The Guardian has won its appeal against an Iraqi court ruling which found the paper had defamed the country’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
The article in question, written by the Guardian’s award-winning Iraq correspondent, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, described fears inside Iraq that the prime minister was ruling in an increasingly autocratic manner. It reported the views of three intelligence officers, and a range of others, who commented on the nature of al-Maliki’s rule.
The Guardian was forced to publish an embarrassing clarification on Tuesday after an article in its Comment is Free section heavily criticised WikiLeaks for publishing a US embassy cable that was put in the public domain by the newspaper.
The 2009 cable shows that the prime minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai met with American and European ambassadors, whose countries had imposed travel sanctions and asset freezes on the country’s president Robert Mugabe and his top political lieutenants, and private agreed with them that the sanctions should remain in place.
Tsvangirai’s private discussions over the sanctions could leave him open to being charged with treason and, if convicted, sentenced to death.
The original Guardian article, written by former Republican National Committee communications manager James Richardson, claims that: “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder, upending the precarious balance of power in a fragile African state and signing the death warrant of its pro-western premier.”
But the Guardian was forced to later admit that the cable “was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not, as originally implied, by WikiLeaks”.
The headline of the article has been amended from “WikiLeaks’ collateral damage in Zimbabwe” to “US cable leaks’ collateral damage in Zimbabwe” and the image caption has also been amended.
But the main body of the article still includes numerous strong criticisms of WikiLeaks over the publication:
And so, where Mugabe’s strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed …
Before more political carnage is wrought and more blood spilled – in Africa and elsewhere, with special concern for those US-sympathising Afghans fingered in its last war document dump – WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.
Read the full Guardian article on Comment is Free at this link.
Update: Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz has published a blog post today explaining the error.
Some critics saw malice in the publication of the Richardson piece in the first place: why would the Guardian point the finger at WikiLeaks knowing it had published the cable? In fact, neither Richardson, a first-time contributor to our comment website, nor the US-based editor who handled it, were aware of the somewhat complicated process through which (most) cables were published. The piece was posted on the bank holiday after Christmas. The Guardian’s WikiLeaks editing team was not around. They were taking a well-earned break after months of working on the documents.
Sky News blogger Mark Kleinman reports today that Trinity Mirror made a secret merger approach to Mecom, one of Europe’s biggest regional newspaper publishers.
According to the Sky News report, Trinity Mirror, which publishes the Daily Mirror and around 150 regional titles in the UK, approached Mecom with an all-share merger offer in November but was rebuffed.
A spokesman for Trinity Mirror told Journalism.co.uk today that it doesn’t comment on market speculation.
Mecom has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Peter Noorlander of the Media Legal Defence Initiative has a post up on Index on Censorship warning that the European Court of Human Rights must reject Max Mosley’s prior notification action or risk grave consequences for the free media.
Such a rule would be disastrous for investigative reporting of all kinds — by the media as well as by NGOs. It would mean that a local paper that has been leaked documents showing corruption in the local council, for example, would be forced to notify those named in the story. The subjects would without doubt take out an injunction, probably on grounds of breach of confidence, and the story could not be published for months…
On the anniversary of last year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Michael Morisy takes a look at the media response to the crisis and some of the tools at its centre, including radio, Ushahidi’s mapping platform and crowdsourcing.
Critical to parsing through all the data were centers far outside of Haiti, like one group in Boston that helped geolocate emergency texts, information that was then passed along to relief workers on location. Groups of Haitian expatriates helped translate the flood of data from Creole, French, and Spanish into English, passing it along to the most appropriate aid organizations as well as the U.S. Marines, who often served as the basis for search-and-rescue missions.
In Haiti, the report found the use crowdsourced emergency information had hit a turning point, helping inform real-time decision-making.
Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.
Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.
Students can now create their own profiles on Journalisted.com
The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is now available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk
For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe
Xan Rice – 6 articles (The Guardian), Tristan McConnell – 5 articles (The Times), Mike Pflanz – 5 articles (Telegraph), Katrina Manson – 4 articles (Financial Times)
Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog has an interesting look at user-generated content and comment moderation, and the stories they can produce.
Bradshaw looks specifically at Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, which has been subject to strict moderation in the wake of the assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He points out that the decisions to remove certain comments and let others stand can be seen as representative of the page owner’s stance and could potentially give rise to a story.
Bradshaw also warns that trawling through comment threads on political pages is not the same as treading the streets. What you see there is not unadulterated content, it is closer to carefully edited campaign material.
Worth reading in full.
Full post on the Online Journalism Blog at this link.
Lost Remote has a post on another media issue to emerge from the Giffords shooting: the spreading of inaccurate claims on Twitter that Giffords had died, and subsequent removal of tweets by news organisations.
Some nifty advice from Media Wales online communities editor Ed Walker, who has a blog post up on using cached Google pages to dig up deleted information. Walker was trying to find out who had been staying at a Cardiff hotel during an outbreak of the norovirus.
Who were these 100 people? What was it like having the bug? It was a Friday afternoon when this broke and with despair we called the hotel but got nothing. The council would only confirm the dates when it happened and how many people were being treated. So, I pulled out my Google search terms and set about finding out who could have contracted the norovirus.
Paul Bradshaw’s Hyperlocal Voices series takes a look at the SE1 site this week. The site has been running for 12 years and boasts half a million visits every month. Well worth a read for anyone in the business of hyperlocal journalism.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a community newspaper called ‘SE1’ but that had died out, and our neighbourhood was just a small part of the coverage areas of the established local papers (South London Press and Southwark News).
We saw that there was a need for high quality local news and information and decided that together we could produce something worthwhile.
The UK media has come in for a fair amount of criticism over the past few days for its coverage of Chris Jefferies, who was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Joanna Yeates but later released without charge.
In a post for Index on Censorship, published yesterday, Kingston University journalism professor Brian Cathcart analyses the deficiencies of England’s contempt of court laws that allow news organisations to go unpunished for what he calls the “monstering” of suspects.
Sometimes, as in the case of Jefferies, the attorney general publicly draws editors’ attention to the Contempt of Court Act of 1981, but it never makes any difference. They know and he knows that that law, supposedly intended to protect juries from improper influence, contains a loophole big enough to render it meaningless.
To convict a paper of contempt in such a case the Crown would have to prove there had been a “substantial” risk of “serious” prejudice. This, successive attorneys general have decided, is both unmeasurable and unprovable, which means it is also unenforceable. It follows that reporting of suspects around the time of arrest is unfettered.
Full post on Index on Censorship at this link.
Related content elsewhere
David Banksy: Molecular chemistry, contempt of court and the reporting of the Joanna Yeates case