Paul Martin, the British broadcast journalist detained in the Gaza strip on charges of espionage, has been released by Hamas, the BBC reports today.
Hamas, which runs the enclave, has not filed any charge against him in court but said it was deporting him because it “believed him to be guilty”.
Despite Mr Justice Eady’s little quips during his speech (about telling footballers apart in soft lighting, for example), the colour from last night’s speech at City University London came in the questions afterwards.
Heather Brooke proudly announced herself as a freedom of information campaigner and British-American. Whilst Eady professed himself an advocate of freedom of speech, his feelings about Americans had been less favourable – we often overlook the fact that we are not part of the United States, he jibed at one point.
When Eady finally located Brooke (“Sorry, the reason I was looking round the room was because I didn’t recognise you compared to the person who portrayed you on television”) he tackled her questions: why are super-injunctions not recorded publicly and what are the total libel costs that go through his court each year?
“Super-injunctions are something of an artificial construct, blown up by the media recently. I’d never heard the term till it was mentioned till a few months ago.
“I’m not conscious that I’ve ever granted one, though it’s conceivable I might have done.”
They were, on the whole, he claimed, used in celebrity blackmail cases to ensure the threatening party didn’t find out the nature of the injunction and run off to the newspapers.
“The trouble is when a judge grants an anonymous injunction, it’s recorded anonymously and you can’t find out the details.”
The only thing to be done, he said, is to invite judges over a period of time to list the number of the super injunctions they’ve granted, if they have done.
“One couldn’t break into the confidentiality of a particular case. I think you’d find it’s a tiny number. I might have done one or two in the past.”
On costs, he was equally unenlightening: solicitors come up with a fee he said, based on the number of hours. “Sometimes one suspects they may be over charging in the sense that more hours are spent handling documents than is strictly necessary, but it’s very difficult to establish that’s the case.”
While Eady had been to one or two training sessions with cost judges on keeping costs down, not much light had been thrown on the issue, he said. He had no statistics to offer: “Costs are huge, I’m sure of that”.
Scientific debate
On Simon Singh’s ongoing case, in which Eady ruled that Singh’s comments about the British Chiropractic Association were fact not comment (currently awaiting a Court of Appeal decision) he would not be drawn, following a question by Connie St Louis, who runs City University London’s new science journalism course.
“I don’t want to discuss a particular case. But the basic principle is pretty clear, in terms of scientific discussion and research, that there should be completely free and uninhibited communication between experts in the field and indeed the general public at large,” said Eady.
“The question arises whether or not, in a particular set of of circumstances, whether the boundary between comment and fact has been overstepped. That’s a very central issue in that case. I don’t want to get drawn into that because I’ve expressed my view in that case.”
“I don’t think there’s great danger for scientific investigation. Everyone accepts, I think, that freedom of communication is vital in that context.”
Libel tourism
On libel tourism,he was equally unconcerned, when asked a question by journalist James Ball.
“I would be interested to see the research on libel tourism, if there is any, because sitting where I do I don’t see an awful lot of it,” said Eady.
“By libel tourism, I think you mean people coming to this country with no connection to it, who have been libelled in it.”
If there is genuinely no connection between the claimant and the UK, then there is a mechanism to strike out the case, he said.
The facts are often exaggerated, he said, presumably in reference to the press accounts.
“Sometimes it’s said the person has no connection to this country, but in fact the person has strong business connections (….) As our law stands here, they’re entitled to sue in this country.”
No-one in the audience took up the Independent’s challenge to ask him about future plans, despite several dares via the Twitter conversation (which you can see at this link).
To the surprise of some, it was Mr Justice Eady who took the platform for a speech on freedom of expression in the context of human rights law last night, to mark the launch of City University London’s new centre for Law, Justice and Journalism.
The high court judge is known for his judgements that led to big media payouts to Max Mosley, Madonna and Tiger Woods for breaches of privacy, and for the many libel cases over which he has presided. In a speech in 2008, the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre said that Eady was bringing in a “privacy law by the back door.”
We have uploaded Eady’s speech in full, below:
Last Sunday, writer and author Zoe Margolis was shocked to discover that the headline on her own opinion piece about the portrayal of women in the media for the Independent on Sunday, wrongly described her as a prostitute.
The headline was changed for later editions of the paper. An online version of the headline has now been changed to ‘I’m a good-time girl who became an agony aunt’, with the same article. The original version remained live on the mobile site for some time, before being removed.
Margolis now intends to pursue legal action, her spokesperson confirmed to Journalism.co.uk.
“Zoe has never worked in the sex industry and has worked hard to establish her writing as something distinct to it.”
Margolis said: “I’m absolutely distraught by this damage to my reputation both professionally and personally. Unfortunately this situation just shows how much work still needs to be done to challenge the sexism of the media in their conflation of female sexual desire with the sex industry.”
Margolis, keeps a successful blog about her sex life, originally anonymously as Abby Lee, and then under her real name once she was exposed by the Sunday Times in 2006. Her second book was published this week.
Her spokesperson said that the incident had revealed an “undercurrent of sexism”. It illustrated the very point that Margolis was trying to make, she said: “that if you are a woman, writing about sex openly, it is very likely you will be labelled with negative terminology”.
“Zoe believes women are chastised or labelled for expressing their sexual desires and that this needs to be opposed.”
Twitter users following Margolis on Sunday were shocked by the headline, particularly ahead of a week used to mark women’s rights, International Women’s Day (IWD). Christchurch
“The eve of IWD & @girlonetrack is subject of vile SIndy h/lines for a positive piece on writing on sexuality & feminism,” tweeted @emmagillan.
The Independent on Sunday did not wish to comment at this stage.
Al Jazeera English’s Listening Post has an excellent film about the new Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) proposal, which, if successful, could make Iceland an investigative journalism haven.
In the Listening Post film, which also features Index on Censorship news editor Padraig Reidy, Wikileaks’ editor Julian Assange explains IMMI’s limits as well as its potential: “It’s important to remember that the IMMI appears to be a good bullet, but it’s not a magic bullet, so there will be many cases where there is brutal suppression of the press that IMMI doesn’t have substantial effect on.”
IMMI’s proponents hope new legislation will help change tough libel laws around the world, with a “ripple effect” in the EU and beyond.
A letter to the Financial Times signed by some of the highest digital figures in the UK challenges the House of Lords adoption of amendment 120A to the digital economy bill.
This clause, they argue, will lead to more cases where internet service providers (ISPs) block websites accused of illegally hosting copyrighted material – before being seen by a judge.
The writers, who include Tom Watson MP, Stephen Fry, the chief executive of Orange; the MD of Google UK, the chairman of the TalkTalk Group, BT Group’s chief executive and the MD of EBay, claim that freedom of speech will be threatened, without reducing copyright infringement.
[you will need to register or subscribe to view in full]
Taking the ‘show your process’ ethos seriously, the US-based non-profit investigative outlet ProPublica has released a recipe for one of its recent investigations, which examined how states oversaw the misconduct of medical professionals.
ProPublica was created two years ago to pursue stories that would spur change. As part of this mission, we make our finished work and its underlying data available to all. Other news organizations are free to republish stories posted on our site. Reporters across the country have used the data we have compiled on the stimulus to do local versions of these stories. And whenever possible, we post source documents for readers to view.
Now we are taking this principle a step further, giving away the recipe for what has been one of our most powerful reporting efforts to date. We are doing this because we believe there are many ways to prompt change through journalism.
TechCrunch has a summary of a presentation by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, on the decline of newspaper advertising revenues.
“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian. They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on.” The problem is that on the web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.
Presentation below:
News International is to pay out around £1 million in legal costs and personal payments in the latest phone hacking case, the Guardian reports. Publicist Max Clifford will now drop his legal action concerning the alleged interception of his voicemail.
The settlement means that there will now be no disclosure of court-ordered evidence which threatened to expose the involvement of the newspaper’s journalists in a range of illegal information-gathering by private investigators.
Last week’s lively ‘2010: the first new media election?’ debate at City University London provoked a fair bit of online comment, particularly as it coincided with the announcement of the rules for the televised leader debates. You can now watch the Media Society event online: