Contempt of Court Act & Power of the Media?

As part of our NCTJ qualification we are looking at areas of media law and restrictions on reporting. We’ve been looking at the Contempt of Court Act which states that a journalist must not report on anything that poses a serious risk of prejudice (bad character references, language of guilt, witness statements…..anything that may influence a jury).

The media however, do not always fully abide by the Contempt of Court Act, since they know that at particularly points in the case they can get away with a more casual approach to the rules, often relying on the argument of the “fade factor”. This was well documented in the case involving the Kray Twins. Their lawyer argued they wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial due to adverse media coverage – this was over-ruled by a judge who said: “I have enough confidence in my fellow countrymen to think that they have got the newspapers sized up. The public’s recollection is short, and secondly, that the drama of a trial almost always has the effect of excluding from recollection that which went before.”

More recently in an article written in the Times in December 2006, a journalist called Magnus Linklater, quite rightly pointed out the coverage of the Sussex strangler suspects had been breaking all the rules of the Contempt of Court Act. What was interesting is that he speculated that the reason that no one had come down on the press was due to the Government not wanting to damage relations with the media at a time when it needed their co-operation so badly.

He wrote: “A more likely reason for Lord Goldsmith’s silence is that he is unwilling to challenge the power of the media at a delicate time. They are allies in a larger war- against international terrorism – and the last thing he wants is to clamp down on them just at the point where their voice is needed to keep the public on the alert.”

This raised a question in class that we didn’t really have time to elaborate on: “Is the media more powerful than the government?” This is an age old question and definitely has a lot of grey areas. Although much of the news is controlled, much of this is down to the way the government manages it’s relationship with the media, as opposed to an act of dominant power. For much of the time the media is seen to co-operate and in some ways controlled by the government.   

In the same instance however, it could be argued that the media are just lulling the government into a false sense of security, playing the game until they have whatever ammunition needed to launch an attack. Classic examples include the Watergate scandal, Murdoch’s on and off allegiance with the conservative party and the leaked documents about the war in Afghanistan that have just surfaced due to Wikileaks.

In truth the relationship is certainly not black and white, more of a slippery marriage of love and hate and make up and break up, both wearing the trousers from time to time. Ultimately only one side can be the main bread winner and my vote is the media. We also can’t overlook the rise in citizen journalism and the use of the internet, that further add weight to this argument.