Joey Barton, The Mirror and big glass houses

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.

Juror-naming journalist facing jail

It seems I am starting to get a bit obsessed with this Contempt of Court thing.

My last two blogs have involved contempt of court breaches in the reporting of John Terry trial and the Harry Redknapp trial. My specific point in those two cases was that newspapers were not giving enough thought as to which stories users can comment on online.

Now a Twitter user, and former colleague, has accused me of carrying out a contempt crusade and brought a new case to my attention. It involved an allegation that a Guardian reporter, Jamie Jackson had made two horrific breaches of the contempt of court act in the Harry Redknapp case.

1) He named a juror on Twitter

2) He tweeted details of a legal argument not put before the jury

The case has been referred to the Attorney General by the trial judge, Anthony Leonard QC who has also banned live-blogging and tweeting from court.

My only reaction, and it is currently one free from being contemptuous because Mr Jackson has not been arrested, is to ask: "How the hell can any journalist get something like this wrong?"

In this country the anonymity of the jury is sacrosanct. This is no technical breach, it is a law-smashing sledgehammer of a breach and the consequences could be wide-ranging in the extreme. Any journalist-in-training is told that contempt can carry a jail-term if serious enough and, as much as I wouldn't wish it on any journalist, this is the sort of breach the jail term may be reserved for.

As we all saw recently with The Guardian's live-blog of the new presenter of Countdown. That particular publication wants to get live coverage up on any and all given circumstances. But if you can't get the most basic law right then the chances of the judiciary continuing to give open access is limited to say the least.

We all make mistakes. As a deputy news editor I once let the name of a rape victim get past me on newsdesk - a mistake that still makes me shudder 11 years later - but in the live environs of Twitter with no sub to save you, then you have to step up and be absolutely sure of every word you produce.

The Daily Mail has reported on this fresh breach by The Guardian and you may remember that, much to the chagrin of The Daily Quail, the Daily Mail was on my Goodies list last week. It has adopted a particularly gleeful tone but hey - you give them the ammo and that is what they will do.

You may not agree with the Mail but technically they are often very good at what they do - hence my post last year querying several bad decisions they had made.

Journalism, comments and contempt of court

So this is a time when journalism is under massive scrutiny.

The Leveson Inquiry is looking in-depth onto every nook and cranny of the industry and threatening to drag out all of the skeletons and then slap the handcuffs of draconian statutory regulation on us all because a minority of hacks erm, well, they hacked.

So why is it that the some titles cannot follow the basic principles of the law correctly?

Yesterday The Sun ran a story on the on-pitch battle between Anton Ferdinand and John Terry. You may recall that on February 1, Terry is due in court to face an allegation that he racially abused Ferdinand during a game between Chelsea and QPR last year.

The story is perfectly acceptable and written with the boundaries of the law as it stands. However, for 12 hours The Sun allowed people to comment on the story.

Some of those comments, as you might expect of modern day 'passionate' fans, were pretty fruity and several stepped so far over the line to be in clear breach of the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

That Act is intended to allow suspects a fair trail and ensure that juries are not swayed in any way by anything said outside of the court room. All journalists know that to print anything which might suggest the guilt of the accused is a clear breach.

You will have to take my word for it that three comments breach that Act is a very blatant way. I have the screen grabs but do not intend to add to The Sun's indiscretion.

About 12 hours after the story was posted, and after at least 21 comments had been left, The Sun realised their mistake and took the story down.

But today, The Independent, has done the same.

Fortunately, at the time of writing this blog no prejudicial comments have been let but it is easy to do so. I signed in to Disqus with a Google account and left the comment to the left.

My comment is not prejudicial in the slighted, containing only words 'My real time comment'. It was left purely to satisfy myself that no pre-publication moderation of comments was happening at The Independent and sure enough my comment was published immediately.

I did a check round and here's what I found:

* Guardian - no comments allowed

* The Times - comments allowed but they are pre-moderated (no link behind the Paywall) - my real time comment was published but I was unwilling to attempt to post a prejudicial comment so cannot guarantee a result either way.

* The Telegraph - comments allowed - my real time comment was published immediately

* The Mirror - comments allowed and I didn't need to do a test as the top comment was such a clear breach of the 1981 Act it clearly had not been moderated (screen grab taken)

* The Star - no comments allowed

* Daily Mail - comments allowed - but were going through pre-moderation

* Express - no comments allowed

If four out of nine mainstream newspapers are unable even to adhere to a basic law governing journalism - what chance do we have of avoiding statutory regulation?

I know that one of the most exciting aspects of online journalism is the interaction with the readers but you cannot publish and be damned - there is no Reynolds Defence in Contempt.

UPDATE: Following queries from readers about whether the Contempt of Court Act 1981 applies in a magistrate's court and for a summary offence (ie that not before a jury), I sought a definitive answer from the Attorney General's office and was given the following reply:

"The Contempt of Court Act applies to any court and applies from arrest."

So that settles that. That's not to say that the Mirror will be prosecuted but it certainly confirms that it could be if someone were to formally report the breach.