In 1999 The House of Lords made a seismic change to the law of defamation. Its effect was to fortify the power of Fleet Street to libel individuals for profit without sanction, thereby both fundamentally undermining their human rights and permitting the press to persist in promulgating any falsities favoured by editorial agendas. This aberrant judicial law-making was justified by the most monumental intellectual dishonesty. Continue reading
The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
Tag: Jonathan Coad (Page 1 of 4)
For most of us the portal via which we glean information about key national and international issues is the media. It is essential therefore that we can rely on it both to (per Clause 1(i) of IPSO Editors Code) “take care not to publish inaccurate or misleading material” and inform us when it errs. Continue reading
Anyone who has fought the tabloid press will tell you that taking them on is not for the faint hearted. Prince Harry would have known that they would fight hard and dirty. He and Meghan Markle have been attacked ever since they set out, and voiced the intention to improve the quality of the British press. They also wanted to reduce the degree to which it abuses all of us, by compelling it to be the subject of effective and independent regulation. Continue reading
I make the case in Part 1 of this post that there are good policy reasons why Section 1(2) of the Defamation Act 2013 (“the 2013 Act”) does not always best serve the public interest. However even if the Section 1(2) hurdle were absent, a corporate claimant whose product or business practices have wrongly been attacked is likely then to be confronted with a “public interest” defence under Section 4. Continue reading
On 17 and 18 November 2020 Inforrm published a two-part post on “Corporate Claimants in Libel Cases, Part 1” and “Part 2” by Guy Vassall-Adams QC, which is an erudite and helpful analysis of the relevant law. Continue reading
In a recent adjudication of a complaint about an errant front-page story published by the Daily Mail misreporting a court award of compensation to a victim of unlawful imprisonment and ill treatment by British armed forces, IPSO has set out its rationale for effectively ruling out the correction of front-page articles via the front page. Continue reading
The trial judge (Mr Justice Mann) in Cliff Richard’s successful privacy claim against the BBC ([2018] EWHC 1837 (Ch)) has not seen the best side of the British media. In 2015 he presided over the phone hacking trial brought by victims against the Mirror newspaper group, Gulati v MGN. Continue reading
When in 1991 I qualified I into a well-known claimant media practice I was fortunate enough to find on my desk on the first day that I arrived a file containing a libel action being brought against London Weekend Television (by whom my new firm had just been instructed). Continue reading
Almost all the most powerful elements of Fleet Street will line up behind Mrs May in the run-up to the next election – and indeed they have already begun the process of doing so. As for the voting public, they are reliant on (inter alia) Fleet Street to help them make their voting decisions. The grandees of Fleet Street will be considering whether their titles are likely to be held to account in a way that they care about if it misleads voting public on key electoral issues. The answer to that question is; almost certainly not. Continue reading
In his piece on Inforrm yesterday, Keith Mathieson begins by describing the use of CFAs in cases against the media as a “scandal”. Evidently the Supreme Court did not agree with him – unanimously. One of the titles for whom he acts has already described judges with whom they disagree as “Enemies of the people”, so I suppose the judges can count themselves lucky not to have been attacked in similar terms. Continue reading
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