I didn't blog last week and if by some strange quirk you are a regular follower of my blog then you may wonder why. Well the reasons are twofold; we put on our huge Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner Debate, which I took part in on the day of last week's lecture, and also the last two weeks of lectures were on court reporting so I felt it would be beneficial to just put my thoughts on both lectures in to one single, easy to digest blog.
When talking about court reporting, the most important thing to remember in my opinion is privilege. There are a few other situations where privilege comes into effect, the House of Commons for example, but it is most commonly used in court. What privilege allows journalists to do is write and publish or broadcast material which may be defamatory or untrue, simply because it is said in court. We have protection in reporting these things as long as, yep, you guessed it; we are FAST, ACCURATE and FAIR. People in court have what is known as ABSOLUTE privilege but journalists only have QUALIFIED privilege (QP) in reporting on them. Your reports need to be fair, accurate, without malice and on a matter of public concern for QP to come into effect. It is the same rule for reporting on the House of Commons where as long as your report follows the regulations for QP then you can report anything said by MPs in the Commons. This is the way that recently many injunctions and super injunctions have been broken with MPs naming and in some cases shaming those with injunctions so that the paper can break the story without fear of reprimand. Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming was famous around the time of the Ryan Giggs super injunction, calling injunctions an "affront to democracy," and breaking a few using his absolute privilege in parliament. You can read a comment piece here about how that process works and the worries parliament have about this kind of conduct and you can read about how the Ryan Giggs story broke using several links; here, here and here. It's interesting to see there one of my mini blogs from a long time ago with a mention of another sports star with a super injunction who I'm not sure we ever found out about.
Qualified privilege has two levels: with or 'subject to' explanation or contradiction and 'without' explanation or contradiction. It is also subject to the Reynolds Test, the 10 point test which I listed and went through in my last blog. There are a few other events covered by privilege, pressers and public meetings are covered but again, only if they follow the rules for obtaining QP. Written handouts are also covered according to the lecture. This is something I'd never heard before and it made me wonder whether that defence would also stretch to a press release. Say for example you receive a press release from an outspoken, right wing, extremist group about a demonstration and you report what they have to say. As long as you give a balanced report, giving the other side a chance to respond and that your report is accurate and without malice; would it be legally safe? I genuinely don't know so a little more research is needed and perhaps an update to this blog will be in order. Stay tuned. It is also worth thinking about the risks of live broadcast when it comes to privilege. What can you broadcast when you're filming something live which is protected by privilege? We had to deal with this ourselves recently with the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate mentioned above. We were streaming the event live to the world (although more likely a few people in Hampshire and my mum) and so anything the candidates said would be transmitted to the world whether it was defamatory or not. Was that safe legally? Well it was a public debate but it was up to us as to whether there was balance or not. Fortunately the candidates were very well behaved on that front and we were lucky but it is good to show we have thought about this kind of issue.
I'm planning to update this blog with a few more thoughts and examples but if you feel you haven't learnt enough about court reporting you can see my first year blog here and my trip to the court from around that time (don't worry, I wasn't IN court, just visiting) can be read here.
Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
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