On Thursday, we had out first lecture in media law with Ian Anderson. The lecture consisted of a basic overview of the English legal system and it’s importance to us as journalists. It had the feel of a revision lecture for me, having studied law for my undergraduate degree.
The main focus of the lecture detailed the problems that we face as journalists, including the various laws that make our job harder. Including that the defamation laws of this country are the strictest in the world.
Despite these draconian rules we do have the tradition of free press in this country. Lord Donaldson states in the Spycatcher case that a free press is an essential component in maintaining democracy and the "British way of life as we know it."
This is in direct contrast to somewhere like Iran, for example, where this week the blogger Hossein Derakhshan was sentenced to a 19-year jail term for commenting on political reform. The Times reports that Iran now has around 40 journalists in its jails, the worst record in the world. The Iranian regime argue that these innocent journalists are a threat to public security, and therefore a threat to the state.
Theoretically, this could occur in the UK. As journalists our right to freedom of expression is enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and since 1998 has been incorporated into English law via the Human Rights Act.
However, the second paragraph of Article 10 (freedom of expression) sets out a number of areas where this right can be withdrawn where “necessary in a democratic society.” These reasons include “interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety.” Other restrictions can occur when considering conflicts between the right to freedom of expression as a journalist, and the right to privacy and family life of those we report on.
Luckily, we have a number of other checks and balances in English law that protect the work of journalists, it is therefore very unlikely that a situation could arise in which a journalist was imprisoned. These include the rule against prior restraint, and rules governing the “public interest,” which we will learn about over the coming weeks.
Journalists find themselves in a unique and privileged position in that they are able to express their views (whether explicitly or implicitly) through discourse, and are able to influence the minds of the general public. Despite the UK's strict defamation laws, it is interesting that British tabloids continue to push the boundaries of acceptable journalism, sometimes seeming happy to fabricate or embellish scandals regarding politicians or celebrities, safe in the knowledge that any compensation payouts will pale in significance to the revenues generated by newspaper sales. However, as paper sales volumes fall due to the access of free information on the internet, I wonder if the tabloids will continue risk litigation by publishing defaming scandals, or if they will go to more extreme lengths to capture the evidence needed to satisfy their headlines, as was exemplified recently by the News of the World paying one of Ricky Hatton's 'close friends' to secretly video-record him appearing to ingest cocaine.
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