Tag Archives: media law

May 12, 2012 · 8:21 am

Blurred lines for journalists and social media editors: Are you personally liable for an error?

A short section of my new book – Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued – has the heading ‘Who carries the can?’.

There, I write:

“Most bloggers cherish their independence, but this comes at a price. If you are the sole publisher of your material, then prosecutors and litigants will come looking for you personally. If you write for a larger organisation you share that responsibility with your employer or client. A litigant can still sue you as the writer, but they might choose to target your wealthier publisher – particularly if you are an impoverished freelancing blogger.

“In the 20^th century, large media organisations would usually pay the legal costs and damages awards against their journalists if they were sued and give them the services of their in-house counsel to guide them through any civil or criminal actions. Most of the so-called ‘legacy media’ still do that today, so if you are a mainstream reporter or columnist thinking of going solo with your blog you might weigh this up first. Another advantage of writing for a large media group is that your work will be checked by editors with some legal knowledge and perhaps even vetted by the company’s lawyers before being published. Either way, you might investigate insuring yourself against civil damages, although even in countries where this is available premiums are rising with each new Internet lawsuit. Another option is to scout for liability insurance policies offered by authors’ and bloggers’ associations. Search to check your options.”

The issue has come into sharp focus with journalists’ own tweeting under their personal handles in recent times. My recent piece in The Australian, reproduced below, looked at the question of journalists’ standards of independence and fairness on Twitter compared with the expectations placed upon them in their ‘day jobs’.

Organisations have started to develop social media policies for their reporters’ and social media editors’ use. But a huge grey area is the question of personal liability for individuals.

If a journalist (or any other employee, for that matter) claims in their Twitter profile that the views expressed are private not those of their employer (a standard disclaimer) where does that place them if someone sues them personally over their tweets?

It would take a particularly generous proprietor to cover the legal expenses of their employee who has distanced their private comments so clearly from their work role. It would likely leave them high and dry, with their own house and savings on the line, defending a legal action over a tweet, blog or other posting.

Despite my long experience as a journalist and academic, I made a serious error in this very story commissioned by The Australian. It was only noticed by an astute sub-editor (copy editor) at the eleventh hour – saving the newspaper and myself significant embarrassment at the very least. Thank God for subs!

But the fact is that our private blogs and tweets do not have the expert eye of a copy editor scanning them pre-publication – which can leave us personally liable for our words.

That’s something worth pondering very carefully before we press that ‘Send’ button.

———

Media twitters as Murdoch fronts Leveson

The Weekend Australian, April 28, 2012, p. 12

MARK PEARSON

THERE was a virtual sideshow alley to the circus of Rupert Murdoch’s appearance at the Leveson media inquiry in London – coverage of the event on Twitter.
The topic #rupertmurdoch trended briefly at 7th place worldwide on the social media network, remarkable given discussion was also running at #leveson, #NOTW and #hacking.
It augurs well for a future for journalism that the appearance of an important public figure at a judicial inquiry could hold its own in the Twittersphere with the rapper 2 Chainz, a reality program on teenage pregnancy and the hashtag #APictureOfMeWhenIWas.
The Twitter feed offered a warts-and-all view of the medium as a source of information and informed opinion on news and current affairs.
It also raises issues of relevance to the self-regulation of journalists’ ethical behaviour when democratic governments are proposing statutory media controls in the converged environment.
Frequent Twitter users are accustomed to the extremities of opinion expressed in 140 characters on controversial issues.
The very “social” nature of the medium means that the streaming commentary is not dissimilar to what you would hear from a crowd gathered around a pub television watching a major sports event or a breaking news event.
You get a smorgasbord of views, quips, snide remarks, venom, puns, one-liners and references to a whole lot more, often in the form of links or photos.
With retweets you can then get the “Chinese whispers” effect, as facts are massaged or adapted to fit the character count down the grapevine.
Journalists are supposed to offer audiences some meaning in the midst of this mess.
For journalism and media organisations to stand out from the crowd they need to be the source of reliable, verified and concise information and opinion based on proven facts – something we used to call “truth”.
This week’s coverage of the Murdoch appearance demonstrated that some prominent journalists seem to have formed the view that Twitter is so different a medium that they have licence to ignore some of the foundation stones of their ethical codes.
Murdoch’s appearance elicited a blood sports style of sarcasm from critics from rival organisations, most notably at the ABC and Crikey.
Crikey’s Stephen Mayne might argue that readers would expect his Twitter feed to reflect his years of confronting Murdoch at News Corporation annual general meetings. Fair enough.
But does that excuse his tweet suggesting counsel assisting Leveson ask Murdoch about his marriages and fidelity “to test whether he really agrees that proprietors deserve extra scrutiny”?
Surely it was that kind of tabloid privacy intrusion that prompted the whole sorry saga. Which was Mayne’s point, I guess, in “an eye for an eye” kind of way.
Of course, News Limited journalists are not ethical saints in their use of Twitter, but on this issue they were in defensive mode.
Many prominent News columnists do not have active Twitter accounts, but even The Australian’s Media team chose not to engage on this important international media issue.
The Daily Telegraph’s Joe Hildebrand showed that, in the Twittersphere, sarcasm is often the preferred line of defence: “Can’t wait until Rupert Murdoch resumes speaking at the Leveson inquiry. I haven’t known what to write for 10 minutes.”
News journalists can hardly look to their boss for leadership in seeking to be unbiased in their Twitter commentary.
Murdoch himself posted to his @rupertmurdoch handle on March 30: “Proof you can’t trust anything in Australian Fairfax papers, unless you are just another crazy.”
Amid the snipes and counterattacks there is a whole lot of banter too – journalists doing the virtual equivalent of talking in the pub after work.
It might be gratifying, clubby and intellectually stimulating, but is a very public media space the place to be doing it?
What message does this send the audiences who follow these journalists on Twitter because of their connection to their respective masthead?
Most offer the standard “views expressed here are my own” rider on their Twitter profiles.
But is that really enough, when beside that they trumpet their journalistic position and employer organisation?
It is symptomatic of a broader problem of corporate social media risk exposure that has triggered an industry of social media policy writing, in the wake of the harsh lessons for McDonald’s and Qantas when hostile customers converted their promotional hashtags to #bashtags in public relations disasters.
But in journalism it’s more complex, because reporters are encouraged to use social media for establishing and maintaining contacts, sourcing stories and engaging with their audiences.
Journalism should be all about transparency, so many would argue it does no harm for readers to know what a reporter really thinks about an issue, particularly in a converged postmodern world where objectivity is supposedly dead.
It might well be, but the ethical codes still speak of fairness, accuracy and respect for the rights of others.
And those very codes are meant to be followed by journalists and their organisations in their mainstream reporting.
Sadly, they might soon face a statutory tribunal and penalties for their unethical actions.
They can’t have it both ways. News organisations cannot sell themselves to readers as impartial, authoritative sources of news and informed commentary when on Twitter their journalists are either breaking their codes or staying mute about an important international news event involving their boss.
The citizenry deserves better if we are to rebuild its confidence in journalism as an important democratic institution.

© Mark Pearson 2012

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.

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May 5, 2012 · 5:32 pm

Any Australian #privacy tort must feature strong free expression protections

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance has released its latest annual press freedom report – Kicking at the Cornerstone of Democracy – with some excellent articles covering the gamut of media law and censorship issues in Australia.

It is essential reading for journalists, media lawyers and students – updating the material covered in their media law textbooks in an accessible journalistic style.

My article is on privacy law, and I reproduce it here in its extended, unedited form for the benefit of my blog followers:

———

Privacy On Parade

The right to privacy is a relatively modern international legal concept. Until the late 19^th century gentlemen used the strictly codified practice of the duel to settle their disputes over embarrassing exposés of their private lives.

The first celebrity to convert his personal affront into a legal suit was the author of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas père, who in 1867 sued a photographer who had attempted to register copyright in some steamy images of Dumas with the ‘Paris Hilton’ of the day – 32-year-old actress Adah Isaacs Menken.

The court held his property rights had not been infringed but that he did have a right to privacy and that the photographer had infringed it.

Across the Atlantic in 1890 the top US jurist Samuel D. Warren teamed with future Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis to write the seminal Harvard Law Review article ‘The Right to Privacy’ after a newspaper printed the guest list of a party held at the Warren family mansion in Boston.

Warren and Brandeis wrote: “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.”

Thus celebrities, lawyers, paparazzi and the gossip media were there at the birth of the right to privacy – and the same players occupy that terrain today.

While both privacy and free expression are recognised in many national constitutions and in international human rights treaties, Australia is rare among Western democracies in that it has no constitutional or Bill of Rights protection for either.

That distinguishes us from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand which all have constitutional or rights charter requirements that proposed laws must be considered for their potential impact on free expression.

It is one of the main reasons for the complex array of legislation, court decisions and industry codes of practice limiting Australian journalists’ intrusion into the affairs of their fellow citizens.

The myriad of laws of defamation, trespass, data protection, surveillance, confidentiality, discrimination, consumer law, stalking, court publishing restrictions, suppression orders and copyright all have a privacy dimension. The Privacy Act controls the collection and storage of private information by corporations and government.

There are very few situations of media intrusion into privacy not covered by one of these laws or by the framework of codes of ethics and practice controlling journalists’ professional activities.

Proposals to replace the self-regulatory and co-regulatory ethics systems with a statutory news media regulator would add yet another layer to the regulation of privacy intrusions.

The crux of the proposed ‘statutory cause of action for a serious invasion of privacy’ is whether a citizen should have the right to sue over a privacy breach and receive either an award of damages or an injunction to stop publication.

Over the ditch, Kiwi journalists now have to navigate a judge-made right to privacy, developed interestingly from a celebrity suit in which the plaintiffs lost the case.

Mike and Marie Hosking were New Zealand media personalities who had adopted twins and later separated. They asked for their privacy, but a magazine photographer snapped the mother walking the twins in their stroller in a public place. They sued, claiming breach of privacy. The NZ Court of Appeal invented a new action for breach of privacy, but held it did not apply in that particular case. The Kiwi privacy invasion test requires “the existence of facts in respect of which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy” and that “publicity given to those private facts that would be considered highly offensive to an objective reasonable person”.

But this is set against the backdrop of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act which protects free expression.

Australia’s High Court famously left the door open for a possible privacy tort in the ABC v. Lenah Game Meats case in 2001, when animal liberationists had secretly filmed the slaughter of possums in an abattoir in Tasmania and the ABC wanted to broadcast the footage – the fruits of the trespass.

It is hard to quarantine this latest push by the Federal Government from the News of the World scandal in the UK and the Greens-championed Finkelstein inquiry into media regulation.

The government had effectively sat upon the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposal for the statutory cause of action for three years before progressing the matter with its Issues Paper last September in the wake of the phone hacking revelations from London.

Few journalists or their media organisations object to the notion of their fellow citizens’ embarrassing private information being kept secret.

However, it is in the midst of a breaking story like that involving collar bomb extortion victim Madeleine Pulver, a celebrity scoop like the Sonny Bill Williams toilet tryst images or the case of the fake Pauline Hanson photos that genuine ‘public interest’ gives way to audience gratification and the resulting boost to circulation, ratings or page views.

Free expression is already greatly diminished by this mire of privacy-related laws and regulations without adding a new statutory cause of action for privacy.

But if this latest proposal is advanced further, journalists should insist upon:

– a free expression and public interest defence reinforced in the strongest possible terms;

– removal of the existing laws it would duplicate; and

– strong ‘offer of amends’ defence like that now operating in defamation law and alternative dispute resolution provisions to deter celebrity gold diggers.

Short of a bill of rights enshrining freedom of the press and free expression, these demands amount to the minimum the news media deserve in a Western democracy.

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April 15, 2012 · 2:11 pm

Don’t shoot the messenger #RSF #UN #censorship

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

Don’t shoot the messenger

(My closing address to Brisbane Model United Nations conference, Queensland Conservatorium, 15 April 2012)

———

What a wonderful concept this is – students from a diverse array of disciplines having the opportunity to put your knowledge and abilities into practice over three days in this model United Nations setting – and to gain so much more understanding and skills through the process.

I have no doubt many of you will look back on this conference as an important landmark in your lives and will take many of the lessons and friendships into successful careers, wherever they may lead you.

You have applied your minds to important and innovative challenges – crimes against humanity, a right to death, impoverished nations, new weaponry, space rights, the economics of polio and the international criminal court. Journalists from the international press gallery have reported on proceedings while representatives of non-government organisations have attempted to negotiate suitable outcomes for their constituencies.

My address to you relates to these latter elements and how one Paris-based NGO – Reporters Without Borders – has worked since 1985 to defend the interests of journalists and cyber-dissidents attempting to report on these kinds of issues internationally and to promote the global right to free expression.

Reporters Without Borders is registered in France as a non-profit organisation and has consultant status at the United Nations.

For the past several years I have been Australian correspondent for RSF, filing regular reports to my colleagues in Paris on the threats to media freedom in this liberal Western democracy.

Sadly, I have had much to report because there has been a legislative creep factor at play which means that politicians will pay lipservice to free expression and media freedom yet continue to propose and pass laws that impinge upon that core democratic value.

Australia is rare among liberal democracies in that we do not have free expression explicitly enshrined in our Constitution and we lack the bills and charters of rights of comparable nations where it stands alongside other important human rights.

Of course we are not among the worst offenders.

But it made news recently when RSF demoted Australia from 18^th to 30^th position in its World Press Freedom Index among the 179 countries ranked.

First to the latest ranking: what factors contributed to Australia’s decline in its media freedom status since 2010? For a start, the fact that there were five simultaneous government inquiries into news media regulation at the time it was being compiled sent a message to the international community that, for a Western democratic nation, the Australian government and its agencies were entertaining tougher regulatory measures.

They included the Convergence Review, its subsidiary Independent Media Inquiry, the National Classification Scheme Review, the Commonwealth Government’s Privacy Issues Paper and the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s review of privacy guidelines for broadcasters.

Between them they raised the prospects of new controls on print, broadcast and online media; a new tort of privacy; tough new classification systems across media; and the conversion of some self-regulatory bodies to regulatory status.

RSF was specially concerned by suggestions at the hearings of the Independent Media Inquiry that journalists should be licensed and at that inquiry’s recommendation that a government-funded statutory regulator be established, with ultimate powers to refer editors to courts on contempt charges with potential fines and jail terms as punishment.

The trial of Victorian police officer Simon Artz for alleged leaks to The Australian newspaper about a counter- terrorism operation raised several media freedom issues, with Crikey senior journalist Andrew Crook allegedly breaching a suppression order by revealing the name of a former member of Victoria’s Special Intelligence Group involved in the hearing; warnings over Crikey journalist Margaret Simons’ live tweeting from the hearing; and The Australian’s Cameron Stewart being ordered to reveal his sources.

Victorian Police launched an investigation into an alleged hacking of an ALP electoral database by four journalists at The Age, including editor-in-chief Paul Ramage.

Government control over media access to detention centres prompted condemnation from the journalists’ union and RSF issued a release. The Department of Immigration introduced new guidelines to restrict reporting of, and access to, detention centres.

The Federal Court’s ruling that hate speech laws should trump free expression was of concern when a judge ruled Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt breached the Racial Discrimination Act in his criticisms of fair-skinned indigenous people.

Senior Fairfax executives were summonsed by the Police Integrity Commission to produce documents revealing sources in September in relation to articles by Herald journalists Linton Besser and Dylan Welch about the NSW Crime Commission.

Fairfax’s deputy technology editor Ben Grubb, 20, was arrested after reporting on a conference presenter’s alleged hacking at the AUSCert IT security conference.

RSF has also expressed concern for some years at the Federal Government’s determination to introduce an Internet filtering scheme.

RSF does not claim its index is a precise scientific measure. It could never be, given the enormous variables at stake, and has to rely on an element of expert qualitative judgment when making the final determinations of a country’s comparative ranking.

The process centres upon a questionnaire sent to partner organisations (18 freedom of expression groups in all five continents), to its network of 150 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.

The questionnaire features 44 main criteria indicative of the state of press freedom. It asks questions about every kind of violation directly affecting journalists and ‘netizens’ (including murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment).

It also measures the level of self-censorship in each country and the ability of the media to investigate and criticise.

Many countries’ rankings change from year to year but there is little movement at the extremes. Europe typically dominates the top 10, with Scandinavian countries like Norway and Finland among the top few, while the usual suspects feature at the other end of the scale: Iran, North Korea, Vietnam, China, Burma, Turkmenistan and Eritrea.

Free expression is not absolute, although its opposite, censorship, can be.

The major difference is in what the lawyers call ‘prior restraint’ – censorship before publication or broadcast. Those at the top of the scale have high levels of transparency and welcome media scrutiny of government processes, with a minimum of licensing, suppression and no physical intimidation of journalists. At the other extreme journalists are murdered, jailed and tortured, publishers of all kinds require a licence, and Internet access is restricted.

Over the past five years, Australia’s ranking has fluctuated between 16 and 30 of the 179 countries surveyed, typically ahead of the United States but well behind New Zealand in the level of media freedom.

Governments might take issue with the methodology and dispute their nations’ rankings, but the index draws on the energies of experts throughout the world and in Paris and is thus taken seriously in international circles.

It serves to raise awareness about media and Internet freedom, which cannot be a bad thing in an age of government spin.

And there are almost 150 nations RSF ranks lower than Australia in its index.

I devote a chapter of my recent book – Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued – to the difficulties you can encounter when writing about them online.

There I explain that the only country outside the US, Europe and the Commonwealth to rank highly in free expression rankings over recent years has been Japan. Despite having regional charters of human rights, several countries in Africa and Central and South America have shown little respect for Internet or media freedom.

The so-called ‘Twitter revolutions’ throughout the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011 showed how social media could help accelerate movements for better human rights.

But despite the impact of ‘people power’ in such countries there is still evidence of censorship and intimidation throughout much of the world. No regional human rights convention exists in Asia and the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission provides an ongoing chronicle of abuses, many involving the gagging of journalists, bloggers and dissidents.

The countries of the world with the highest level of censorship maintain tight control over expression and take firm action against online writers who use the Internet to question their authority.

These are places where you get labelled a ‘dissident’ and face jail if you blog or tweet to express your political views. Reporters Without Borders has released a list of enemies of free Internet speech: Bahrain, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. They are countries where bloggers, journalists and other ‘dissidents’ have been imprisoned or tortured for daring to write what they think or for encouraging others to do so.

Governments in such countries block access to full Internet use via systems like the so-called ‘Great Firewall of China’. While the Internet is seen by many as a wonderful new tool for democracy, there is a downside to the use of social media and blogs if your nation does not value free speech: your Web-based activities can be monitored quite easily by security forces and your careless use of such media can leave you dangerously exposed.

Blogger Nay Phone Latt was only released from a Burmese jail in January after reporting in his blog about the unfolding demonstrations against the government in Rangoon in 2007 and for describing how hard it was for young Burmese to express themselves freely.

Chinese blogger Ran Yunfei was among several arrested in a crackdown on dissent by government authorities in 2011. He spent six months in prison and was released on the condition he did not speak with the media or continue to share his political views online.

Many more languish in jails throughout such countries today for expressing themselves freely.

Repressive regimes also engage in modern age propaganda techniques such as cyber-attacks on target websites and on ‘phishing’ to steal dissident password information to access their email addresses and other contact details. The US has declared cyberspace the new ‘fifth sphere of war’ after land, air, sea and space.

Some countries have laws making it an offence to insult the royal family, with Thailand, a nation with an otherwise free and vibrant media, the most active in its use. It is called ‘lèse majesté’, and in that country it can carry a maximum jail term of 15 years.

Authorities have charged as many as 100 people a year with the offence in recent years, with several unsuspecting foreigners including an Australian jailed because of their published criticisms of royalty. Many other nations have lèse majesté laws or similar.

As you enter your international careers, you need to be concerned for both your own safety and the liberty of others in your blogging and social media activity.

In my book I explain how you need to be extra careful that your words or images do not implicate someone in a country with a stronger censorship regime than your own. Remember, your blogs, tweets and Facebook pages can be accessed by authorities in other countries, even if they have an Internet firewall in place for their citizens. Also you need to be careful with what you write about the activities of your friends and colleagues from other countries. I’m sure you would not want another blogger’s imprisonment or torture on your conscience if the security agencies in their home country arrest them over something you have posted from the cyber-safety of your free expression haven. You need to bear this in mind because your new networks may well extend to vulnerable individuals living in such regimes.

So what can you do to help elevate free expression as a fundamental human right?

I would encourage student journalists to sign up with RSF and perhaps one of the other free expression NGOs like Article 19 or Index on Censorship. The rest of you might become more active within Amnesty International which also has a strong free expression chapter.

Free expression is a right Amnesty regards as “important for the personal development and dignity of every individual and vital for the fulfillment of other human rights”.

And rightly so. For without free expression, victims of human rights abuses would be unable to communicate their predicament and their supporters would be prevented from issuing their rally cries for change.

While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrined free expression for all the world’s citizens at Article 19 in 1948, it was only ever meant to be a declaration of a lofty goal and has many limitations.

Better safeguards came internationally in 1966 when the UN adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which also protected free expression, again at Article 19.

But many countries have not ratified the covenant and you are left without regulatory bite. Complaints about individual countries’ breaches can be brought to the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, but the processes can take several years and are often unresolved.

The journalists among you should have truth-seeking and truth-telling as your absolute mission.

The rest of you might sometimes have other obligations which sometimes limit your ability to reveal everything about a topic, but you should make it your own mission to defend the rights of others to speak their minds.

In journalism we use the expression ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ – and we mean it both literally and metaphorically.

While the world has changed markedly since the UN was established in 1945, a constant has been the natural tendency of those in power to gag their critics.

Active membership of organisations like Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International can at the very least remind those who abuse their positions that they are being watched, and at best motivate them to change their ways.

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March 28, 2012 · 9:05 pm

Canadian CJ headlines ‘Courts and the Media: Challenges in the Era of Digital and Social Media’

By MARK PEARSON
Follow @Journlaw

Our book – Courts and the Media: Challenges in the Era of Digital and Social Media – edited by Patrick Keyzer, Jane Johnston and me – has been published by Halstead Press. Order details are here. The book was launched by Queensland Chief Justice Paul de Jersey (below) on March 29.

It stems from our symposium Courts and the Media in the Digital Era held on February 12, 2011, keynoting the Chief Justice of Queensland Paul de Jersey, News Limited chief executive John Hartigan (who has since retired) and shadow attorney-general Senator George Brandis.

We have chapters written by several speakers from that symposium as well as contributions from some other experts, including the Canadian Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin’s Supreme Court Oration on ‘Courts and the Media’, delivered in Brisbane on September 15, 2011. We thank Her Honour for agreeing to make it available to us as our opening chapter.

My own chapter looks at the intersection between the courts, the media and mental health and includes several developments that have happened since I presented the paper in February and wrote an article for the Pacific Journalism Review, published in May. (Thanks to research assistants Kiri ten Dolle and Annabelle Cottee for helping make it possible, along with some generous funding under the Australian Government’s Mindframe National Media Initiative!) You can get a sneak preview from my earlier blog.

The convergence of media and technologies have had resounding implications for the justice system, particularly with the advent of blogging and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. This, combined with broader, faster and more portable access to websites with Web 2.0 devices, has challenged traditional conceptions of jurisdiction, open justice and transparency while raising serious definitional questions about journalism and journalists. The release of tranches of documents by Wikileaks and subsequent legal action in recent months served to highlight many of those issues as pundits debated issues of confidentiality, espionage, whistleblowers, freedom of information, international relations, secret hearings, suppression, journalism, public interest and social media in the courtroom.

The papers presented at the Courts and the Media in the Digital Era Symposium and the chapters of this book address those questions from a range of perspectives – judicial, political, administrative, journalistic, academic, and corporate – with some offering insightful hybrid views of each.

You will find a variety of voices in the chapters, reflecting the background of the authors and the circumstances of their contributions. Some bear the rhetorical hallmarks of keynote addresses, others reflect the meticulous research and documentation of academic scholarship, while some reflect a more conversational tone of a contribution to a conference panel. Such variation happens in such edited volumes, and in many ways it adds to their flavour and appeal.

While all chapters acknowledge the intersection of justice, journalism and new technologies as the focal point of the ‘Courts and the Media in the Digital Era’ theme, some are focussed less on the new media elements. All pay strong attention to the issue of open justice and its interpretations in laws and policy in the 21^st century.

McLachlin CJ’s opening chapter explores the relationship between the courts and the media in the modern age by drawing upon the historical and philosophical traditions of open justice and itemising the shared interests of journalism and justice. Her conclusion foreshadowing the challenges posed by the communications revolution lays a suitable foundation for the subsequent articles to explore them in depth.

The keynote address by the Chief Justice of Queensland, the Hon Paul de Jersey, grapples with the competing interests at stake when the news media cover courts and explains several initiatives in his own jurisdiction to balance those interests in the digital era, including establishing free wi-fi in court houses, permission for journalists to tweet proceedings and the uploading of civil judgments and criminal sentencing remarks to the court webpage.

News Limited chief executive John Hartigan (who recently retired) proposed the following four reforms to enhance open justice: allowing cameras in courts for openings and sentencings; real time access to transcripts and court documents; rejection of the current suppression model and removal of take-down orders.

Co-editor Jane Johnston from Bond University surveys the international field to offer examples of the impact of social media on the courts and focuses on some recent Australian examples where tweeting from court has prompted differing judicial outcomes. She also reports on the attitudes of court information officers to social media.

Griffith University’s Jacqui Ewart draws upon her expertise as journalist, researcher and author of Haneef: A Question of Character, to analyse the implications of national security laws for coverage of anti-terror trials and to assess the new dynamic of social media in the mix.

Law academic Daniel Stepniak from the University of Western Australia traces the use of cameras in courtrooms and offers insights into the attitudes of the judiciary to audio-visual technologies in their various forms.

University of Technology, Sydney, law lecturer Geoff Holland illustrates the complex research issues at play when considering the influence of prejudicial publicity upon jurors, offering a comprehensive review of theories and cases.

Bond University legal scholars Elizabeth Greene and Jodie O’Leary apply this in the Web 2.0 environment and call for the introduction of the option of judge alone trials in jurisdictions that do not yet permit them to deal with extreme cases of prejudicial publicity.

Bond University journalism academic and leading ethics text author Roger Patching has kept abreast of the News of the World scandal and assesses the extent to which it has fuelled calls for a new tort of privacy invasion in Australia.

Federal Court director of public information Bruce Phillips traces that court’s use of technology through live broadcasts in the 1990s through live Internet streaming and more recently the use of social media for reportage from some cases.

Criminologists Alyce McGovern and Murray Lee examine the ways Australian police media units have embraced social media and conclude it has offered them a direct channel of communication with the public on a par with their more traditional media liaison.

Former court media officer, journalist and member of the Australian Press Council Prue Innes reviews courts’ use of suppression orders two years after her authorship of Report of the Review of Suppression Orders and the Media Access to Court Documents for Australia’s Right to Know Coalition and makes some other insightful observations about media access to court information.

Finally, academics Geraldine Mackenzie, Caroline Siranovic and Kate Warner from Bond University and the University of Tasmania share findings from their ARC Discovery project researching the association between Australian citizens’ media consumption habits and their level of confidence in the courts and the sentencing process.

Such a work, particularly in print format, could never provide a comprehensive account of the state of the courts-media-technology nexus as it stands today. And neither should it. That relationship is a dynamic, attempting to balance a range of rights and interests of all stakeholders against the important and historic notion of open justice.

While the technologies might change and fresh cases might test the boundaries, this book will have served its purpose if it helps us understand the core principles at stake and if it aids judges, policymakers and journalists as they try to adapt to each innovation and news scenario.

——————-

* Mark Pearson is professor of journalism at Bond University and Australian correspondent for Reporters Without Borders. He tweets from @journlaw and blogs from journlaw.com

——–

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer! My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.

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March 19, 2012 · 2:35 pm

Inquiry’s #Finkelstein was judge who fined company for contempt over comments by its Facebook fans

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

Independent Media Inquiry chair Ray Finkelstein had already broken new legal ground and fined an online publisher for contempt for hosting misleading comments on its Facebook page before he was appointed to the inquiry last year.

His decision as a Federal Court judge in Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Allergy Pathway Pty Ltd (No 2) [2011] FCA 74 in January 2011 established the leading Australian precedent on publishers’ responsibility for the comments of others on their websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

He found the alternative health company’s actions in not removing ‘misleading and deceptive’ claims about its allergy treatments by ‘fans’ on its Facebook page (and ‘Twitter pages’) was in breach of earlier court orders to desist from making claims that it could ‘diagnose and treat allergies’.

As Crikey reported at the time, he fined both the company and its director, Mr Paul Keir, $7500 each for the disobedience contempt.

He has now chaired an inquiry which has a core recommendation with exactly that potential outcome – along with possible jail terms – for news bloggers and media outlets that refuse to publish corrections or apologies as directed by a new statutory News Media Council.

Of course there are key differences here, too. Allergy Pathway was not a news publisher – and it was disobeying an earlier court order under consumer law.

However, then Justice Finkelstein broke new ground on an issue where other jurisdictions like the US and the UK have offered protection to ISPs and blog hosts over the words of commenters on their sites.

Until a higher court decides otherwise, his decision means every Facebook user and website host (and Twitter user! – see below) is legally responsible for ‘publishing’ the comments of others on their sites.

The extent to which they might be immediately liable for an offending comment or whether they would be protected by taking it down within a ‘reasonable’ time has not yet been determined.

Certainly, Justice Finkelstein’s decision established that they would need to take reasonable steps to remove any such comments the instant they had been brought to their attention.

The Allergy Pathways decision goes to some lengths (paras 14-17) to define a Facebook ‘profile’ and ‘fan page’ and a Twitter feed.

But at paragraph 18 Justice Finkelstein seems to show a misunderstanding of Twitter by stating the ACCC’s argument as “once Allergy Pathway is aware of the statement having been placed on its Facebook or Twitter page and does not remove it, then it is liable for contempt”.

Call me an ignoramus, but I am left wondering: What is my “Twitter page”, and how can someone else post something there? Does he mean my own list of tweets, for which I am clearly responsible myself? Does he mean a #hashtag I have established on a topic? Surely I could not be responsible for others’ comments there? Or does he mean someone putting my handle in their tweet, for which I could surely not be held responsible?

He proceeds to track the legal precedents for host liability through defamation posted on golf club noticeboards, through to bulletin board hosts and Internet Service Provider liability.

“The effect of these cases is that merely facilitating the commission of a wrong will not result in liability but it is another thing to procure or conspire in the commission of the wrong, in which case liability may be imposed, particularly if the procurer is aware of the material being published and has accepted general responsibility for its publication,” Justice Finkelstein wrote.

He concluded: “It has been shown, indeed it was not disputed, that Allergy Pathway knew that persons had published testimonials on its Twitter and Facebook pages and that it took no steps to have them removed. …

“While it cannot be said that Allergy Pathway was responsible for the initial publication of the testimonials (the original publisher was the third party who posted the testimonials on Allergy Pathway’s Twitter and Facebook pages) it is appropriate to conclude that Allergy Pathway accepted responsibility for the publications when it knew of the publications and decided not to remove them.

“Hence it became the publisher of the testimonials. In any event it is clear that it caused them to continue to be published from the time it became aware of their existence, which is enough to put Allergy Pathway in breach of the second limb of its undertaking.”

I might be missing something here, but the good judge appears to have bundled the company’s responsibility for comments by others on its “Twitter page” in with responsibility for comments on its Facebook page.

I can live with the latter – and as a result of this decision media organisations and public sector groups like the Queensland Police are now monitoring their Facebook comments very carefully – but how on earth can we control the former? And what is a ‘Twitter page’ upon which others might comment?

Please enlighten me in the comments section below.

Another theory is that Mr Finkelstein and his advisers were not quite as expert on the workings of the Internet and social media as punters might expect from a $1 million-plus government inquiry. The have already been criticized for using the term ‘hits’ rather than ‘page views’.

As for the fact that Mr Finkelstein already had ‘form’ in the fining of publishers for contempt is not that great a surprise. It is what senior judges are sometimes called upon to do.

However, it puts into context his core recommendation for a statutory solution with appeal to a judge like him with the power to fine or jail a news publisher or relatively small blogger for disobedience contempt.

Mark Pearson is professor of journalism at Bond University and Australian correspondent for Reporters Without Borders. His views here do not purport to represent those of either of those organisations.

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Tagged as ACCC, Australian media, censorship, consumer law, convergence, Finkelstein, free expression, journalism, law, media, media inquiry, media law, Media Report, News of the World, NOTW, Press Council, press freedom

March 11, 2012 · 12:05 pm

Attack by The Australian supports case against ‘enforced self-regulation’ #Finkelstein

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

The Australian’s associate editor Cameron Stewart has argued that the immediate endorsement of the proposal for a statutory media regulator by some media academics was indicative of the irrelevance, ineptitude and Leftist bias of journalism educators generally.

Like any piece of attack journalism, it used carefully selected truths and sources to develop a positional and very political assault on the journalism education sector and the former (and current) journalists who teach, research and publish there. It is an old and flawed argument.

While I disagree with this kind of journalism and its use by a leading masthead, I think it presents a unique lesson on why Finkelstein’s core proposal for a News Media Council with statutory powers to order corrections and apologies is so wrong.

Journalism educators have quite rightly taken umbrage at the article in the Weekend Australian and, as I blog, are composing a unified response to the attack.

This is the right course of action – to first seek redress and a right of reply from the publisher of the offending article.

If the identified individuals felt strongly enough about the imputations it contained about them – and if they had the resources available to them – they might take legal advice and perhaps sue for defamation.

For reasons I have outlined previously in Crikey, most principled journalists and editors do not resort to this measure because they value the free exchange of ideas too highly and do not wish to set such an example for others.

If the aggrieved journalism educators are dissatisfied with The Australian’s response, under the current regime they might instead make a complaint to the Australian Press Council over any unfairness, bias or inaccuracies in Stewart’s article they feel breaches that body’s Statement of Principles.

If the Council is unable to mediate a resolution, this would then be adjudicated by its complaints panel of (mainly) non-affiliated citizens and journalists, chaired by legal academic Julian Disney (or its vice-chair).

If the Council found The Australian had indeed been unfair, biased or inaccurate, or had unfairly refused to run a right of reply, the Council might decide to uphold the complaint and demand The Australian run its adjudication in full. As that newspaper’s parent company, News Limited, is an abiding member of the Council, it is likely that adjudication would be published. If not, it would at least appear on the Council’s website and among its regular releases on adjudications.

As outlined in several submissions to the Finkelstein inquiry, and noted at length in its final report, these processes could do with considerable improvement.

But consider the course of events under the proposed statutory body detailed in the report.

The early steps in the process would be fairly similar to the Council’s system, although the proposal would have the whole matter conducted ‘on the papers’, without legal representation, within a few days.

The ‘independent’ panel would be chaired by a retired judge or eminent lawyer appointed by the government of the day, and would have a different constituency with fewer media members.

However, rather than being told to publish the decision, The Australian might well be ordered under statutory powers to publish a correction, apology, retraction or right of reply.

The Australian might feel so strongly about its claims that it refuses to do so. After all, to ‘correct’, ‘apologise’ or ‘retract’ something over which you hold the heartfelt belief is true, however misguided, is itself an affront to those who hold such beliefs so strongly. Indeed, to be forced to apologise when you do not mean it is to be compelled to state a falsity.

The Australian’s refusal would be the disobedience of a statutory body and, under the Finkelstein proposals, would trigger a charge of contempt to be adjudicated by a court of law, with the usual penalties for contempt available to a judge – a fine or a jail term. (The report flags some opportunity to appeal the Council’s decision within that process – with all the accompanying legal costs for both sides.)

Some of my journalism education colleagues might be feeling so angry about the article that they might want Stewart or his editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell fined or jailed over this story. I suspect, however, that most would share my disdain for the possibility of such an outcome in a free democratic society which has no protection for free expression in its Constitution or Bill of Rights.

However, no matter how misleading and misplaced we may feel Cameron Stewart’s piece may be, there is no disputing the fact that some journalism academics immediately supported the proposal for a statutory regulator with such powers and potential consequences.

The ground seems to be shifting somewhat on that front. One of those attacked, Johan Lidberg from Monash University, initially (cautiously) supported the core recommendation but now states “A statutory based media regulator is highly problematic” (email to journalism educators, 10.3.12).

UTS Professor Wendy Bacon, and Swinburne’s Margaret Simons, have each written strong and well documented endorsements of Finkelstein’s criticisms of the mainstream media’s ineffective self-regulation, but have stopped short of endorsing the statutory enforcement option.

And so they should.

Wind the clock back to late 2010, and we had this very editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, threatening to sue journalism educator Julie Posetti for defamation over her tweets covering comments made by a former staffer from The Australian at a Journalism Education Association conference – the now infamous #twitdef episode.

Allow me a little licence with the scenario because the Finkelstein reforms might not cover tweets and the actual case was contentious partly because of its twitter brevity.

But let’s say a UTS student had reported the comments in that university’s student newspaper, and Mitchell had not sued, but had instead complained to the proposed ‘independent’ News Media Council about the article, on the same grounds of unfairness, inaccuracy and bias.

And what if, like Posetti, the student newspaper had stood by its article and refused to publish a retraction, correction or apology?

Well – assuming the newspaper met the definitional criteria of the new body as ‘news media’ which are far from clear – then we might well be facing the prospect of a journalism student or editor being jailed for what would otherwise may have been a defamation damages payment, and for which a defamation defence might well have applied.

Hypotheticals I know, but you need them to flesh out the potential implications of a new media regulator that would instantly convert ethical codes into punishable laws.

Only by using examples close to home can we understand the intransigence of both complainants and publishers. An analysis of both APC and ACMA complaints over recent years will reveal complaints over political views – a disproportionate number related to the Israel-Palestine dispute – where opinions are held so strongly that some proponents would face jail rather than retract or apologise.

One of the academics informing the Finkelstein inquiry, Denis Muller, has written a defence of the proposal on smh.com.au. It is worth quoting his final two paragraphs in full:

“It is proposed that the new council would have power to order corrections, apologies and rights of reply, and say where they should be published. The question of fairness arises here: if wrongful harm was done in a page one story, why shouldn’t at least the first two or three paragraphs of the remedial material also appear on page one? If a sanction was ignored or refused, the council would have the right to apply to a court for an order of compliance. The media company concerned could argue its case. Only if it lost and still refused to comply would it become legally liable — not to the council but to the court for contempt.

“Ideally, the media would do all this themselves: make a legally binding arrangement to set up an accountability body, properly funded, with transparent processes, credible sanctions and agreement to comply. History tells us it is unlikely, but maybe this report will act like a cattle prod on their collective hide.”

I might be wrong, but I read that final sentence as a hint that the whole statutory regulator proposal might be a trumped up threat to the mainstream media to get their regulatory house in order – not unlike David Calcutt’s 1990 warning to the British tabloids that they were ‘drinking at the last chance saloon’.

That may well be the case, and if so it seems to be already having an effect, with publishers meeting last week to discuss a revamp of the Press Council.

But if it is true, what a shame that Finkelstein should send such a message of endorsement of statutory media regulation to the regimes throughout the world who have already adopted it.

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March 3, 2012 · 11:50 am

News Media Council proposal: be careful what you wish for #ausmedia #MediaInquiry #Finkelstein

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

The Finkelstein (and Ricketson) Independent Media Inquiry report released yesterday is a substantial and well researched document with a dangerously flawed core recommendation.

An impressive distillation of legal, philosophical and media scholarship (compulsory reading for journalism students) and worthy recommendations for simpler codes and more sensitivity to the needs of the vulnerable are overshadowed by the proposal that an ‘independent’ News Media Council be established, bankrolled by at least $2 million of government funding annually.

This Council would have the ‘power’ to order corrections and apologies – but not to fine or jail journalists. That would be left to a higher court if a media outlet did not comply.

Several academics and small publishers have given it their approval. Even the Greens have applauded it, having demanded such an inquiry in the midst of the News of the World scandal in the UK and continued adverse coverage in News Limited publications locally.

The politicised circumstances of the inquiry’s birth fuelled a cry of ‘something must be done’ about the news media – for once and for all.

Criticism of the recommendations by the larger media groups on free expression grounds have been dismissed as a defence of their vested interests. It should surprise nobody that News Limited chief executive Kim Williams holds such a view, but such pigeon-holing of Finkelstein’s serious critics is a great shame. History is littered with examples of politicians withdrawing citizens’ rights to free expression because they did not like what they had been saying about them at a particular moment in history.

Scratch the surface of this proposal and you will find a harsh new regime which stands to damage Australia’s reputation as a democracy and might well come back to bite the politicians, academics and publishers who are supporting it today.

The key problems are with independence, enforcement and duplication.

The report details a process whereby the Council would be funded by the government, yet kept at arms length from it via an ‘independent’ board headed by an appointed ‘independent’ chair.

Only the chronically naïve would believe true independence could be established and maintained through such an appointment process in a relatively small government-funded instrumentality. It would, after all, be the government selecting the initial appointments committee.

Even the appointment process to the High Court suffers criticism from time to time, and the independence of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s chair and board has been questioned in recent history by the same academics and politicians applauding this new ‘independent’ body.

Those very people argue that News Corporation editors do not need explicit directions from Rupert Murdoch – that their very appointment implies they will toe the line. That may well be the case, so why would it be different here?

Although this statutory body will not have the power to fine or jail journalists, its appeal lies in its ‘regulatory teeth’, powers that the Australian Press Council has lacked and the Australian Communication and Media Authority has been loathe to use.

At face value, the News Media Council would only have the power to “require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply”.

However, what if a news blogger or publisher should disagree with such a direction so strongly that they refused to comply with such an order?

Well, then they would be cited for contempt and tried in a court which would have the power to fine or jail them. Several Australian journalists have suffered that fate in recent years. Such a court would be charged with the relatively straightforward task of determining whether the publisher has disobeyed an order of the statutory council.

Only then might publishers get the opportunity for an appeal – again by a judge in court:

11.78 In order to preserve the ability of the News Media Council to act swiftly, there should be no internal appeal from, or internal merits review of, a determination. Nor should there be external merits review via the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

11.79 It would, however, be neither desirable nor possible to preclude all judicial supervision of determinations. In any event, because enforcement may need to be by way of court order, judicial supervision would be built into the process. In the course of enforcement proceedings a collateral challenge to a determination may be available and this would provide a sufficient mechanism for judicial supervision.

And who can guess what such appeals might cost your impoverished blogger or start-up publisher in legal fees – pitted against publicly funded prosecutors and their team of silks? So much for a quick and cheap dispute resolution process.

It’s a slippery slope – all rosy for its supporters who can only see themselves calling to account the multinational News Corporation and its anti-Left line.

But they might consider how this might operate under a change of government, perhaps under a Howard-like government with individuals sitting on the Council like those appointed to the ‘independent’ ABC board during that period?

And what if such a Council orders a leading environmental news site or magazine to publish an apology to a mining magnate for the ethical breach of publishing a ‘biased’ and inaccurate report about the company’s waste disposal practices, based on sensitive material from confidential sources? Where would the power and resources rest in a court appeals process in that situation?

To publish such an apology or retraction would be an affront to the blogger, and in their principled belief it would be a lie to do so.

Yet, they would face a hefty fine or jail – or risk losing their home in an expensive court appeal process – if they chose to stand their ground.

This proposal effectively converts the MEAA Code of Ethics and the scores of in-house and industry codes of practice into laws – enforceable, ultimately, in the courts.

I suggested in my personal submission (PDF) to the inquiry and in my appearance at its Melbourne hearings that Australia already has enough of those laws. Hundreds of them. I suggested alternative mechanisms using existing laws. I argued that we did not need more media laws and more expensive legal actions and that a government-funded statutory regulator would send the wrong message to the international community. It is the approach adopted by the world’s most repressive regimes.

Which brings us to the matter of duplication. I have seen few serious ethical breaches that could not be handled by existing laws like defamation, contempt, consumer law, confidentiality, injurious falsehood, trespass and discrimination. There are existing mechanisms to pursue them properly through established legal processes.

All of the serious examples cited at 11.11 of the report could have been addressed using other laws such as defamation, ACMA remedies or breach of confidence (or the proposed privacy tort). But the new regulator would do away with all the normal trappings of natural justice, dealing speedily with matters on the papers only without legal representation a media defendant would expect in a court of law.

Small publishers and bloggers might well be bullied into corrections or apologies because they would not have the time, energy or resources to counter a contempt charge in the courts.

This proposal (bizarrely titled “enforced self-regulation” at 11.33) risks duplicating the offences via ethical code breaches, with a big stick of a contempt charge hanging over a media offender who might well have been able to defend an action taken through the traditional channels.

The cost of this inquiry and its $2 million proposed annual funding would be much better spent on media literacy campaigns for the community, law and ethics training programs for journalists and bloggers, and the establishment of a one-stop referral service within the ACMA so complainants can get help in making their complaints through existing channels.

The budget would probably even cover a means-tested advocacy service to help poorer complainants pursue the most serious breaches of existing laws through the courts.

Australia is rare among Western democracies in that we do not have free expression or media freedom enshrined in our Constitution or in a Bill of Rights. Other countries like Britain and New Zealand proposing similar regulating mechanisms have free expression as an explicit right informing their jurisprudence.

The High Court demonstrated this week (PDF) that it is in no rush to progress its so-called “freedom to communicate on matters of politics and government”.

While rejecting the notion of licensing news media, the proposal quite rightly points out the problems in deciding the ‘news media’ that will be policed – in itself a defacto system of licensing journalists. It admits it could have no jurisdiction over foreign news outlets, which means the paparazzi and hundreds of offensive bloggers need only operate under an offshore enterprise.

Supporters of this News Media Council proposal should look again at the scenarios that could play out under a tough new regime of media regulation duplicating the court system. They might well heed that lyric from Australian songwriter Paul Kelly: “Be careful what you pray for. You might just get it.”

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February 27, 2012 · 9:05 am

Media regulation: my interview with @RichardAedy on @RNmediareport

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

I was interviewed for the ABC Radio National Media Report program last week on the upcoming Independent Media Inquiry report.

You can hear the full program here, where you can also view the complete transcript.

I’ve just copied below the segment of the transcript featuring my own comments:

———–

ABC Radio National Media Report

Finkelstein Inquiry into Newspapers

Broadcast:Friday 24 February 2012 5:30PM

…

…Richard Aedy: …There are other perspectives beyond those of the Press Council and the publishers. Mark Pearson’s Professor of Journalism at Bond University on the Gold Coast. He’s particularly interested in that intersection between journalism and the law and he’s come up with one of the most novel submissions to the inquiry.

Mark Pearson: There are already so many laws controlling the behaviour of news organisations and journalists, we don’t really need any more. We need to make those that exist more effective. But if there had to be something more, the consumer law that exists at the moment, and already applies to the media in many ways, could be extended to cover heinous ethical breaches.

Richard Aedy: Didn’t the media used to be subject to those laws?

Mark Pearson: Yes they were the old Trade Practices Act. It’s now changed its name to the Competition and Consumer Act. It was introduced in 1974 and it has a provision, basically banning misleading and deceptive conduct, which is normally applying to advertising. But for the first few years, some court decisions held that it might also apply to misleading claims made in news stories; the editorial columns of newspapers and their equivalent in broadcast. So because they didn’t want this impingement on free expression and because of lobbying by the major media groups, they had an exemption to that introduced for prescribed news providers which basically, unless it was in advertising or promoting their own products and so on, they would be exempted from these misleading and deceptive conduct provisions.

Richard Aedy: Right. So to clarify. You don’t think we need additional laws. You don’t even think we need tougher existing laws. What you think we need is a much better understanding of what the laws are and perhaps getting rid of this exemption the media has had to what is effectively, I think, corporations law?

Mark Pearson: Well I certainly wouldn’t propose getting rid of that exemption because otherwise we’d be back to that 1970s position where the media were being prosecuted for their news columns. But I don’t think some tinkering with that would do any great harm which would cover the most drastic ethical breaches, clearly contrary to the public interest, where there’s been real misleading and deceptive conduct involved, of the order of your cash for comment kind of situation.

Richard Aedy: Right. I was going to say give me an example. Well all right that’s a good one. And who would be the regulator? Would it be what, the ACCC?

Mark Pearson: Well it would be the ACCC. The more the media is moving towards breaking down that firewall between editorial and advertising the more they need to be treated like just another business except where they’re doing genuine public interest journalism.

Richard Aedy: So what about the Press Council and Julian Disney asking for greater powers and saying, well look we could do with some government money for this?

Mark Pearson: I think it’s always dangerous to start introducing government funding for media self-regulatory bodies. The instant the government starts funding such things, the instant you have genuine government regulation.

Richard Aedy: But what’s wrong with that? I know editors and journalists always say this would be terrible, real government regulations. But lots of industries are regulated by the government. Why shouldn’t the media be?

Mark Pearson: Well one of our biggest problems in Australia is that we don’t have a Bill of Rights. We don’t have a Constitution with any formal protection of free expression. So it means that these other laws as they’re applied, the courts don’t have something else to look to. The High Court’s made a few decisions introducing freedom to communicate on political matters but all of that’s a little vague. And so there’s really no underpinning of free expression in this country other than a tradition that we’ve had which has been intruded upon time and time again through these hundreds of laws.

Richard Aedy: Mark Pearson from Bond University. He too opposes any move by the Press Council to accept money from the government. But the big worry for the industry isn’t really that the Press Council will get some of its funding from Canberra. It’s that Mr. Finkelstein will recommend that Canberra becomes altogether more involved.

—————

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February 10, 2012 · 3:21 pm

My Online Opinion piece explains Australia’s fall to #30 in RSF World Press Freedom Index

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

The international media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF – Reporters Without Borders) has released its 2011-12 World Press Freedom Index and Australia has slipped 12 places from 18^th to 30^th among the 179 countries ranked.

That result and the organisation’s methodology deserve explanation and debate, which I offer in my article in Online Opinion today.

As RSF’s Australian correspondent for the past six years, I offer some insights on both fronts.

First I assess the factors contributing to Australia’s decline in its media freedom status since 2010.

Then I explain why the RSF ranking process is indicative rather than scientifically precise.

Interested? Read my piece in Online Opinion today.

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January 23, 2012 · 9:59 am

My piece in The Drum: Media regulation made simple by ‘responsible truth-telling’

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

Some of you might have missed my opinion piece at ABC’s The Drum Opinion published on December 22.

I reproduce it here for your interest and you might like to add your comments to the other 100+ featured on The Drum .

—————————

Media regulation made simple

MARK PEARSON

The solution to the news media regulation problem lies in two or three simple words, depending on whether you choose to hyphenate: ‘responsible truth-telling’.

Those words should replace the myriad of codes of ethics, codes of practice, and statements of principles that Australian journalists are expected to follow in their daily reportage.

It might sound idealistic and over-simplified but that’s what it comes down to. It is a phrase that can be read to incorporate truth-seeking, across all platforms of new, social and legacy media, by those practising the pursuit many of us still call ‘journalism’ and by those blogging, tweeting or standing on soap boxes in public parks claiming to be speaking in the public interest.

As the Supreme Court of Canada recently decided, ‘responsible communication on a matter of public interest’ is worth protecting and irresponsible communication should be discouraged.

Regulation in the form of laws has worked reasonably well to deal with irresponsible investigations and publications and harmful falsities and continues to do so.

Just because ‘co-regulation’ via the Australian Communication and Media Authority and ‘self-regulation’ via industry groups, the Australian Press Council and the journalists’ union have floundered, does not make straight-out government control of the media any more acceptable in a Western democracy.

There is already an oversupply of regulation of the media and free expression generally in this country – across all levels of government and via quasi-governmental and self-regulatory and co-regulatory bodies. Added to this there is considerable censorship of free expression in government and the corporate sector in the form of ‘spin’.

Australia’s free expression is particularly fragile because it lacks any formal expression in our Constitution, especially when this is combined with at least five inquiries into the news media this year (2011) and proposals for a press regulator with government teeth, against a backdrop of Senator Conroy’s attempts at imposing an internet filtering scheme.

The Convergence Review quite rightly takes a 21st century broad-brush view of media regulation, but the Media Inquiry chair Ray Finkelstein QC appears focussed on a mechanism to prop up the very 20th century complaints system of the Press Council, proposing some government sanctions on the publication of findings and some taxpayer funding to supplement the reluctant sponsorship of the major newspaper groups.

My own submission to the Media Inquiry proposed there should be no more laws controlling the media in this country – just better access for media consumers to the laws that already exist and a one-stop shop for the handling of complaints. It also suggested a reworking of consumer laws so that ‘prescribed news providers’ do not get an automatic exemption from the ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’ actions over their news material.

No journalists can be expected to operate effectively within deadline paying heed to all the five or six codes that might apply to them.

A single code of ethics applying to journalists and their employers across all news media, under the banner of ‘responsible truth-telling’ would address fundamental principles of truth, accuracy, verification, attribution, transparency, honesty, respect, equity, fairness, independence, originality and integrity, with exceptions only for matters of substantial legitimate public concern.

It would be supplemented by industry or workplace ‘information and guidance’ documents to help explain to journalists and editors the fact scenarios and precedents applying to a particular medium or specialty.

Any government funding could establish and maintain a one-stop media complaints shop for referring consumers’ concerns to the appropriate self-regulatory or co-regulatory body and an accompanying media literacy campaign for the broader community. The several million dollars spent on these inquiries would have been better spent on this.

Broader citizen access to broadband and the sands of time will solve most of the media regulation problems we have today, but applying existing consumer law to the news media would help. That’s the way it was for a few years after the Trade Practices Act was introduced in 1975 until intensive lobbying by media groups won them a news provider exemption from its operations.

Why revisit consumer law? Because these days most news provision is ‘just another business’ and the only news media candidates for any regulation with teeth are usually operating across state borders in ‘trade or commerce’ and are therefore subject to the provisions of what has been rebadged the Competition and Consumer Act.

The Web 2.0 environment has motivated the traditional media to focus more strongly on commercial interests than it has ever had to do previously, breaking down the traditional ‘firewall’ between advertising and editorial material. Traditional revenue streams have reduced to a trickle. That’s why they have staff freezes and can’t increase their funding of the Press Council.

Such an adjustment to consumer law would mean a scandal on a scale of ‘Cash for Comment’ or the News of the World episode could be handled for what it is: irresponsible deception of media consumers by powerful, cynical, corporate players.

It’s not a radical suggestion. The ACCC entered the Cash for Comment fray early on, but backed off when the then Australian Broadcasting Authority started investigating. Perhaps it should have persisted. Just two years ago the High Court found against Seven under the former Trade Practices Act in a case false claims about goods and services. The reform would extend this to other ethical breaches.

‘Responsible truth-telling’ would remain protected, as it should be in a Western democracy. The onus would be on the ACCC to prove the irresponsibility or falsity of the misleading material or actions and that it was contrary to the public interest.

Media Inquiry chair Ray Finkelstein dismissed my suggestions as ‘impractical’ when I appeared in the Melbourne hearings last Thursday. He seemed intent on his Bandaid-like solution for the Australian Press Council.

He might be willing to take another look at it now that the Convergence Review has flagged its own big-picture approach and its intention to return to the drawing board of media regulation.

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