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.

Daily Mail and rape footage

I have a history with the Daily Mail.

For starters, I worked there in the 1990s despite being a left-leaning person keen on supporting human rights. Then last year I wrote a blog post about how poor the standards were becoming at the Mail.

The Daily Mail is a favourite of the Twitterati - its right-wing politics and tub-thumping, link-baiting journalism is guaranteed to get us liberal social media types uptight and sniping.

Even when they recently claimed personal and professional success in the conviction of two men for the murder of Stephen Lawrence they failed to win even a flicker of support from their traditional enemies.

To sum up it's a hate-hate relationship.

Today they have stooped so low that makes me feel physically sick to my stomach. And it's a strong stomach I might add.

Today they carried a report of an alleged rape on Big Brother in Brazil.

No problem there - of course they should report on that. After all, the programme is still huge news around the world and a crime has been alleged.

But the Daily Mail was not content in telling its readers about the allegation, it also deemed it necessary to show them what had taken place in a seven-minute video taken from YouTube.

No I won't link to it because in doing so I would republish this mindless, unethical, immoral 'journalism' and I have no intention of doing that.

No doubt the defence will be that the material is already out there on YouTube so why not? Well, the answer is simple: we are gatekeepers of information. We edit and employ logic and ethics to decisions about what and when to publish - that's why experienced people in our trade (or profession if you prefer but you'd be wrong) get more money and the top jobs if they want them.

Snuff movies have been available from dodgy market stalls for years, hard core porn has been available on the top shelves of newsagents or adult shops for decades yet no newspaper editor has felt the need to republish their content.

Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. And in this case that fact is so blindingly obvious to anyone with a brain I can't believe I am even having to write this.

Simply appalling.

UPDATE: The video had been removed from the story by the evening of January 17.

UPDATE: Angry Mob has also blogged to highlight the weirdly spinning moral compass of the Daily Mail

The terror of leaving the iPhone family

I was waking up early with palpitations, nibbling my fingernails and was distracted for a month.
 

The cause of my panic attacks? The contract was up on my iPhone 3Gs and I had a big decision to face. Scratch that – this was a MASSIVE decision.
 

I loved my iPhone. It did nearly everything I wanted it to: I checked football scores, kept up to date with current affairs via the BBC News app, social networking on Twitter and Facebook, listened to podcasts on my long drive to work.
 

It was more than a phone – it was a companion and a status symbol. While I held it aloft it screamed – ‘this man is up with the times’, ‘he is an in the know, media savvy dudester’.
 

But it was expensive. With Vodafone (the only network to get a connection in my small Oxfordshire village), I was paying £36 per month and yet, because the phone connection was so poor, I was using about 10 per cent of the available free calls and a miniscule number of the unlimited texts.
 

I wanted the iPhone 4s, but at £41 there was no way my Scottish blood would allow me to chuck more money into the Apple black hole.
 

So I became obsessive. Constantly asking friends, colleagues and students about their phones and surfing the web for advice.
 

My anxiety wasn't helped when a friend (a tech-savvy friend whose opinion I trust) stated that giving up his iPhone was the worst thing to happen in 2011 and said Android 'suck dogs' balls'
 

I am sure it was easier naming my three children than coming up with ideas for a new phone. I can only assume that the kind of separation anxiety I was facing is similar to that experience by married people about to leave their partners.
 

Sony Eriksson looks good. Or does it? Some have, according to Vodafone, just been recalled due to an error.
 

I hear good things about Blackberry but I can only get the Curve on my budget. That wouldn’t be so bad would it? But what about my massive thumbs (my brother used to tell me I was born without thumbs and they had to graft a dead man’s big toes on to my hands), would they be able to cope with the Blackberry QWERTY keyboard?
 

Samsung? A lot of people say a lot of nice things about them. But I feel uncomfortable with the level of copying that goes on between the Galaxy and the iPhone and I had a terrible experience with a Samsung Tocco four years ago. Yes it was a 5mp camera but there was a two second delay between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken. I have loads of photos of the back of my daughter’s head from a lovely holiday in Yorkshire.
 

I was advised to keep the 3Gs and reduce my contract but heck I wanted a new gadget to play with and I wanted to keep the iPhone to use as an iPod touch as well.
 

As the day approached I got more nervous. It is no exaggeration to confess that more than once I woke up in a panic at 4am thinking about my iPhone’s replacement.
 

In the end I got a HTC Desire S on £26 per month. I have had it three weeks now and feel comfortable to blog about it.

Best to list what I wanted to see how it compares.
 

1) A phone.

The HTC outstrips the iPhone massively. The reception on the iPhone was so weak that I couldn’t use it as a phone in my home village and to send a text message I had to type it, leave it on an upstairs window sill for a minute and then press send. The HTC gives me at least two bars wherever I am in my house.

iPhone 3Gs: 0, HTC Desire S: 1
 

2) A camera

The iPhone’s 3mp camera was great and shoved the idea that it was all about the mps straight back down other manufacturer’s throats. The HTC’s 5mp camera is it’s equal in terms of taking quality pics and has the added bonus of a flash so I can take pics at night now as well. A narrow victory for the Desire.

iPhone 3Gs:0, HTC Desire S: 2
 

3) Web surfing.

Similar, but undoubtedly slicker on the iPhone. The double tap to get columns to fill the screen works more accurately on the SGs and the HTC has an annoying habit of putting the text too close to the edge of the screen.

iPhone 3Gs:1, HTC Desire S: 2
 

4) Apps

Again the 3Gs takes this because the BBC News app – my most used – is far slicker. It fits the screen more quickly, responds more sensitively and is an all-round better user experience.

iPhone 3Gs:2, HTC Desire S: 2
 

5) Social networking

A tie. Neither is better or worse. Both do what I wanted them to do (along as I avoid the rubbish HTC Peep app for Twitter) so I can’t choose.

iPhone 3Gs:2.5, HTC Desire S: 2.5
 

6) Podcasts

Initially this was my biggest disappointment about the HTC. The iPod function of the iPhone was excellent at managing podcasts and there was no inbuilt function on the Desire to manage this. But for £4.95 I have bought the BeyondPod app and all of that functionality has been restored. I had to buy it as an extra but as I am saving £10 per month on the 3Gs, and £15 per month on the 4s, it doesn’t seem so bad. Another tie.

iPhone 3Gs:3, HTC Desire S: 3
 

So it’s a tie. There are other things to consider such as the fact I can now get a free Tetris app on the HTC (they were paid for only on the iPhone), it is cheaper to buy decent accessories such as case and scratchguards for an Android phone and the Notes app on the Android is rubbish by comparison.

I feel I have made out pretty well. I am better off, have an iPod touch at home with all my music on it and am no longer a slave to iTunes.

If the 4s was the same price? You know what? I would choose the HTC Desire because I can now use it as a phone and, after the two years of the iPhone in my house, the novelty value of that will take a while to wear off.

Since settling in to the HTC, I am now informed on a regular basis how many of my contacts are signed up to HTC Sense so perhaps I am preaching to the choir anyway?

The Times behind the Paywall

In the past I have been hovering between coolly-supportive and warmly non-committal when discussing the issue of Paywalls for online newsites.

It's a hugely emotive topic with a large proportion of the London-based media-scene being anti on the basis that content is free and that it is a sign of a burgeoning democracy of information.

The arguments for are, of course, that the media industry is suffering and suffering badly. Would Rupert Murdoch been quite so keen to close the NOTW if the profits had been at pre-Web 2.0 levels? The Guardian - the most fierce critic of paywalls - is in strife and the Guardian Media Group flogged off their regional arm to prop up the huge losses it was making?

I am currently doing a research project into reporting of the transfer window in football and one of the things I was most looking forward to was being 'forced' to subscribe to The Times online and see what all the fuss was about.

What a massive disappointment it has been. I have been looking at the site for almost a month now and I find it littered with poor practice in terms of layout, presentation and navigation.

I'll start with the homepage:



What an unappealing mass of text that is - no sentence breaks, no paragraph breaks just words chucked on a page. Then there's the primary navigation bar. I had to check with a colleague that my eyes weren't going - that it really was that fuzzy and out of focus (trust me, it's not my picture this time).

Then they opt for an extremely clunky hover menu.



I may not have the fastest broadband in the UK but that seems to slow the whole process down and, to my eyes at least, it is not an attractive thing designed to ease your way around their site.

And it does what bad hover menus do - when you drag the mouse from the primary to the top of the secondary (From Sport to Football in this case), you frequently get switched to the Money menu because your cursor is taken over that section of the navigation.



Next we'll go the football section.

More chunky text and this time words are cut off half-way through.



The appearance of that disembodied ",a...." looks incredibly amateur to my eyes.

Moving on through the page and the appearance is decent. The stories are well-ordered according the news-agenda of the day and there is a good amount of white space to make for a pleasant viewing experience.

But there are not many stories on the page and I think I want to find more. I want to read more about the Premier League and I spy that that the titles Premier League and More Premier League are links. But when I click then I am taken back to the top of the page as the link only goes to the main football page. Same with the Columnists link and now I am very disappointed because Matthew Syed is one of my favourite journos.

How about the Championship? My club Derby County are on the up so I'll read about what Clough jnr is up to.

Where, for the love of blood and stomach pills, is the Championship? In the Hover Menu? No. A separate section in the football page? No. A random link in a list? No.

I am sure it is there somewhere but by now I am off to somewhere else. Despite the fact I am paying for the Times, I do not use it for any kind of news information.

The proud claim of the Times was that it was bringing in a paywall to protect and maintain its quality. That has been a mega-fail.

I am disappointed because secretly I had hopes that the paywall would work. Journalism, and particularly investigative journalism (real investigative journalism not donning fancy dress and encouraging people to break the law), is an expensive business.

But you can't ask people to pay and then offer them a significantly reduced service.

My favourite journalism bloopers

'Tis the season for giving so, after a serious year in which journalism has taken a heavy battering from all sides, I though it time for a more lighthearted post.

So here we have it: My Top 10 Bloopers.

Before I start I would like to say that I have made some right corkers in my time. For example, on my first intro at the Derby Evening Telegraph I wrote:

Choir Leader Anne Smith is desperate for more male members to add a little cheer to her Christmas celebrations

Fortunately I had a very amused sub to save me from the embarrassment of that going in the paper.

So. Here goes:

1) It's a classic. I thought that by now all subs would be very wary of putting the words 'Blow' and 'Job' in close proximity but that's what happened on the Oxford Mail.



I know, I know. The kicker's in bold and there's a colon in between but still.....

2) The Juxtaposition is a funny beast and tricky to manage when advertising and editorial departments don't talk as much as they should.



But putting the words 'Don't bury your head' next to the picture of a mother describing the horror of hearing that her only son had been decapitated caused the Derby Evening Telegraph red-faces all round. I was on the early shift that day and had 35 complaints in the first 15 minutes!

3) What are Ant and Dec up to?



One from the Express this time. Difficult to see what happened here but a bit of rooting around on Google finds the claim that they changed 'Can Dec finally match Ant?' to 'Can Dec at last match Ant?' but forgot to update the right-hand page before sending to print!

4) I knew she was odd but WTF? Here, in the sadly departed London Lite, we see Amy Winehouse heading out on the town. But what's that she's holding? A severed hand. Eeek. Odd - even for her.

Note to sub - step away from the Photoshop.

5) Mary, Mary quite contrary. If this man is homeless, how was he attacked in his own home? Someone was half-asleep on this one.

6) Quite possibly the best smutty headline of all time. I mean, I know what the Gloucestershire Echo sub is trying to say. But extra services offered by girls at Cheltenham Ladies College caused quite a stir on Twitter last year.



7) This one from the Ludlow Journal only makes sense when you look at the keyboard and realise that I is next to O, and K is next to L but I doubt Tony Fuller was best pleased when he read this caption and saw he had been renamed Tiny Fukker.



8) What year is it again? This piece in the i was a very insightful column about the improvement in the Tour de France this year. Unfortunately the sub appears to be looking to the future.



9) My word that Kendra is dirty. The model and reality TV star released a candid autobiography but the Daily Mail seems to have got confused between its wrestling metaphor (no holds barred) and its pornography metaphor (no holes barred). Still, maybe this wasn't a mistake...



10) Back to Leveson again and if the good Lord (Leveson that is, not the big imaginary fella up in the clouds) isn't careful, this kicker will represent how every feels about the media for all eternity.



I am fairly certain that the Daily Mail was referring to the media scrum at the Amanda Knox trial or perhaps labeling their colleagues media scum was another dig at Desmond?

Hope you've enjoyed - feel free to use the comments to direct us to your own favourites.

I can't claim credit for all the above. Some I have spotted, some were spotted by HoldTheFrontPage and some came to me via Twitter.

Am I poisoning the minds of the young?

I had an interesting Twitter exchange with former senior journalist at the News of the World, Jules Stenson, at the weekend.

To be fair, I started it when I tweeted the following:

If you were starting to feel sorry for tabloid journos, listen to ex NOTW hack Jules Stenson on Media Show Pod. What a turd #journalism

Stenson took great exception to this and replied. I have to say I am impressed by his dedication to Twitter – he does not follow me, my tweet was not retweeted and I didn’t tag him directly. One can only assume he regularly searches Twitter – and perhaps the internet at large – to see what people are writing and saying about him.

His reply:

@MBradbrook Your students must be proud to have such an articulate man as a lecturer.

First off I have to say. It’s a fair cop. I was not at my most eloquent when I described Stenson as a ‘turd’ – but then, in my defence, neither was I at my most inaccurate.

I should add that I don’t personally know him so perhaps I should amend my description to ‘professional turd’, because for all I know he might be lovely to kittens and a perfect delight in his home life.

What was it about his interview that irked me so? Well, it was his lack of honesty. By that I don’t mean that he outright lied but, like many tabloid journalists, he failed to tell the whole truth.

Two examples:

1) Hugh Grant was a legitimate target for press intrusion because he supported greater regulation of the press.

2) Steve Coogan was a legitimate target for press intrusion as he gave Piers Morgan a ‘laddish interview’ in which he talked about his private life.

What is the dishonesty here? Well how about:

1) Hugh Grant has had his private life ‘investigated’ by the tabloids for far longer than he has supported press regulation. It’s not a chicken and egg situation here people – he has been a topic of fascination for 15 years plus.

2) Likewise, Coogan has also been on the receiving end so often before the interview with Piers Morgan that it renders Stenson’s argument disingenuous in the extreme.

To be honest I was a little embarrassed at being caught descending to the level of name-calling but replied to Stenson as follows:

@julesstenson sometimes it's just best to tell it as it is. There are worse crimes in #journalism than a lack of articulation

He was on no mood to debate journalistic crimes however and went on the offensive:

@MBradbrook Staggered they let you teach journalism.

Presuming ‘they’ to be the University of Gloucestershire (my employer) it seems an incredible statement to make on the basis of a 140 character tweet. But then again, doesn’t that just sum up the issues with tabloid journalism? No research, no analysis just a snap judgement.

But no problem , I thought. I’m better than this so I invited Stenson to debate the issue at the University of Gloucestershire – I’m sure that while he was here he could probably even find a couple of students willing to describe me ‘a turd’ just to add balance.

But no. Debate was not high on Stenson’s agenda:

@MBradbrook You just carry on filling young minds at the University of Gloucs with poison and feel very proud of yourself.

Poison! Many of my students will be willing to testify that I fill their minds with boredom but poison seems a bit strong. Perhaps he thinks that Grant, Coogan and myself are to form a lunatic fringe of the Leveson Inquiry and start firebombing the temples of St Rupert?

Not a bad idea. Perhaps then we’ll get the journalism we deserve rather than the patronising, celebrity-filled, dishonest tat that gets served up right now.

What’s Stenson up to now? Well he’s tweeting about Christopher Jefferies of course. He’s tweeting about the most undeserving victim of press intrusion and monstering in history.



What a nice man.

Mind you. I am smiling because I have written the name Stenson so often now that all I can think of is Fenton, the deer-herding labrador.

Is it a good thing to give a platform to racists?

Interesting article about Twitter on the BBC website today by pundit and former striker Mark Bright providing a platform for racists.

The article has been inspired by high profile investigations into allegations of racism made against England captain John Terry and Liverpool striker Lois Suarez and offensive yet completely unsurprising comments by Sepp Blatter who suggested that racism should be dealt with by a handshake and then forgotten about.

It's a strong article written from a position of knowledge and experience and makes a compelling read.

Mark Bright is 100 per cent correct that social media in being used as a platform for racists. It's not just Twitter, the worst by a long way is YouTube - I have stopped looking at the comments section of the video sharing site because of the vile racist nature of many of them.

Liberal society in general has for a long time held on to a 'no platform' policy in relation to racism. The basic theory is don't let racists have a voice as that voice is oxygen which will fuel the fire of their hatred and perhaps ignite it in others.

But now, as Bright has identified, that fire is far from extinguished. In this country many have believed it has been and we have been full of criticism of other countries which we perceive to have lower standards than us.

Incidents of racism in UK football grounds have been identified as a one-off. But that is as true as the News International's claim that phone hacking was perpetrated by a 'rogue reporter'.

Social media is open source. There are legal constraints of course but the judiciary has not yet come to terms with how to implement the law to a platform with millions of characters of information being uploads every day.

So 'no platform' is not working in social media - it promotes freedom of speech and those opposed to 'no platform' have long said that breaching the principle of freedom of speech is a price not worth paying.

Racists were ignored for so long that many thought they had gone away or at least that their number has diminished to an insignificant level. Yet social media is showing the pure folly of that thinking - just read some of the abuse that Bright has received during his time on Twitter.

"When James Vaughan joined Norwich from Everton, I tweeted to say, 'Good luck to James Vaughan with his move to Norwich'. Someone replied to say, 'I don't want any more blacks at Norwich. We've got enough, if you want to watch blacks and foreigners, go to see Arsenal'."

That's a horrible thing for him to have to read yet as a result of a simple retweet, the perpetrator was banned for life from Norwich City Football Club.

The issue is back out in the open and can be dealt with rather than denied.

Perhaps we have to accept that 'no platform' is unworkable now that social media is coming to the fore and embrace that element as an opportunity to more accurately assess society.