Watch the video stream of Kleptoscope 12 ]]>When parliament changed the law on defamation in 2013, it thought it had solved the problem of libel tourism. It hadn’t, it merely moved it underground. The world’s richest people may now find it harder to win cases in British courts, but that doesn’t matter: it is sufficient for them merely to threaten proceedings. Even if media organisations are confident they would win in court, the prospect of a lengthy and expensive court case is enough to make even well-resourced companies back down. This has stifled British coverage of Putin’s kleptocracy, of sub-Saharan African theft, and of the looting of Malaysia in the 1MDB scandal. Hosted as usual by investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, the Frontline Club’s kleptoscope evening will look into how this happens, what it means, and how it affects individual journalists.
Chair
Oliver Bullough chairs our Kleptoscope series that investigates corruption and dirty money in London. Bullough is an award-winning journalist and the author of two books about Russian history and politics, The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame be Great and now Moneyland, why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. He is also an expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.
Speakers
Clare Rewcastle Brown‘s reporting for her web site The Sarawak Report was instrumental in exposing the 1MDB scandal, perhaps the biggest single act of kleptocracy the world has ever known. She has been threatened by more lawyers than most of us will ever meet.
Bradley Hope works for the Wall Street Journal, and has also broken important aspects of the 1MDB scandal. His excellent book on the subject — Billion Dollar Whale — was published to rave reviews in the United States, but is yet to be published in the UK: for legal reasons.
Rupert Cowper-Coles is a solicitor who specialises in defending journalists against defamation claims, and who helped keep The Sarawak Report in business despite all the legal threats against it.
]]>An event at the Frontline Club on 25 September saw a discussion focused on the recently published book by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, When Reporters Cross The Line, examining the ethics of reporting in high pressure situations.
L-R Frederick Forsyth, Jeff Hulbert, Martin Bell, Stewart Purvis, Penny Marshall. Photo: Greta Hofmann
Assembled for the discussion were Purvis, professor of television journalism at City University, Hulbert, a media historian, Penny Marshall of ITV News, former journalist and renowned novelist Frederick Forsyth and veteran journalist Martin Bell in the chair.
A wide-ranging talk took in Marshall’s defence of a story on Bosnian war atrocities, Forsyth’s experiences of reporting the Biafra massacres in Nigeria, and a variety of other issues associated with reporting under pressure.
The product of meticulous archive research, Purvis and Hulbert’s book covers a range of situations in which lines might be crossed.
“No one has ever defined what the line is,” said Purvis. “We found that there are lots of lines.”
“We felt that there was a need for certainty in regulations, but found that regulatory precision is unlikely and that there are grey areas all over the place. . . . The subtitle for the book was heroes, villains, hackers and spies. Some of the villains turned out to be heroes and some of the heroes turned out to be villains.”
Touching on the issue of protection of a journalist’s sources, Hulbert suggested that while this is important, there was also a responsibility for a journalist to be held accountable for their reporting:
“It’s a little debatable from the archives whether the stories actually held water. . . . At no point have lawyers said to journalists ‘you made it up mate’. They just allowed the innuendo to percolate.”
In 2000, ITN won a libel case against left-wing magazine Living Marxism that had claimed that Marshall, along with others at ITN, had fabricated a report about a Bosnian detention camp.
“The supposed motives were variously that we were in it to win it, were vain, wanted an award, or worse had an anti-Serb agenda and had gone out to see what we wanted to see and wasn’t there,” she explained. “What ensued some of the bravest defending of our journalism.”
Marshall admitted though that in the heat of a situation the lines are not always clear cut:
“In the field the lines are blurred,” she said. “It’s easy for regulators and for academics who are not in high stress situations. But in these situations you have to rely on the seasoned judgement of journalists. I held hands with a lost child. I showed I cared . . . we’re not robots. If you don’t care, don’t be a journalist.”
A more difficult line, said Marshall, was the extent to which sources of stories should be put at risk:
“I’ve always worried that some of the people who were in our report lost their lives because of our endeavours to show what was happening.”
Forsyth said that he had crossed “three lines” during the course of his career. The first was taking a job as the BBC’s assistant diplomatic correspondent at the age of 28 and realising he had not only “inadvertently joined the establishment”, but was also “expected to serve it”.
The coverage he was expected to produce of the Nigerian-Biafran war in 1967, he said, was “strongly biased”. The second line was his decision to walk out on his post without notice and board a plane to Biafra, where he witnessed what he described as “a deliberately concocted and organised famine.”
“It was the only time our government has assisted a foreign government killing its own citizens,” he said. “Why? Because of the massive vanity of senior civil servants who could not and would not be proved wrong.”
Others on the panel agreed that journalists are often under the pressure of editorial agendas.
“I’ve become more sceptical about impartiality,” said Purvis. “You have to ask whether the coverage of Libya [of the overthrow of the country’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, in 2011] was really balanced. And yet the only channel that was criticised for bias was Russia Today, and that was for being pro-Gaddafi.”
Forsyth agreed:
“I don’t think there’s any major story where you can avoid bias. There’s almost always two sides to every story. The establishment is not the friend of dispassionate reporting because it wants its version to dominate and that may well be the wrong version.”
The issue of celebrity among broadcast journalists was also a source of concern.
“There are a number of celebrity journalists who have thrived through their celebrity,” says Hulbert. “Some I imagine would be able to gain entry to worlds that mere mortals such as I wouldn’t, so I think it helps. But whether it’s that celebrity emerges from the quality of your work or whether it emerges from a desire to be a celebrity depends on the individual.”
Marshall argued that one advantage of broadcast journalism is that many potential elements of bias are plain for all to see:
“You can see who I am and what I am. . . . You wear your history on your face, but I don’t think you can leave it behind.”
But the confines of the mainstream news agenda remain an issue, Marshall continued:
“The agenda is so narrow now which I regret. My children’s agenda is much wider than the news we’re feeding them. It’s part of a bigger disconnect between Westminster and the public and the media and the public.
The space for independent journalism, meanwhile, is shrinking. As Michela Wrong, a former Financial Times and Reuters journalist commented from the floor:
“It’s about how you see the world. If you go to an Angolan diamond mine with a diamond company, or with Oxfam, or on your own, you’re going to have three completely different experiences. There’s not really any room for independent journalists to cover a story now.”
In the end, says Marshall, it is down to the journalist to hold themselves accountable for their stories, and to be transparent about any lines they may have crossed.
“You want the sort of journalists who cross lines because the best journalists have the will to bring Biafra to account. But they also need to know that when they cross lines they can admit to doing it and are prepared to explain themselves.”
https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/when-reporters-cross-the-line
The international editor for ITV News, Bill Neely delivered a fascinating masterclass in television journalism last night at the Frontline Club.
Part of a regular series of ‘Reflections’ events in association with the BBC College of Journalism, in which top journalists talk about their work and those who inspired them, the hour-and-half event was a mine of information and expert analysis on how to best make use of words, pictures and sound – and silence.
A must-watch for aspiring journalists and those who want to improve their game, the event includes insight into some of the key moments in TV journalism history since the 1980s, including the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995. In the face of the atrocities carried out during that conflict, some journalists including the BBC correspondent Martin Bell and Ed Vulliamy decided that detachment was no longer possible and instead opted for the “journalism of attachment”, Neely explained.
He also analysed his colleague Penny Marshall’s use of words and pictures in a 1992 report from a Serb-run detention camp in Bosnia, which opens with Marshall saying ‘We were not prepared for what we saw there’. “Then for 18 seconds, she said nothing,” said Neely.
The report won the International News Award for 1992 at the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards but was caught up in a “storm” after Living Marxism magazine claimed that the video tapes were faked.
ITN successfully sued the magazine for libel but some people “still had not forgiven” BBC world affairs editor John Simpson’s decision to give evidence for the magazine, Neely said.
After showing one of his earlier reports from Newry while he was the BBC’s Northern Ireland correspondent, Neely examined the work of a number of journalists from ITV News, including Colin Baker and Paul Davis and the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Martin Bell.
Good journalists are able to use words to “grab a person by the lapels and never let them go,” said Neely, who talked about the different approaches used by journalists, including Bell, who did not script his reports.
Drawing on a career that had seen him cover stories around the world from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Haiti earthquake and fighting in Libya, Neely also discussed the use of sound, pointing out the differences in the way ITV News and the BBC reported from Dunblane massacre in March 1996.
Neely highlighted Baker’s report that showed school children leaving the primary school where 16 of their classmates and a teacher were shot dead. Ove the images, the former senior correspondent said: “Evil touched them, but just brushed past.”
During the report the sound of grieving parents could be heard from a building behind him but at no point did Baker draw attention to it, Neely said. “I think there are times when you just don’t need to,” he added.
The award-winning journalist, who picked up BAFTA’s three years in a row, contrasted different reporting styles from the BBC correspondent Kate Adie’s “icily detached” approach to the more conversational style of his colleague Tom Bradby, political editor of ITV News.
Neely talked the audience through step by step through his report from Haiti that won him his most recent BAFTA last year. The report was shown in three parts and Neely highlighted different aspects of the package, which Ray pointed out broke with accepted wisdom of “using your best pictures first”.
Part two of the interview is here:
The threat to freedom of speech from costly libel cases and the "chilling" fear of legal action could be alleviated by reforming the system to deal with smaller cases faster and cap the maximum costs lawyers can charge.
That was at least one agreement in an otherwise combative debate amongst the panel and audience. If you missed the event, you can watch the whole thing here:
Event chair Clive Coleman – presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Law in Action programme – described a tumultuous year in UK libel. He said the rise of super-injunctions such as those taken out by multinational oil trader Trafigura highlighted the courts’ power to silence public commentary.
However, the recent success of high-profile libel defences, coupled with commitments from the major political parties to review libel law, prompted him to ask whether it had been “a good six months for the free press”.
Nigel Tait, partner at notorious law fim Carter Ruck, which represented Trafigura, said it had been a “stimulating 12 months” in libel law. He rejected the need for changes to libel legislation, agreeing that that "costs" are behind the “chilling” affect on freedom of speech. He came out in support of a libel tribunal to deal with more minor cases, arguing lawyers could not be expected to shoulder an increased workload.
I’m in favour of a two-tier system. For the really important cases…I could see why you’d have a proper high court judge and possibly a jury. But I don’t think you need the Rolls Royce service for bloggers, what’s written on the internet.
Media law expert and Reynolds Porter Chamberlain partner David Hooper said that the key to lower libel costs in much of Europe was the “swift result” reached in most cases. He said:
[Claimants] may often get results they don’t deserve. But the key thing is that they are cheap. What people really want is a quick decision by the best person available and that’s really what a tribunal would do.
Simon Singh insisted that public opinion, much of it voiced over social media, is helping defence against a defamation writ from the British Chiropractic Association, which he refered to as "two years of hell".
Tait argued that a severe cut in lawyers’ success fees, which in no-win-no-fee "conditional fee arrangment" cases often double costs for defendants, risked removing the incentive to take on difficult cases.
Leigh closed the debate on a cautionary note for journalists, saying that the press was also responsible for problems surrounding libel in the UK:
Unless we put the newspaper house in order it is very difficult to move the debate on libel reform further forward.
Journalism.co.uk covered the evening and you can read its coverage here and here.
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By Ewan Palmer and Patrick Smith
The shark-infested waters of UK media law could be about to get a little safer, thanks to Ministry of Justice reforms to curb extortionate lawyer success fees earned through "no win no fee" conditional fee arrangement cases (CFA).
But Jack Straw’s quick-fire legislation (read the responses to the consultation here, in pdf format) has failed to win enough support to pass in the pre-election bill "wash-up" and reforms will now fall on to the next government, whoever that is…
We discuss this and more at the Frontline Club on Tuesday April 13, science writer with Simon Singh, Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, Carter Ruck partner Nigel Tait and David Hooper, from Reynolds Porter Chamberlain. Helping us make sense of all this is our chair Clive Coleman, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Law in Action programme. Book here for tickets.
But until then, here’s out brief primer on what’s afoot in media law reform…
Defamation lawyers can currently charge a success fee in CFA cases of 100 percent of the total costs – effectively meaning lawyers double their fees, leaving defendants with a massive bill to pay, often even if they succeed in defending the case. Jack Straw’s proposals would introduce a success fee cap of ten percent.
The law firms argue that they need to charge high fees to counteract the risk of losing in a CFA case – but thanks in to the UK’s case law-based system and the burden of proof being placed on the defendent, very few libel writs fought and won by media bodies in the High Court.
CFAs: a necessary evil?
CFAs were introduced to help people who can’t afford expensive legal fees to sue for libel, which is one reason some MPs like Labour’s Tom Watson voted against this latest law change proposal.
But what started out as an admirable policy has since been abused by those who can afford to pay their own fees. As law firms choose not to take on difficult cases, both smaller and large media bodies are experiencing what they would call a "chilling effect" on their journalism; many would rather settle out of court than face the crippling expenses that would occur if they fought the case.
Libel Tourism
The current libel laws means it is possible for statements published abroad – but visible to a UK audience somehow – abroad to be the subject of a writ. This has the effect of attracting people with little connection to the UK to London’s High Court to settle their disputes and protect reputations.
As The Times’ legal editor Frances Gibb puts it, London is now the libel capital of the world, being the scene for many cases brought by businessmen and companies from countries where such stringent laws don’t exist.
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