry’s alleged affairs were revealed.
Index on Censorship news editor Padraig Reidy said the free speech group was “greatly heartened by the judge’s recognition of free expression in his ruling”.
“Kiss and tell stories can be controversial,” he said. “But this is a case where public interest can be argued. Ferdinand’s claim that he was ’embarrassed’ by the revelations is clearly not enough to restrict Ms Storey’s right to free speech”.
21 Sep 11 | Uncategorized
Sir Harry Evans deserves credit for organising this week’s debate about “the press we deserve” in central London . It was deeply depressing, however, to see a panel of the great and the good discussing the press they thought they deserved, with hardly a reference to the reading public and with no apparent awareness of the depth of failings in the (absent) tabloid press.
In a cloud of complacency, the systemic failings of the tabloids and of the Press Complaints Commission were lost altogether. Here, by way of reminder, are some of the problems that most of those present seemed happy to do nothing about.
– The shameful spectacle of mass, serial libel, followed by mass serial apologies and payout, followed by further mass, serial libel, The press did this to Robert Murat, to the McCanns, to Chris Jefferies in Bristol and in all likelihood we will see the same outcome in the case of the nurse Rebecca Leighton. Papers tell grotesque and damaging lies about people, pay up and then do it again (we even have a new courtroom ritual in which they all apologise together). Imagine these were railway accidents: would we allow train operators to pay modest fines after killing a few passengers, and then carry on as before? No, we would demand that they account for what had gone wrong, if necessary discipline those responsible, and improve their internal systems so it did not happen again. Nobody at all does that in the case of the tabloid press. They just go on defaming.
– The Mosley trial revealed the depths of dishonesty to which journalists can sink. The News of the World bullied, bribed, blackmailed, cheated and lied to get its story and its follow-ups, and then embellished what it had to the point where they bore no relation to the facts. The judge all but called the paper’s chief reporter a liar and a blackmailer in court, and yet that reporter was not sacked. After the paper was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine that it could laugh off, where was the regulator who would go in and ask what had gone wrong and what was being done to fix it? Nowhere.
– The sustained fantasy and dishonesty of the tabloid coverage of the Madeleine McCann affair. This went on for the best part of a year, with the PCC doing nothing at all, besides standing by and watching. It affected many more people than the McCanns; the public as a whole were lied to, to the point where a kind of hysteria was engendered. Many papers eventually paid damages, but does anyone doubt that something similar could happen again now?
– Phone hacking was illegal, and is a matter for the law. But the newsroom standards and ethics behind it are something different, and it would be a naive person who claimed that those exceptionally low standards prevailed only at the News of the World, or indeed that phone hacking only occurred at that paper. Baroness Buscombe’s claim that the PCC code of practice has driven up standards is utter nonsense. Moreover, the four-year cover-up by the News International management, which continued to employ and shelter hackers for years, demonstrates that these standards were not questioned by those in charge.
The sustained refusal of the tabloids to report the unfolding hacking scandal from 2009 until this summer was an abuse of editorial power and amounts to a cover-up in itself. Here was a scandal involving a huge international corporation, the prime minister, half a dozen former Cabinet ministers, two royal princes and more celebrities than you could shake a stick at, but tabloid editors systematically hid it from their readers because it was a scandal that embarrassed them too. In effect, they lied to their readers by implying the scandal was not happening. Not since the press concealed the brewing abdication crisis in 1936 have we seen such a collective violation of responsibility.
– Those are only the most gross and most recent offences, for which self-regulation had no remedy, nor even a response. It had no remedy because the PCC is a small-time complaints body and nothing more, and it was designed that way by editors and proprietors who did not have the slightest interest in raising or supporting ethical standards. Instead they wanted a fig-leaf behind which they could continue to behave exactly as they wished.
We are now witnessing another cover-up, just like News International’s. We are being told, by half of Harry Evans’s panellists and by the Daily Mail that there was indeed a problem in the tabloid press, but it was all down to one rogue newspaper. That rogue newspaper has been caught (admittedly a little late in the day, but that was the fault of the police) and dealt with. A message has been sent out to other newspapers which they will heed. Problem solved; let’s get back to normal.
That is a self-serving lie, just as it was when it was peddled by News International about Clive Goodman. There isn’t just one rogue newspaper, there are lots of them. The problem has not been dealt with at all. And if we go back to normal we are giving the libellers and blackmailers, the privacy invaders and the people-destroyers a licence to carry on as before. Who deserves that kind of press?
21 Sep 11 | Uncategorized
With this year’s slew of superinjunctions and the exposure of the phone hacking scandal, the fine lines between free speech, privacy, media regulation and public interest have never been so topical. On 20 September, lawyers Gideon Benaim and Hugh Tomlinson QC were joined by the Guardian’s David Leigh and Index editor Jo Glanville at the Law Society to pick apart this complex balance of principles and interests and evaluate the press’s role in upholding it.
It was first put to the panel whether the UK’s current privacy laws were working. Hugh Tomlinson QC argued they were, but he felt that rather than continuing to leave such decisions to judges, there needed to be legislation.
Leigh, meanwhile, was concerned about what he dubbed “the ballooning approach to privacy law” and its potentially restrictive effects on the journalism trade and free speech. Benaim, however, did not buy into what he termed “Doomsday” rhetoric — the assumption that investigative journalism and democracy were on the brink of tighter sanctions.
The subject of whether — and how — the press should be regulated in light of the recent phone hacking scandal that has marred Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation proved contentious. While Benaim was in favour of more controls, Leigh, Tomlinson and Glanville expressed concerns. “Regulation is attractive on the surface, but it cannot work because where journalism ends and blogging begins is not clear,” Tomlinson said.
He added, however, that he would like to see an “independent quasi-judicial regulatory body for the press” that mixes incentives and disincentives for reporters.
An audience member asked whether or not phone hacking would have occurred had regulations been in place and the reporters involved had received more rigorous journalistic training. For Leigh, this was a non-issue in News Corp’s case: “The tabloid culture of anything goes took over.” In this atmosphere, hacking unsurprisingly became acceptable.
Glanville agreed that controls may well have proved futile. “Even if regulations were in place, how would they have stopped hacking when even the police and the CPS ignored it?”
The panel added that the very reason phone hacking persisted was due to widespread concerns — and fear — over the power of Murdoch and his media empire. An issue raised, but left unanswered, was whether or not an independent regulator would have held back over such concerns.
Glanville closed the debate by noting how we are seeing a “massive cultural shift in how we treat our own privacy. This is mismatched with what is legally possible in terms of what is published.” In the short term, the upcoming Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions and the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking should provide a pause for thought and help refocus both British journalism and the public’s relationship with it.
Marta Cooper is an editorial assistant at Index on Censorship.
