Today The Mirror online has run a nice helpful story about Joey Barton and the comments he made about the John Terry case.
Twitter was alight with speculation about the comments soon after they were posted on Barton's @joey7barton account. Barton-bashing is a favourite pastime these days, although to be fair, he does walk around with kick me sign pinned to his back.
The new theory goes that Barton has breached contempt laws by making statements which indicate guilt on Terry's part. In theory, that does breach the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
In theory. In practice we are unlikely to see a prosecution from the Attorney General because the charge against Terry is a summary offence and will not be tried before a jury. Therefore proving that Barton's ill-advised comments have influenced the court will be difficult in the extreme.
I'm sure the Mirror reporter knew this. Odd it wasn't mentioned in the story.
Still, it puts me in mind of a blogpost I wrote last month. You see, several national papers had 'decided' to allow comments on online reporting of the Terry case, similarly breaching the CoCA.
You could argue their breach was much worse than Barton's as all journalists are trained in media law so should at least have known there was a breach.
Now let's see, which news outlet was the worst? Oh yeah, that's right, the Mirror.
The Daily Mail is now speculating that Barton may well be the first person prosecuted for contempt for comments made on Twitter. Interesting opinion - completely wrong of course - but interesting nonetheless. In recent checks however, I do have to point out that the Daily Mail does at least have a decent record in showing it has a good understanding of the contempt law.
Perhaps the law does need changing for contempt now that social media has enabled everyman to broadcast opinions and that not everyone has a solid understanding of contempt. That is particularly true as most police procedural dramas in this country are American and therefore display a completely different law.
What is true however is that the mainstream media does know our contempt laws and with breaches we have seen in recent weeks, including the allegation that Guardian reporter Jamie Jackson named a juror, perhaps they should stop casting stones from their big glass houses.
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