Critical Reflection

This year WINOL has been extremely successful in respects to the website, the focus of the term has been switched from the bulletin towards focusing on the website and increasing the amount of content, quality of the content and number of articles being written to increase the number of viewers of the website an improve its Alexa ranking, which we achieved. The current Alexa ranking for WINOL.co.uk is 10,338 in the UK and 476,793 worldwide which is a vast improvement on previous years and months, and is constantly falling. On the 27^th of November the websites UK ranking was at 21.900 which shows a drop of over 10,000 places in two weeks. I think this is because of the push for better written stories and updating the website all week, rather than just having a mass of stories hit the website on a Wednesday and then have no more updates for the rest of the week, having recent stories makes the website more current and actually gives people a reason to check it daily.

The re-design of the website has been a massive success, the new layout is much simpler to navigate and more attractive to the eye. Sport on the website has been sparser than news, partially because of a smaller reporting team and no dedicated sports writers updating the pages throughout the week and because of inconsistency within the team, some reporters would write and upload their match reports or stories promptly when told whereas other would not.

During the final week of the term WINOL 99 news was introduced. These short 99 second long daily updates where a new project to provide a daily video update, although each of these videos was only viewed between 47 and 105 times together throughout the week they gained more views than the weekly bulletin for the week. This can also be used to help explain the very quick increase in the Alexa ranking for the website over the last 2 weeks, these videos show that at least 47 people a day viewed the website to watch the daily 99 second news update which can only be a positive thing. After a bit more practice the production of these short bulletins will become much more streamlined and it will become easier for them to be produced, but this does add another daily deadline on top of the weekly one for the bulletin and it is important these are met.

The features section of the website and the features team have been extremely good this semester. They have been consistently producing well produced features including two extremely good profile interviews, one with a elderly man who used to Hitler's neighbour and another with Paul Blackburn who spent 20 years in prison due to a miscarriage of justice. These two videos alone have gained nearly 800 views on youtube. The features sections on the website are varied and interesting ranging from fashion photo shoots to confessional interviews and sports gonzo pieces, overall the features have been well produced and have been a real credit to the website.

The bulletin itself has been good this year, in the first few weeks it was rocky because of the new reporters getting to grips with new equipment and not knowing how to properly structure packages. The first three packages are of good quality because they were produced by experienced reporters, the 4^th package and the 'and finally' have many technical issues as does the sport because of inexperienced reporters and a lack of correct equipment. Although all the reporters received basic camera training and an understanding of how to use them they lacked an understanding of controlling sound, they did not know that radio microphones were available and were still unsure about some fairly basic camera functions. The technical ability of the reporters did improve but editorially they were still weak, I believe this was because of a lack of a bulletin focused debrief. Although we did receive a debrief from the guest editors each week this does not give enough of a focused review of the work for people to really improve editorially, and myself and Dan, the news editor, also gave our teams feedback but are not as detailed as Chris and Brian. I think that having these focused sessions would have improved the quality of reporters packages faster. Overall the quality of the packages did improve by the end of the year with reporters learning to use sequences and planning how they will structure their packages.

The production team was well run and organised on Wednesday and the bulletin was uploaded promptly, before five, each week which helped the bulletin views, which although were lower than normal were not terrible, the highest number of views the bulletin reached was 246 views, and the lowest gained only 43 views. There was a lack of production help on a tuesday during the filming of Sportsweek, although myself and Graham, the production editor, were experienced enough to produce the show ourselves there was a lack of focus and urgency towards sportsweek, especially when compared to the bulletin.

We have produced several special shows this semester, which I have been heavily involved in, including the coverage of the US election results, live coverage of the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate and producing an awards ceremony for the yearly British Journalism Training Council Awards. For the US elections I used the tricaster, a portable vision mixer, to live stream the output from the gallery to Ustream. This was the second time I had used the tricaster for this, the first being for the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate. The stream was successful although it did suffer sounds issues which were either due to a poor connection between the tricaster and the sound desk or a problem with the way the tricaster was pushing the sound to youtube. Although the stream had sound issues it was active for the two hours. The special itself was successful, although the planning had to be changed at the last minute because the result was announced before the broadcast. The highlight of the output were the Skype calls from America, we have tried several of these before, not from america, and it is very rare that they work live or are good enough quality to broadcast.

The second special I mentioned was the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate, I was heavily involved with the production of this event, leading the production team. This event was extremely well organised by Louis O'brien and he managed to get all 6 candidates and an audience of nearly 300 people to the university for the debate. As with the US elections I set up the tricaster to live stream the debate, this time with three cameras. We also set up two separate cameras for use in the final edit as well. The stream was live for the hour and a half that the debate ran for. Throughout the debate I live mixed between the three cameras, because there was no ability to have talkback it meant that I couldn’t communicate with the camera operators, this meant that we have to designate shots for each camera. This was a simple solution but was by no means perfect because. The stream was viewed by nearly 300 people when it was active.

The third special that I mentioned was the BJTC awards. Again as with the HPCC debate I lead the production of this project which was a large undertaking. The show had been partial organised as far as a venue had been arranged and then presenter and guests were organised, but all the live and video production work was left to me to organise. The final production included 6 cameras, a vt operator, sound, lighting, Autocue and the project was directed by Angus Scott. As well as prepping the production team and working on the script with Angus I also produced close to thirty minutes of video which was to be played during the show, these videos were a big challenge because they had to be played to match the presenter, Alistair Stewart, as he announced the nominees, winners and cued several video clips of the nominated projects. I edited several versions of each video for each section before discovering a system that worked. The show was a success and nearly went off completely without a hitch, the only issue came about because some of the nominees were late and Alistair failed to cue some of the videos. After the event I also edited the footage from all 6 cameras together into a 20 minute video of the awards show, there were several challenges while editing, there were major sound issues which took 9 hours to resolve. These projects where a massive undertaking and took up a lot of time, especially the BJTC awards, but they have helped to raise the profile of the course and WINOL within the university and to future employers who were at the ceremony.

My main role within WINOL was sports editor which means that I was responsible for the sports output on the bulletin as well as producing the weekly sports show, Sportsweek. Overall I am happy with the semesters sports coverage although there are several ways in which it could have been improved. Firstly I had the challenge of gaining access to the clubs who let us film, most were extremely cooperative and happy to have us back but Eastleigh FC demanded that we get a football conference photography license. To obtain this I first had to gain a copy of the university insurance policy and send that to the conference league, I eventually obtained the license and gained access back into the club, but during the period that we could not gain access it was difficult to have enough content to fill sportsweek.

Due to a lack of home fixtures, the only ones we can film, and a shortage of reporters due to personal reasons I found that I would often have to produce packages and interviews to fill time to have enough content to fill sportsweek. The lack of fixtures also meant that reporters would often have to find news stories or produce sports based features to make sure they produced a package each week, this started of well with reporters finding stories to pitch in the sports meetings but lost momentum as the term went on for reasons I can't really place.

The quality of the sports coverage was fairly poor to begin with, as can be expected, but I tried to get the quality up as quickly as possible to provide the best service possible to the clubs. The quality did improve quickly as the reporters got used to filming sport and with my help they improved their scripting, which is a difficult skill to master in sport. One problem I encountered early on was reporters not finishing their packages early and putting pressure on me to get sport ready for the bulletin, because of this I introduced a sports board, like the news board, which set out which match the reporter would go to each week, set them times for their packages and most importantly deadlines, which were mostly met.

One change to the sports this semester was that we pre recorded the sports output for the bulletin each week, this decision was made because of the new desk which was too small for two presenters to sit at. This put a lot of pressure on me on a wednesday because while trying to finish the sportsweek production and make sure that the packages were up to a good quality and edit the sports for the bulletin.

The audience for sportsweek varied a lot and was mainly reliant on twitter and if the football clubs retweeted the links to their followers. The Basingstoke Bison videos continued to get good viewing figures with two videos getting around 500 views each, but again these figures fluctuated and I failed to get any consistency in the audience figures. I did try to gain access to several football and ice hockey forums to try to get a consistent audience but the registration was refused so I could not post the links which would have increased the number of views.

Reporting Elections

The election period starts with either the dissolution of parliament or an earlier time when the Queen announces her intention to dissolve parliament. Once this period begins there are several laws and regulations that journalists must keep in mind while reporting. The main reason for these restrictions is because during an election period it is even more important than normal for broadcasters to be fair and impartial, because we cannot influence the voter’s opinions. These impartiality guidelines are set by the broadcasters codes of conducts, either the BBC of Ofcom.

During an election period it is extremely important for broadcaster to be impartial, and show their impartiality. Newspapers do not have to be impartial and can be as biased as they want towards a political party. But because of the intrusive nature of the media impartiality is extremely important.

Each of the main three political parties must be given equal time and prominence to express their opinions, this goes further than normal balance which is showing both sides of the story. A broadcaster must give the exact amount of time to each major political party, and if there is a fourth that is also prominent in the area, this means that each candidate or leader must be given an equal amount of air time, to the second, to give their opinion.

Due weight means that you do not have to give each opinion the same amount of time and prominence throughout a broadcast, package or article, but instead give due weight to an opinion with regards to the amount of people that hold it, so minor opinions do not need to be given the same weight as commonly held ones.

As far as the legal restrictions go, we still have to be mindful of libel as always, but within elections candidates are likely to make defamatory allegations about one and other. There is no statutory privilege for media covering elections, but if the statements are said within a press conference or public meeting, then as long as they report is fast accurate and fair the journalist should be able to rely upon qualified privilege.

The laws against publishing false statements is designed to stop any dirty tricks between candidates and their supporters. This law makes it a criminal offence to:

• make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of an election candidate, if the purpose of publishing the false statement is to affect how many votes he/she will get.

It is a defence to show that when the statement was published it was believed that the comment was true or had reasonable grounds to believe that the statement was true

Exit polls and reporting from a polling station is another legal danger zone. In the UK you cannot release exit poll data before the polls close, this includes vox popps with voters.

Section 66A of the Representation of the People Act 1983, says it is a criminal offence to:

• Publish, before the polls are closed, any statement about the way in which voters have voted in that election, where this statement is, or might reasonably be taken to be, based in information given by voters after they have voted

And to

• To publish, before a poll is closed, any forcast – including any estimate – of that election result, if the forecast is based on exit poll information from voters, or which might reasonably be taken to be based on it

So if a journalist broadcasts or prints any information from exit polls or information about how people have voted while the polls are open then the publisher is liable to a fine of up to £5000 fine or up to 6 months in jail term.

This limits what reporters can say and do during an election day, the election is the news of the day but as far as being able report the only thing journalists can really report about are how many people are voting. This is why during elections, like the Police and Crime Commissioner elections a couple of weeks ago, all the news, online and broadcast, will be focused on the numbers that are coming out to vote. There is no way this can affect the outcome of the results or affect public opinion so it is legally safe.

Confidentiality and privacy

A breach of confidence occurs when the confident, the person who has been told the confidential material, abuses the confidential material.

There are three elements to a breach on confidence:

• The information must have 'the necessary quality of confidence'
• The information must have been imparted in circumstances imposing an obligation of confidence; and
• There must be an unauthorised use of that information tot the detriment of the party communicating it

This means that for there to be a breach of confidence the material must first be seen to be confidential and to have been obtained in confidential circumstances. Information that is seen as trivial is generally not confidential.

Certain situations create an obligation of confidentiality, a contractual relationship like one between employer and employee, will usually contain a confidentiality clause so that employees cannot reveal an employers secret. Employees in the security services may not have any contract but due to the nature of their work it is viewed that they have a duty of confidence because of the nature of their work.

Injunctions were introduced to prevent breaches of confidence. When a journalist obtains confidential material the journalist should contact the person, or as it is put in the BBC style guide they should be give 'the right to reply'. The issue with this is that this gives the opportunity for the person to obtain an injunction preventing the use of the information. This creates the 'Journalists dilemma' as McNae's calls it where a journalist has to make the decision if they should check the information and risk an injunction or publish and possible face libel damages.

Journalists do have a defence against injunctions in matters involving freedom of expression which comes under section 12 of The Human Rights Act. The confider, the person who has had their confidence breached, must show that it is likely that at trial it will be deemed that the publication should not be allowed. An injunction cannot be granted unless the journalist is not present when the application is made, unless it is deemed that the person seeking the injunction has taken all practicable steps to inform the journalist.

It is important to remember that an injunction against one is an injunction against all, so if one newspaper has an injunction against it not allowing it to publish confidential material if they are aware of the injunction, and if they do publish they can be guilty of contempt of court. This means that is up to the person seeking the injunction to persuade the court rather than the defendant, and the court must try to decide the likely outcome of the full trial.

Injunctions are not cheap and the fees can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. The person who seeks and interim injunction must agree to pay any damages to the defendant if it is deemed at trial that the injunction should not have been granted.

The right to privacy is granted by article 8 of the human rights act, which says:

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private or family life, his home and his correspondence
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society.
   -in the interest of national security, public public safety or the economic well being of the county
   -for the prevention or disorder of crime
   -for the protection of health and morals, or
   -for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others

To put it simply there are several exceptions to the rules on the grounds of public interest, there are :

1. deterring or exposing crime or serious impropriety
2. protecting the public health or safety, and
3. preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of the individual or organisation

As it is with confidence, where information mist be seen to have the 'necessary quality of confidence', it is necessary to judge whether a person has a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. If it is deemed that they do then to publish this information is a breach of confidence the person may obtain an injunction just like confidentiality.

The main thing to remember with confidentiality as a journalist is to weigh up the two sides of the dilemma, if you have confidential material and contact the confider before publication you rick an injunction and the story ending, but if you publish without contacting them then you can risk a libel case.

Copyright

Earlier in the semester we had a special guest lecture on Copyright given by Peter Hodges who worked in the BBC as a senior member of their legal team for a number of years.

The importance of copyright law is to allow people to protect their intellectual property, it protects the products of peoples skill, creativity, labour and time. This includes literary, dramatic, artistic or musical work, sound recordings, film, broadcast or typographical arrangements.

There is copyright in so many areas of life that some people may not realise when they are being breached, for example there are several copyrights in a single musical recording. As well as the recording itself there is also a copyright for the arrangement and the original song. So a song writer can write a popular song, they will own one copyright which is to the melody and words in the song, then several artists may record a version of the song, each of these different recordings would be covered under a new copyright, one for the performance and one for the arrangement.

One interesting example that Peter flagged was the Eiffel Tower, obviously it is one of the most recognisable landmarks in the world, but it is a danger for any tourist who wants a nice holiday snap. This is because the lighting design that illuminates the tower at night is copyrighted by the company that created it, this is mainly to restrict the way that the tower is shown and distributed in commercial media but it is something to be aware of.

To create a copyright of your work it is fairly simple, merely create a piece of work that shows some skill, creativity, labour or judgement, and then publish it. There is no need to seek for the copyright to be obtained by registration. Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you created the work, you may not hold the copyright. If you create the work while under employment then the employer will hold the copyright rather than the person who created the work.

There are several rights that are granted to the holder of the copyright with regards to the work that is copyrighted, there are:

• to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies
• to import or export the work
• to create derivative works
• to perform or display the work publicly
• to sell or assign these rights to others
• to transmit or display by radio or video.

As you can see these are very restrictive, as you would expect, but there are ways of still using copyrighted material even if you did not create it yourself. Before I move onto that I will briefly talk about how long a copyright lasts, using material that is out of copyright is always easier when possible.

The standard length for a copyright is the life of the author plus 50-70 years dependant on the type of work. For literary, dramatic, musical works and films the copyrights lasts for 70 years after the authors death. For broadcast and sound recordings the copyright lasts for 50 years, from the end of the year it was recorded or released.

As I said the easiest way to deal with copyright is to avoid it by either creating your own work, e.g. taking your own photographs, or by using work which is in the public domain.

But there are several ways of using copyrighted material within the law, the first is to simply buy the martial. This then passes the copyright from the original author onto the person who bought it, this then gives them the right to distribute the work as they want.

The second and most commonly used way of using copyrighted material, this time without permission of the copyright holder and without paying for it, is fair dealing. You can only copyrighted material use fair dealing for 3 purposes, these are:

• research and private study
• criticism and review
• reporting current events

The first purpose is not really important for us because it is purely non-commercial. Criticism and review allows the use of quotes from books and plays and clips from films and broadcast when being used to write a criticism or review. On WINOL we have used fair dealing for this purpose a lot within Ewan's gaming review show.

The third purpose is reporting current events, this allows you to use copyright material to report a current event as long as sufficient acknowledgement is given to the author and it has been made available to the public. This defence does not cover photography. For a while there was a dispute over the football highlights and if they could be used under fair dealing of reporting current events, this is because of the amount broadcasters pay for the rights to broadcast sports.

I mentioned above that reporting current events doesn’t cover photography, but there is a way of using photographs within copyright law without paying the creator. Creative commons is a way of sharing copyrighted material, usually photographs, within certain guidelines set out by the author. These guidelines include crediting the author, whether the work can be modified in any way and if the work can be used for commercial means. Good sources of creative commons work are flickr and youtube, and on WINOL we try to use as much creative commons material as possible when we cannot get the images ourselves.

One point that Peter made that was important for me and my role within WINOL was about incidental inclusion and how it doesn't cover music. This means that if football fans are singing a song or tune at a match or if there is music being played over a PA then it is a breach of copyright. This is something I deal with on a weekly basis, especially with ice hockey and so have had to make reporters drop clips or cut shots shorter to avoid incidentally including music.

One of the biggest copyright battles in recent years involved Youtube and its parent company Google who were being accused pf massive intentional copyright infringement by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. The lawsuit would have cost Google $1bn but they won and the lawsuit was thrown out. This is a landmark case between two global companies but it is good to note that copyright infringements incur much higher costs that libel cases.

Dancing with Defamation

Defamation is one the biggest if not the biggest legal issue us journalists have to deal with, even on WINOL I have found myself discussing it with reporters and lecturers. So what actually is defamation , in the simplest terms defamation or defaming someone is saying something negative about a person, company or organisation. Which as a journalist can be a difficult this to avoid.

The legal definition of a defamatory statement as given in McNae's is that a statement about a person defamatory if it tends to:

• Expose a person to hatred, ridicule, or contempt; or
• causes the person to be shunned or avoided; or
• lower the person in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally; or
• disparage the person in his/her business, trade, office, or profession.

The words tends to are very important in this case because it means that the claimant, the person claiming to have been defamed, doesn't have to show that they were actually exposed to hatred or ridicule ect.

There are ways of defaming a person without actually asserting a defamatory statement, these are known as inference and innuendo.

Inference

As the name implies, is when someone infers a defamatory statement, this could be something as simple as saying “a man, known for his views against alcoholism was seen leaving a pub late last night, the local member was said to have been stumbling and dropped his mobile phone.” This implies that he was drunk and because of his stance against alcohol this statememnt would defame him. Even though I have not said he was drunk, by saying he was leaving a pub late and night and stumbling I have inferred that he was.

McNae's definition of inference is:

• An inference is a statement with a secondary meaning which can be understood by someone without special knowledge who 'reads between the lines in the light of his general knowledge and experience of wordy affairs.

Innuendo

Innuendo is similar to inference, but the main difference is that innuendo is that unlike inference innuendo can seem like a normal statement to the general public, but there is a group people with special knowledge that can then understand that the statement is in fact implying something defamatory.

McNae's definition of innuendo is:

• An innuendo is a statement which may seem innocuous by some people but which will be seen as defamatory by people with special knowledge.

The person claiming to have been defamed by innuendo must prove two thing, firstly that the special facts or circumstances giving rise to the innuendo and secondly that there are people who know about these when the statement was published.

A high profile example of defamation through innuendo which has is active at the moment is Lord McAlphine after the recent Newsnight broadcast. The BBC thought that they would be legally safe because they did not name anyone during the report, but it has become clear that they gave enough information to allude towards McAlpine, which then lead to people like George Monboit to tweet about the report, identifying McAlpine,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9683457/Lord-McAlpine-Guardian-will-not-pay-George-Monbiots-legal-costs.html

This aticle: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/lord-mcalpine-accuses-media-defamation-innuendo-over-child-abuse-links gives an overview of the case.

With the introduction of no win no fee lawyers in recent years the realm of libel courts to the masses where as before they were mainly used by wealthy and litigious celebrities. This means that journalists have to be even more careful about what they write and say.

But of you do defame someone then there are several things the claimant must prove to be able to sue for damages, these are:

• the publication is defamatory; and
• it may be reasonably understood to refer to him/her – that is, 'identification'; and
• it has been published to a third person

An easy three word mantra to remember this is: defamation, identification, publication.

Defamation: The claimant must prove they have been defamed, I have already been through what makes a statement defamatory.

Identification: The claimant must prove that the material identifies him/her. On this subject McNae writes “The test of whether the published statement identifies the claimant is whether it would reasonably lead people acquainted with him/her to believe that he/her was the person referred to.”

In 1862 a judge said that it is only necessary that “those who know the claimant can make out that he/she is the person meant”

Journalist have to be careful when writing about members of organisations, for example if these is only a single female officer in a station and I wrote something defamatory about the female police officer, but did not name her, it is obvious who I am writing about. Also derogatory comments about institutions can reflect upwards onto the person who runs the institution, McNae especially warns about criticising schools.

Wrongly identifying is another danger we face, this means checking facts like how a name is spelt and that a picture if of the correct person. McNae gives an example from the Daily Mail who published a photo of the wrong man in the coverage of a robbery trial.

http://www.rjw.co.uk/legal-services/media-libel-privacy/defamation-libel-slander/recent-cases/case/negligent-misstatement-about-nurse-leads-to-defamation-claim/#axzz2CPFLB2Lx Here is an example in which a newspaper clearly defames a nurse, but has no legal defence because they named the wrong nurse in the article.

The way to avoid miss identification is to identify someone as mush as you can, this can mean including a persons age, address and occupation alongside the CORRECT picture. This is especially important when court reporting.

It is possible to defame a group, if the group is small enough. So if a journalist writes something defamatory about a small group or organisation, McNae uses the example of a small police station, but does not identify a specific person in the station then if the group is small enough all the members of the station can sue. There is currently no actual number with defines how large these groups can be, but a group of 35 police dog handler's was views sufficient to identify them as individuals.

A well known example of this occurred after allegations that a detective at Banbury CID had raped a woman. The publication failed to name an individual and were sued by the 12 detectives.

The final thing to talk about before wrapping up Identification is Juxtaposition. This is when a photograph is placed incorrectly or the wrong photograph is used, this can be especially bad if the position of the picture suggest that it is the person being identified in a separate story.

Publication: This is the simplest to prove, if the statement has been said to or been written down and shown to anyone other than the person it refers to then it has been published, and once it is in a newspaper it has definitely been published. As far as the internet is concerned this is where things can become a little tricky, within English copyright law a claimant cannot sue unless there is a 'significant publication'. The example provided by McNae's showed that only 5 people had viewed the defamatory material in the UK, and three of these were the claimants 'camp'.

One other thing for people to be mindful of, especially within WINOL and as students is the laws around repeating statement of others. Every repetition of a libel is a fresh publication, which creates a fresh cause of action, and there is no defence for you to day you were just repeating the words of others. One of the most common cases of this is repeating statements made by interviewees without being able to prove they are truthful.

It is key to remember that we are all publishers now, every blog, tweet and post on facebook can defame someone and can land you with a big legal bill.

Defences

Now that we can identify when a statement will be defamatory and when you can be sued lets look at the defences.

There are three main defences a journalist can use against libel claims, these are:

• Justification
• Comment
• Privilege

Justification is the simplest and best defence of the three, this defence is purely proving that what you said it true. There are some requirements you must meet to be able to use this defence, these are:

• that the published material complained of can be proved in a court to be substantially true
• the material must be proved to be true on the 'balance of probabilities'

This is less evidence than is required for 'beyond reasonable doubt' but the publication must have enough evidence to persuade a jury, or a judge when no jury is present, that their version of events is the right one. If this requirement is met it gives complete protection against the libel action.

Honest Comment

This is the second of the main defences and put simple is giving an honest opinion, like with justification there are several requirements if this defence is to be used, these are:

• the published comment must be honestly held in theopinion of the person making it
• it must be recognisable as comment rather than as factual allegations
• it must be based or provably true facts/privileged material
• it must implicitly or explicitly indicate, at least in general terms, the facts on which is it was based.

http://www.thestage.co.uk/features/analysis-opinion/2012/11/ground-breaking-libel-case-was-close-shave-for-gillettes/ Here is an example where the honest comment defence failed, even after it was amended.

Privilege

There are two types of privilege, absolute and qualified privilege, absolute privilege provides a complete defence against any defamatory action, even if malicious. Members of parliament have absolute privilege, but as far as journalist are concerned we have to make do with qualified privilege.

Qualified privilege is a defence available to journalist reporting certain events, there are:

• debates held in public at any legislature in the world
• court proceedings held in public anywhere in the world
• public meetings and press conferences
• the meetings of councils, their committees and sub-committees
• statements issued by for the public by government departments

Like all of the defences there are several requirements a journalist must meet to use this defence. Put simple these are fast, accurate and fair, which is a mantra that has been instilled in us from the beginning of the course as a general way to conduct good journalism.

Fast or contemporaneous means that the report must be published 'as soon as practicable'. For newspapers this means the day after the hearing, and for broadcasters on their next broadcast, be that the same day or the start of the next day.

Accurate as always being accurate is important in journalism, and especially so within court, this means making sure not to report a witness and the defendant or is there are several defendants making sure that you report the correct sentence for each.

Fair there are two important factors here, the first is being without malice, the journalist must only publish with the motive to inform the public.

The final defence I will talk about is the Reynold's defence, this defence came about after the 1998 case between Albert Reynolds and the Times Newspaper, the action came about after the Times published an article claiming that Reynolds had misled the Irish parliament. Although the Times lost the case, after the trial it was deemed that it is a journalists duty to publish media in the public interest, even if it cannot be proven to be true.

Lord Nichollis set out a list of rules to show if the publication is the work of a responsible journalist and therefore able to use the defence, these rules are:

1. The nature of the information, and the extent to which the subject-matter is a matter of public concern.
2. The source of the information. Some informants have no direct knowledge of the events. Some have their own axes to grind, or are being paid for their stories.
3. The steps taken to verify the information.
4. The status of the information. The allegation may have already been the subject of an investigation which commands respect.
5. The urgency of the matter. News is often a perishable commodity.
6. Whether comment was sought from the plaintiff. He may have information others do not possess or have not disclosed. An approach to the plaintiff will not always be necessary.
7. Whether the article contained the gist of the plaintiff's side of the story.
8. The tone of the article. A newspaper can raise queries or call for an investigation. It need not adopt allegations as statements of fact.
9. The circumstances of the publication, including the timing.
   
10. The Circumstances of the publication, including the timing

A recent use of the Reynold's defence can be seen here http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/mar/21/times-libel-reynolds-defence?intcmp=239 in which the Times used it to publish an article about police corruption. The original publication in the newspaper and on the website were deemed to be covered under the Reynold's defence. But after a police investigation Flood was exonerated of any wrong doing, the Times failed to update their website and the judge in the court of appeals said that the failure to update the website was not responsible journalism. This is an important thing to remember that once a story is written and published it cannot be pushed out of your mind, because changes in the story can change your legal defence.

Currently there is a new Defamation bill going through the House of Lords at the moment which will no doubt change libel law and the defences journalists have. The key thing at the moment looks the be the inclusion of a simple and effective public interest defence which will hopefully provide more freedom for journalists. You can read more about the libel reform here http://www.libelreform.org/

A recent defamation case I saw while writing this blog is from Australia, where google has had to pay $208,000 to a man whos name was lined to a gangster. This raises the question that can a search engine defame someone when it is just running off an algorithm. I am sure google will not let this happen again because the suit came about after their failure to act.

It is interesting to see how the internet and defamation have come together this week and when English defamation law will catch up.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 into an extremely wealthy family and was home schooled up until the age of 14 when he moved to Realschule in Linz and attended the school at the same time at Hitler, but it is unknown if the two ever met.

When the First World War broke out Wittgenstein enrolled in the Austro-Hungarian army in an artillery workshop, he was extremely well honoured and was decorated with several medals for his role in defending against the Brusilov offensive. He also fought on the Russian front and the Italian front. He took a military leave in 1918 and stayed in Vienna where he completed the Tractatus and submitted it for publishing.  

After he sent the Tractatus for pubhlishing a series of events which made him rethink his life and give away his vast fortune; his brother killed himself,  the Tractatus was not published; David Pinsent, a man whom he had fallen in love with as a teenager, had died in a plane crash and as if to ad insult to injury he was captured by allied roves an spent 9 months in an Italian prisoner of ward camp. When he returned to his family he talked incessantly of suicide and decided to do two things: give away his fortune, as I mentioned, and become a teacher.

While Wittgenstein was living and teaching in rural Austria, where he gained a reputation as a bit of a tyrant, the Tractatus was published first in Germany and later in England with an introduction by Bertrand Russel.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is written as 7 short declrarative sentences which make it sound simplistic, but each sentence if followed by several footnotes, each itself a statement which proves the former.

The seven propositions of the Tractatus are:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with a sense
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: . This is the general form of a proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein is his last and most famous statement “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” creates a limit on what can and cannot be discussed and analysed in a logical way. This puts a limit on language and philosophy and means that matephysical ideas like God, religion and ethics should not be discussed by philosophers because statements about them cannot be verified.

The rest of the statements and their relevant footnotes discuss how language relates to objects and how these objects can be analysed using language and broken down to simpler and simpler forms, this is a similar idea to logical atomism.  

Proposition 1:

1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

This sets out some basic principles for the following propositions, mainly outlining what objects are, what they are made off and what does and doesn’t count as an object.

I’m going to jump in the middle here to “1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.” Wittgenstein coined this idea of a logical space which is somewhere in which everything that can, and can be proven to exist, does. So for example a desk, a chair and a computer and all the parts which make them exist in this “logical space” whereas god, love and ethics would not. I have started off here because I think it’s a good way to think about what facts are and how they relate to the rest of the statements.  

Proposition 2 is where the logical analysis is introduced in its simplest form.

2 What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs.
2.01 A state of affairs is a combination of objects.
2.02 Objects are simple.

Here Wittgenstein introduces the concepts of objects and states of affairs.

An object is basically a simple object, something that is really made up of one object so say a chair leg. Whereas the chair itself is a state of affairs because it is made up of several objects; legs, arms, a back and a bottom. This way of thinking about the world as objects and states of affairs can let you analyse objects down to their atomic states and let you create abstract ideas like a forest or a city.

Proposition 3 combined with 2 brings to an end Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language. A basic overview of this theory is that the world consists of interconnected atomic facts, and propositions make up pictures of the world.

Language is at the basis of Wittgenstein’s work and in his later book Philosophical Investigations he discussed the concept of something he called “language games”.

The “language game” is a simple concept compared to those I have talked about the in Tratatus, and at its roots says that language, for example the English language is a game and has a set of rules that in essence all the “players” must adhere to. So when you begin a conversation with a person you are both entering into a language game with a set of rules, grammar, which you have both agreed to. Different situations have different rules so for example if I were in the pub I would use different language than if I were in a job interview so the language games in the two different situations have a different set of rules.

James Joyce - Circe

Circe is the 15th chapter of James Joyce during which a man, Bloom, as he journeys though Dublin’s red light district called Nighttown looking for his friend Stephen. Throughout his journey Bloom has many hallucinations caused by his subconscious.

Blooms first hallucination begins when he is confronted by guilt after buying food from a butchers, this hallucination begins with his father Rudolph who questions why his son is in the red light district, or Nighttown. Rudolph questions whether Bloom has a soul because he is in the red light district and Bloom feels guilty about this. This guilt is personified in the hallucination by the appearance of first his mother and then his wife. This hallucination, from a Freudian viewpoint is a manifestation of Blooms guilt, which was caused by him spending money in the butchers and venturing into the red light district. Freud would say that this guilt was caused by Blooms super ego because it knows that because he is married he shouldn’t be in the red light district and because Bloom gave in to his id when he bought the food because he got the instant gratification of buying the food on an impulse. Blooms hallucinations continue in the form of Mrs Breen who flirts with Bloom and then mocks him for being in the red light district, continuing the focus on Blooms guilt.

The next hallucination begins when Bloom feeds a dog in the street, which leads to him being arrested for prevention of cruelty to animals which sees Bloom be put on trial. This trial is an examination of Blooms sexual past and his repressed sexual fantasies. These are displayed within the hallucination as letters which Bloom has written to the women, which I think in reality are his sexual desires. Freud said that this sexual repression comes from the rules put in place by society which make us repress our primitive desires, therefore it is again a conflict between the id and super ego caused by the rules put in place by society. Bloom pleads guilty to the crimes because his subconscious knows that he has had these desired and repressed them. The hallucination ends with Bloom becoming a woman and giving birth to eight perfect children.

Blooms sexual repression is explored more when he enters the whorehouse and has a conversation with his grandfather about sex and the prostitutes in the whore house. This hallucination may be Bloom repressing or coming to terms with the repression of his current sexual desires, whereas the previous ones were focusing on desires from the past.

The most graphic hallucination happens while Bloom is in the whorehouse during which he transforms into a pig and is confronted by “the sins of the past” who displays his deepest darkest perversions to him. Not only does this hallucination reveal the deepest parts of Blooms repressed unconscious but also I think the fact that Bloom becomes a female pig and admits to being a “corset lover” or in other words a cross dresser shows Blooms true perversions which have been repressed because of the society in which he lives.

Overall Blooms hallucinations throughout Circe explore his repressed sexual desires and his guilt caused by his actions, these show a conflict between his id and super ego and how repression of sexual desires because of society can manifest themselves.

Introduction by Paul Krugman to The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes – Seminar Paper

Krugman outlines the basic theories that john Maynard Keynes outlines in his book The General Theory. The majority of Krugman’s work is a study of each chapter of Keynes’ writing. Krugman praises Keynes’ writing style. During this overview Krugman also outlines which chapters of The General Theory should be read with relevance to economics and which ones can be purely read for entertainment. I found that to completely understand, or at least try to, most of Krugman’s writing it was important to first understand Keynesian economic theory.

“If your doctrine says that free markets, left to their own devices, produce the best of all possible worlds, and that government intervention in the economy always makes things worse, Keynes is your enemy. And he is an especially dangerous enemy because his ideas have been vindicated so thoroughly by experience.”

The basis of Keynesian theory is that the economy will not balance itself like Adam Smith believed; Keynes denies the idea of the hidden hand of the market but instead the economy is driven by consumption. If the economy is in a depression and there is mass unemployment then consumption must be increased to improve the economy. Krugman describes Keynes view and wrote “The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully” I believe that this is Krugman showing Keynes’ first step away from the classical economy of Smith.

Rather than the market being self-regulating Keynes says that instead of waiting for the economy to come back to normal it instead needs to be stimulated by the state. For example in the great depression in 1930s America Keynes argued that the way to bring the country out of the depression would be to decrease interest rates and for the government to inject income. With an injection of money into the economy this would increase consumption which in turn increases demand and creates jobs; therefore it would boost the economy. In fact at the end of Krugman’s article he mentions that the government spending and work programme that pulled America out of the depression was WW II. Chris mentioned in the lecture that wars are good for an economy because it allows a government to increase public debt by billions of pounds, which may sounds like a negative, but this then in turn stimulates the economy. For example the current costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq was reached over £20 bn in 2010.

In Krugman’s writing he breaks down Keynes’ theory to four broad bullet points :

•  Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment

•  The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and  painfully

•  Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly

•  Sometimes increasing the money supply won’t be enough to persuade the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the breach.

Krugman also mentions that Keynes’ opposition to the classical economic theories was started by his rejection of Say’s Law. Say’s law said that recession is not caused by a failure in demand of unemployment. Say believed that an economy was improved by increasing production rather than increasing demand. It is clear that Keynes’ views are a polar opposite of Say’s law.

Krugman does criticise Keynes, he recognises that the economic time during which The General Theory was written was a rare economic time, where he says “unable to create employment no matter how much they tried to increase the money supply” and says that Keynes identified this as the state of the economy for the future. But we have not seen the low interest rates which plagued America through the 50s.

Overall Krugman sees The General Theory as one the of the most influential pieces of economic writing because Keynes changed the way in which people looked at economics and compares it to The Wealth Of Nations by Adam Smith in terms of importance. Krugman says “suddenly the idea that mass unemployment is the result of inadequate demand, long a fringe heresy, became completely comprehensible, indeed obvious.” And although not all of his ideas stand up now his effects on economics can still be seen today, especially during the current global recession.

Tom Wolfe - New Journalism

In The New Journalism Tom Wolfe tracks the development of a new journalism and the features game as he calls it. In chapter one of The New Journalism Wolfe tells the story of his move into journalism from leaving graduate school, which he seems to think is a leaping point for people to write a novel. In his early years Wolfe seemed to think that writing a novel was the overwhelming goal for any feature writers was to rent a cabin in Nebraska, disappear for 6 months and come back with a bestseller in toe. He gives the example of two features writers one being a man called Portis who Wolfe describes as “living out the fantasy” when he quits his job in London rents a fishing shack in Arkansas and comes back 6 months later with 2 bestsellers Norwood and True Grit.

Chapter two, called “Like a Novel” begins with an example the change in the way features were written. “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle Aged Man” tracked the fall of a world championship boxer into his middle aged life through several broken marriages. This article took a highly person look into his life telling the story through pieces of conversations that he had with his wife and that his friends had about him. Wolfe was shocked by this new way of writing a feature and says “what the hell is going on!” he sees the text article as a combination of a short story and a traditionally written feature article.

Wolfe sees Brelisn as a bit of a revolutionary within the world of features because he moves away from traditional columnist way of churning up the old news in a liquid oxygen powered bowling ball, and instead shocked the world by stepping out the door and finding a story. The example of Breslins work that Wolfe gives is a court case where the focus of the column is not the prosecution and the defence but instead what each party had on their pinky.

Tom Wolfe continues working through influential works that have inspired him and then seems to realise an important factor in feature writing, the role of the narrator. He says that his work on the small Sunday supplement New York made him work  to grab the reader’s attention by “Yelling in their face”. A story he did about a women’s prison called Nut Heaven, in which the women would yell names at passing men until their victim stopped and then they would “suggest a lot of quaint anatomical impossibilities for the kid to perform”. This gave Wolfe the idea to move the narrator out of a passive role and instead put them in the scene yelling along with the women. He said he liked this technique because it allowed the audience to talk to the characters.

Wolfe expands on the importance of the narrator when he has the idea of changing the way the narrator talks to match the interviewee. The example he gives is feature he wrote on the drover Junior Johnson who was a NASCAR driver who learnt to drive by running moonshine. Wolfe felt that that the “century old British-tradition” which was the style in which all other narrators would talk in would contradict the way the moonshiner talked. So instead the narrator matches the character voice, he calls this device the “downstage voice” as though voice is talking downstage from the character. By 1966 he says that a new era of writing style has been created not by novelists or short story writers but by Journalists.

In chapter 3 Wolfe begins to talk about what today we would recognise as Gonzo Journalism but Capote named them non fiction novels.  He describes 3 journalists who all put themselves inside their story: John Sack joined the army and went to Vietnam as a Journalist; George Plimpton joined a professional football team and Hunter Thompson “ran” with the Hells Angels.

In his final chapter he writes his four rules of new journalism after seeing how journalists have taken the technical aspects of writing away from the Novelist and put in their new set of rules. A basic overview of the 4 rules is:

Scene by scene construction. Rather than rely on second-hand accounts and background information, Wolfe considers it necessary for the journalist to witness events first hand, and to recreate them for the reader.

For example when I mentioned Sack, Plimpton and Thompson who all put themselves inside their work, and even risked their lives to get a fist hand account of the events.

Dialogue. By recording dialogue as fully as possible, the journalist is not only reporting words, but defining and establishing character, as well as involving the reader..

An example Wolfe gave of this would be “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle Aged Man”

The third person. Instead of simply reporting the facts, the journalist has to give the reader a real feeling of the events and people involved. One technique for achieving this is to treat the protagonists like characters in a novel. What is their motivation? What are they thinking?

This is what John Sack did in his book “M” which was his account of the Vietnamese war.

Status details. Just as important as the characters and the events, are the surroundings, specifically what people surround themselves with. Wolfe describes these items as the tools for a "social autopsy", so we can see people as they see themselves

This is noticeable at the start of The New Journalist when he introduces the New Yorker’s Newsroom.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in Austria in 1856 and founded the discipline of Psychoanalysis. Freud thought himself more of a scientist than a philosopher, but had a massive influence on the field of psychology especially philosophy of the mind, ethics and religion. Freud described psychoanalysis as nothing more than exchanging words with your patient. Freud thought that by simply talking to his patients would reveal some kind of psychologically traumatic event in the persons past that they have repressed. Freud came to the conclusion that the traumas dated back to infancy and were usually related to sex. This lead him to his sexual development theories.

Freud explained that there are several stages of a child’s sexual development which can affect people in later life. The first stage is the oral stage which is from birth to 15 months, during this phase pleasure if focused on the mouth for example thumb sucking and biting things. Too much or too little gratification in this stage can lead to an oral fixation in later life

The second stage is the anal stage, from the age of 15 months to 3 years old. The most important part of this phase is toilet training which is a conflict between the Id and Ego, which will be covered later. If this stage is over emphasized then it can lead to a compulsive personality and if the parents do not put enough emphasis on this stage can lead to the opposite, so a messy or disorganised person.

The third stage, and the stage that Freud focused on the most is the phallic stage, which spans the age of 3-6 years old. In this stage children becomes aware of its own body and focuses on its own genitals. During this stage a male becomes sexually attracted to his mother which leads to resentment and jealousy towards his father. This jealousy leads him to fear his father because he fears that his father will retaliate by castrating him. This leads to the boy abandoning his attraction to his mother and he begins to identify with his father and becomes sexually attracted to women, This is the Oedipus complex and is a crucial stage in male development.

In his later work Freud expanded on his work on the unconscious mind by breaking the mind into three mental apparatus: the id, the ego and the super ego.

The id is the impulsive instinctual and acts according to the pleasure principle and seeks to avoid pain and gain pleasure.

The ego is the reason and common sense and its role is to balance between the basic impulses of the id while balancing this with the super-ego. As long as there is balance between the id and the super ego then everything is ok, but an imbalance can lead to neurosis.

The super-ego makes us act in a socially acceptable manner and works in conflict with the id and seeks for perfection and is what we call our conscience. An example of the super ego in society would be the church which sets out impossible rules which if not adhered to will lead to punishment in this case eternal damnation.

Freud used these three mental apparatus to explain different mental disorders caused by a lack of harmony between the three parts of the psyche, Conflicts between the id and ego lead to neurosis for example OCD and phobias. Conflicts between the id and super ego lead to depression and if the ego comes into contact with the external world psychosis appears because people loose their contact with reality.