Privilege- Law lecture 7

After discussing in the lecture this week I am now going to change the style in which I write my media law posts; rather than just repeating my notes from the lecture, which is what I was doing to an extent, I am now going to pick out certain points from the lecture which I found interesting and then relate them to cases which are going on at the moment and discuss how they interest me.

So the lecture this week was on Privilege which I will give a quick definition of;

Privilege is the protection given to journalists,to write or broadcast material which may be defamatory or untrue, from being sued. This is because it is being said in a public meeting or press conference; known as qualified privilege or the journalist is reporting what is being said in court or Parliament; this branch is known as absolute privilege.

There were a couple of examples used in the lecture which I found interesting; first was a very recent example that was reported in WINOL special last week when we hosted and produced the Hampshire police commissioner debate. In this debate, which counts as a public meeting as it was in front of a lecture theater which was sold out with local people, a few statements which could have been defamatory were mentioned about the Police in general and the way that they record crime. However during the live broadcast this couldn't have been avoided, but when the edited version was put onto the website it was still left in. This is because under qualified privilege we are allowed to record what has been said in a public meeting as long as we are

- Fast: the edited broadcast was put onto the WINOL website the day after the event itself.
-Fair- During the debate the other candidates had the right to reply and there were questions asked by the public throughout the meeting.
-Accurate- We reported exactly what was said and in the context it was said; nothing was changed or edited out.
- Without malice: There was no malice with any of the candidates.

Therefore by following these rules we were safe to broadcast exactly what was said in the meeting without the fear or a lawsuit.

The other section of privilege is the side that I personally find more interesting; absolute privilege. It allows journalists to report freely what is said in court and parliament to give a fair and accurate account of what was said and done. I think that it extremely important to firstly allow journalists into both court and parliament to ensure fairness and to avoid corruption. As I am currently looking into a case with the Innocence project as my final year project; ensuring fairness in a trial is something that is very relevant to me as the project has allowed me to see the affects of a miscarriage of justice. I would like to think that having journalists in court and parliament to report exactly what happens through absolute privilege ensures some sort of fairness and a better chance that there will not be a miscarriage of justice.

For the journalist I feel that there are greater risks with absolute privilege and reporting from court which we went through last week in the court reporting law session as the journalist has to ensure that they are only reporting the bare minimum facts that have been presented in court and ensure that it in understood that the trail is continuing. Any facts that are incorrect or by reporting on facts of  a case that is active could be seen as contempt of court and could result in a prison sentence for the journalist. Therefore it absolute privilege may ensure some fairness but can also be a danger to the journalist. Whereas as long as you are  fast, fair, accurate, and without malice when using qualified privilege then you cannot be sued.