It’s almost as if the press and the personalities have swapped roles for this hearing.
We’ve talked previously about how the claimants are doing everything they can to get the litigation into the public domain. The fact is their being here in court also means it’s much more likely to interest the public.
Now we’re going to explore the flip side: how the Mail’s publisher is acting against its reputation as a champion of free speech and the freedom of the press.
The start of these proceedings has seen it actively trying to keep things from the public by a reporting restriction. That’s primarily in terms of shielding the names of the 73 journalists and executives who are named.
Arguing for more restrictions on the press is out of character for the Mail Group’s publications.
In arguing for these restrictions, it relied on the Human Rights Act, which its newspapers have repeatedly criticised.
Paul Dacre ANL’s current editor in chief, talked a lot about paradox in his speech before the Leveson inquiry.
He said, ’The Human Rights Act is resulting in the creation of a privacy law by judges who seem to attach more weight to the right to privacy than to the right to freedom of expression. This is being compounded by the growth of injunctions and super-injunctions to prevent information being printed that is freely available on the internet.’
‘Today, we are in danger of ignoring the fact that news doesn’t grow on trees. News, let me remind you, is often something that someone – the rich, the powerful, the privileged – doesn’t want printed. Establishing the truth and accuracy of such news demands considerable resource and resourcefulness and is, frankly, becoming increasingly difficult.’
What we’ve seen so far is a window into what happens when editorial values come into conflict with business priorities and the interests of the powerful individuals implicated.
Look at how this is being covered by different parts of the press.
For example, there’s an interesting difference between the pretty neutral coverage from Sky News UK and the less neutral coverage of Sky News Australia, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which is famously and heavily implicated in the phone hacking scandal.
Whatever happens, we’ve already learned some very interesting things about the motivations behind different parts of our media.
