Media Law - Lecture 1

Unfortunately the first lecture in our series on Media Law did not go ahead as planned due to problems with room suitability. This initially worried me but I had done the reading and so wasn't entirely panicked. After the History and Context of Journalism lecture it was explained to us that a video version of our missing lecture would be on the Winchester Journalism website (see related links) for us to watch. These are the notes I made and my thoughts on what was said in the video.


Much like the first History and Context lecture, this was mostly an introduction to the course and what we would be studying. It also helped explain the importance of crime and court stories to journalists. Look on any news website and open any newspaper and there will be a crime story somewhere. In fact as I was writing this blog I had a quick check around the National Newspapers websites and found that crime or the court were somehow involved in the majority of stories, (for example, there was a story running on the Daily Telegraph website about the Police being given the right to strike under new Home Office proposals).


One of the sections of the course that interested me most was defamation and the three main defences journalists have against it. Firstly it interested me that almost all things that Journalists report could in some way be seen as defamation, not in the sense that we might understand fame today, but in the sense of taking away someones reputation. The example given here was of Wayne Rooney. It is possible to say that Wayne Rooney is not playing very well at the moment but this is defamation. Without the three main defences that Journalists have, (of which I will explore in more detail next), even the most innocuous of things could be construed as unfairly taking away someones reputation and defaming them. There are defences against this for Journalists as defaming someone could lead to the even more serious charge of libel. Firstly you have the defence of Justification, i.e. you can prove it. If the accusation is once again that Wayne Rooney is not playing very well or more specifically not scoring, the way to avoid the libel would be to prove this through factual evidence, proving that it is not just your own malice that lead you to the statement. This can be linked back to our other topic, The History and Context of Journalism where our study of Philosophy asks us to question everything we know in a search for the facts. The second defence is the similar defence of Comment. In other words, if it is just your opinion on a person and it really does just come from something that could be fact then as long as there is no malice, this could be your defence. Lastly and probably most importantly since it has its own lecture is the defence of Qualified Privilege. This is the legal right that Journalists have to report something from a court even if it may not be true. As this particular defence does have its own topic there will be more extensive notes on this to come.

Other important topics such as Confidentiality, Copyright, and Freedom of Information will be covered in later lectures and in my own notes more extensively but another thing that interested me was the topic on Investigative Journalism. It interested me mostly because it had reference to the Innocence Project which as a Journalism student I will become involved in in my third year. The Innocence project interests me because it seems to be the culmination of everything we will learn in our three years here. All the practical skills we pick up and the theory we learn over the coming weeks will really be building up to the point when we can do a serious piece of investigative journalism.


Finally an overview of the court system was given which of course we will go into more detail about in later lectures but I did find it interesting that even for the biggest crimes, the criminal still goes to the lowly magistrates court first. The magistrates court is the starting point for all crimes and are able to send the criminals for sentencing or to a higher court for trial depending on the plea of the accused. There are also two types of law, Civil law and Criminal law. Civil law deals with conflict between citizens so for example divorce or libel. The Diane Blood case mentioned in the video lecture is a good example of a civil court case. Often though it is the Criminal law that journalism focuses on because, rather cynically, it is often the more newsworthy of the two. As horrible as it seems, a murder case will always have a bigger audience than a divorce, (unless of course it is a high profile celebrity divorce).

As an indicator of how closely Journalism and Law are connected I will leave you with the opening statement from the lecture notes of Chris Horrie. "It is no coincidence that Fleet Street, the original physical location of the Journalism profession in the UK is a street running down from the High Court (The Royal Courts of Justice) to The Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court)".


I'm off to do the reading for next week now but I hope these notes and also my thoughts that I tried to get across were useful to anyone reading them. Feel free to leave comments on any of the points I made and I'll try to answer them as promptly and as well as I can with the limited knowledge I currently have on Law for Journalists.