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Contempt of court: or for justice itself?

By Clark Nida

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14342766

In the murder-investigation of landscale artist Jo Yeates, her landlord Christopher Jefferies was initially arrested as a suspect. Several tabloids straightaway went to work digging up all the dirt they could on the poor man. And when they couldn’t find any, they made it up, calling him “creepy” and “Hannibal Lecter”.

The High Court ruled yesterday that such reports in the Daily Mirror and the Sun were in contempt of court, and fined the Mirror £50,000 and the Sun £18,000. Afterwards Mr Jefferies’ lawyer, Louis Charalambous, said in a public statement: “Christopher Jefferies is the latest victim of the regular witch-hunts and character assassinations conducted by the worst elements of the British tabloid media.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14339807

His language was far too feeble. He could have called the “British tabloid media” by its real name: the gutter press. The judge was far too lenient. The fines were derisory: scarcely enough to employ a couple of cub reporters for a year.

If the News Of The World, which hacked into the mobile of a deceased person, merited being shut down and all the staff dismissed, what does one deserve that deliberately sets out to destroy the life and reputation of an entirely innocent man, bringing the very notion of free speech into disrepute?

Would it have been unjust to send the editor to prison? To shut down the papers and any others under the same ownership and ban their staff from being employed in the media ever again?

Mr Charalambous added something of which we should all take note: that the newspapers gave their apologies “...knowing that after the conditional fee agreement rules are changed next year, victims of tabloid witch-hunts will no longer have the same access to justice.”

Are we to allow a situation to arise where the only redress for persecuted individuals is to take out a contract on the editor and firebomb the newspaper offices? Already such a recourse would be cheaper than going to law. Which makes a mockery of why a public system of justice was ever set up in the first place.

If we’ve decided as a nation that access to the law for ordinary people is too expensive to be subsidised by the “taxpayer” (i.e. all of us), have we properly costed the alternative: viz. lawlessness?

Newspapers as we know them are only able to exist under the umbrella of the law they flaunt so flagrantly. There are many lawless countries in the world, but show me one which has a free press.