Tag Archives: Simon Jenkins

SA president Zuma accepts damages from Guardian in libel case

South African president Jacob Zuma last week settled his libel case against the Guardian and accepted ‘substantial damages’ from the paper, according to Reuters.

Zuma began proceedings in March after publication of a piece by Simon Jenkins, which was subsequently removed from the Guardian website, suggested he was guilty of rape.

Zuma continued with a civil case against the Guardian newspaper, despite an apology run by the title in April.

The reference was the result of an editing error, the paper said in its apology – Zuma was acquitted of rape charges in 2006, it said.

But the apology was not deemed appropriate by Zuma’s lawyers. According to the Reuters’ report, the Guardian’s owners made an offer of damages in May, which was accepted by Zuma last week.

Update: Jacob Zuma still pursuing case against Guardian

Jacob Zuma is continuing his civil case against the Guardian newspaper, despite an apology run by the paper this week for an article about the South African presidential candidate.

The article by Simon Jenkins, which has been removed from the Guardian website, suggested he was guilty of rape.

The reference was the result of an editing error, the paper maintains – Zuma was acquitted of rape charges in 2006, it said in its apology.

After publication Zuma demanded an apology and legal proceedings against the paper for libel have commenced in the High Court, a release from Zuma’s legal firm Schillings said on Monday.

The paper’s statement on April 21 was ‘unacceptable to Mr Zuma’, a spokeswoman on behalf of Zuma told Journalism.co.uk.

“Mr Zuma’s civil claim for damages and an appropriate apology against The Guardian continues,” she said.

“Both legal teams for Mr Zuma and The Guardian are continuing their negotiations about the damages amount that will be payable and how an acceptable apology will be made.

“Should there not be an acceptable out of court resolution, the matter is likely to go to trial.”

A spokeswoman for the Guardian made no further comment beyond Tuesday’s published apology.

Comment: Treasury committee shoots the media messenger over UK banking crisis

Yesterday saw representatives from the UK’s financial journalism industry give evidence to a House of Commons Treasury Committee inquiry into the banking crisis.

So what conclusions were drawn about the media’s ‘role’ in the crisis?

A fairly resounding ‘it wasn’t our fault’ from the journalists gathered (Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, BBC business editor Robert Peston, Daily Mail city editor Alex Brummer, Sky News’ Jeff Randall and the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins):

  • The UK’s banks and economy, in particular Northern Rock, were headed for a crash anyhow and no amount of warning/doomsaying from the media would have changed this. No one – neither the media nor those in charge of the financial institutions were expecting the force of what was going to happen to the economy

While Simon Jenkins said in retrospect he ‘wouldn’t have done it or had it done differently’, some of yesterday’s session echoed Robert Peston’s comments to UCLAN’s Journalism Leaders Forum, when the BBC journalist said there were some lessons to learn from the media’s handling of the situation:

  • Alex Brummer said a lot of the reporting of the financial breakdown was handled by young, inexperienced journalists staffing finance desks, most of whom weren’t around in the last crisis. If you’ve only seen boom times it was even easier to take the press releases/briefings from businesses and financial orgs at face value and not question them, he said.
  • Business journalists are in competition with the richest organisations in the world, added Brummer, and city editors did not push hard enough to get negative stories about the economy higher up the news agenda during the boom period.
  • Jeff Randall agreed with Peston’s UCLAN comments, saying that it could be argued the public had been allowed to live in economic optimism for too long, fuelled by the media.
  • According to Lionel Barber, there’s no point hiding stories of the recession behind ‘happy talk’.
  • On the BBC’s coverage, Robert Peston said each of the stories about the banking crisis were published in the public interest; though Brummer said the public had been very ill-served by the media’s coverage of the economy and more must be done to deepen economic understanding.

An informative discussion with some of the leading journalists in the UK field, yet why had they been summoned in the first place?

Prompted via a Twitter chat with NYU professor Jay Rosen, shouldn’t we be asking who is saying the media is to blame for the banking crisis in the first place?

One question from the committee to Peston struck me as particularly misplaced in this respect, as he was asked what he thought about being a market force in his own right. In his own words, Peston is just a journalist reporting on the facts and information he receives.

Yes – there are lessons to be learned from looking at whether media coverage of the banking crisis indirectly added to public anxiety about the situation or contributed indirectly to already falling share prices.

But as Lionel Barber pointed out yesterday, it was never the media’s intention to break the banks, but simply to report on the situation. Peston’s stories, the man himself said, were verified reports from close contacts and sources and built on as much information as he could gather.

At the UCLAN event, Peston said the ‘primary responsibility for the global economic and banking crisis does not lie with the media’ – but why is the media having to defend itself. In a feisty exchange, Barber posed a similar question to the committee: why didn’t the government bail out Lehman Bros – this failure could be seen as escalating the crisis just as much as any media role.

It was joked that the only five journalists to have spotted the crisis ahead of time were sitting in the committee room – evidence that there were dissenting voices in a sea of stories about never-ending house price rises.

Evidence that this was an exercise in shooting the messenger

Lords review of media is in danger of achieving nothing

While yesterday’s meeting of the House of Lords Communications Committee was less of a nostalgia trip than last week’s session, it seems uncertain what value the evidence given can be to the Lords’ review of media ownership.

First up was Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). Having asked Meyer to explain what the PCC does – and test this out with a few case studies – the moment was ripe for some questions on how the PCC is coping with regulating newspapers online and their video content.

Unfortunately, no such probing was done – as with previous sessions of the committee, the internet was referred to briefly and then dismissed. The review is meant to investigate trends in the ‘provision of news’, so why is little mention of online media being made?

The evidence given last week, where ex-Times editor Simon Jenkins described blogs as ‘bar room chats’ despite being a contributing blogger himself to The Huffington Post, was a case in point example of the committee’s grasp of the digital aspect of the newspaper industry. Jenkins’ comments were met with agreeing nods and laughter and a rehashing of ex-editor’s anecdotes was quickly resumed by speaker and panel.

As a current editor, hearing Rebekah Wade’s evidence was more pertinent than reviewing days gone by with previous employees, who can only offer their perspective on a paper or proprietor with whom they no longer have a connection.

In between attacking the Daily Mail’s content and recycling paragraphs from his diary, Alistair Campbell did his best to point this out to the panel. They could ask him his opinions on specific events and people, but they would remain just that – opinions, he admitted, often based on the personal likes or dislikes that are part of everyone’s character.

When the review reaches a conclusion – and there’s still some time to go – the amount of real insights presented, as opposed to historical overview and personal reflection, are likely to be scarce if the committee’s questions and subjects continue looking backwards and not forwards.