Whether or not this reaction was representative of actual interest in the report, the exchange served as a reminder of Lord Justice Leveson’s determination that his volumes would not end up gathering dust on a scholarly bookcase (or, considering the size and price of the report, as unopened PDF files in a forgotten folder).

What will be the legacy of the report? To what extent will his recommendations be implemented? Beyond this, what did he miss? The last question is the theme of an event at the Frontline Club in October that I am participating in. The keynote speakers include Jake Lynch, author of A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict, and Stewart Purvis, co-author of When Reporters Cross The Line.

Here are the details:

The 10th anniversary conference of the Institute of Communication Ethics, to be held at the Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London W2 1OJ, on 25 October 2013, will explore some of the many crucial ethical issues which went missing during the Leveson Inquiry.

One of the keynotes is to be given by Jake Lynch, Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney and a Senior Research Fellow of the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg. His paper is titled ‘Reporting conflict: The critical, realist approach’.

A selection of papers given at the conference will be published in a special conference issue of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics.

Cost of attendance: £65; students £10. For more information contact Dr Fiona Thompson, Director, The Institute of Communication Ethics, 69 Glenview Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire BD18 4AR; email f.thompson287@gmail.com.

Current line up (and it is increasing all the time) includes:

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Jeremy Collins, Philip Cowan, Jake Lynch, John Mair, Jackie Newton, Deirdre O’Neill, Julian Petley, Judith Townend.

The public was supposed to be at the heart of the Leveson Inquiry. When it was announced, David Cameron described how the ‘whole country has been shocked by the revelations of the phone hacking scandal’.^[1] Of course, establishing exactly how the public feels is a notoriously difficult exercise, but what was clear in July 2011 – two years after Nick Davies’ explosive phone hacking revelations in the Guardian – was that national newspapers finally deemed the phone hacking scandal the subject of public outrage, and the politicians reacted.

How much role did the public actually play in proceedings, then? At Bournemouth University’s ‘Media Reform Post-Leveson’ conference in February, I argued that while media and political elites provided the dominant voices in courtroom 73, the Leveson Inquiry broke new ground for court and political reporting. For the first time a public inquiry held under the Inquiries Act 2005 was played out live on the internet.^[2]

Online media provided a chance for ordinary members of the public, non-profit groups, academic researchers and small media organisations to expand and question mainstream media narratives, as they watched, blogged and tweeted proceedings. Digital communication liberated debate, enabling members of the public to report ‘in the public press all that he has seen and heard’, as Lord Denning put it^[3], in accordance with a longstanding legal tradition of open justice.

Additionally, it improved UK citizens’ right to freedom of expression, which includes the right to receive – as well as impart – information and ideas. The public’s increased access to inquiry resources and reporting tools does not necessarily indicate a greater role on the ‘news stage’, but it opens up the possibility for greater public influence on news discourse, and beyond that, political debate.

One of the aims of the Bournemouth conference was ‘to develop fresh initiatives to encourage media plurality’ and the Media Reform Coalition has asked how we can ensure ‘a genuine plurality of voices and views in the news’. Opening up courts information and data is one such way. Giving the public greater digital access to legal material at source – such as Inquiry transcripts and witness evidence – permits the public to obtain a direct account, which does not depend on news selection criteria by a small number of dominant media outlets.

The majority of the public may not wish to access the raw material, but it at least allows for the possibility of more ‘voices and views in the news’. Those who do seek out information at source will be better equipped to participate in public debate through online media, including social media, blogs and media organisations’ sites and challenge or contribute to journalists’ versions of events. There are important legal and ethical considerations to make when disseminating courts data online^[4], but Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry showed us that some steps towards digital open justice, of benefit to journalists as well as the wider public, are straightforward and can be taken with little fuss.

Abstract: The Leveson Inquiry has broken new ground for court and political reporting: for the first time a public inquiry held under the Inquiries Act 2005 has been played out live on the internet. Online media provided a chance for ordinary members of the public, non-profit groups and small media organisations to expand and question mainstream media narratives, as they watched, blogged and tweeted proceedings. This paper considers public access to the inquiry, arguing that digital communication has allowed for a newly liberated form of debate and enhanced the public’s entitlement to report what they hear in court, in accordance with a longstanding legal tradition of open justice. Additionally, it has improved UK citizens’ right to freedom of expression – which includes the right to receive as well as impart information and ideas. The public’s increased access to inquiry resources and reporting tools does not necessarily indicate a greater role on the ‘news stage’, but it opens up the possibility for greater public influence on news discourse, and beyond that, political debate.

Citation: Townend, J (2013) ‘Leveson online: A publicly reported inquiry’, Ethical Space, Vol. 10, No. 1.

Do you hope to enter
Fame’s immortal dome?
Do you put the washing out
Or have it done at home?
Have you any morals?
Does your genius burn?
Was you wife a what’s its name?
How much did she earn?

Had your friend a secret
Sorrow, shame or vice –
Have you promised not to tell
What’s your lowest price?
All the housemaid fancied
All the butler guessed
Tell it to the public press
And we will do the rest.

The full poem can be read on Guardian.co.uk…

(From The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling)

Full Law and Media Round Up at Inforrm’s blog…

Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

We lead with criminal, rather than civil, law developments relating to media and communications. There have been a spate of prosecutions relating to social media use: a teenager from Lancashire was imprisoned for sick and grossly offensive jokes on his Facebook page about the missing 5 year old April Jones and Madeline McCann; in the same week, Azhar Ahmed was sentenced to 240 hours of community service for posting an offensive update to his Facebook page about British soldiers in Afghanistan, following the death of six British soldiers.

Read more… 2,027 more words

Reblogged from Inforrm's Blog:

The Inforrm Law & Media round up is back from a summer break, slightly ahead of the start of the new legal term. These regular weekly round ups contain summaries of relevant legal and parliamentary proceedings and media content, as well as listings for the week ahead. They are compiled from various legal and news sources, but additional suggestions and content is always welcomed, particularly in relation to defamation, privacy, contempt of court and media regulation, although other media and communication legal topics will be included.

Read more… 2,118 more words

“The one thing I am determined not to do is to produce a document which simply sits on the second shelf of a professor of journalism’s study” Leveson LJ, 23 May 2012

“Sustainability is not the same as Legacy. It is not,” says Kay “I really think that” Hope, the hard done-by Head of Sustainability in the BBC’s brilliant comedy series TwentyTwelve, an excruciating parody of Olympic events, many of which seemed to play out in real life.

Kay is locked in a bitter rivalry with the Head of Legacy, the conniving Fi Healey, each desperate to promote their respective causes in the Danish pastry-fuelled meetings of the Olympic Deliverance Committee. Shallow 21^st century management-speak provided plenty of ludicrous material for the show’s scriptwriters.

It is with some trepidation then, that I attempt to address the “legacy” of the UK’s Leveson Inquiry and the deeper issues behind an over-used buzzword.

The legacy factor is an important one, however, and one which has preoccupied Lord Justice Leveson. He is only too aware of the plights of previous press inquiries and the media’s reaction.

Jeremy Paxman, well-known for his ferocious interviewing style on BBC’s Newsnight, told Leveson that the chairman’s challenge is to stop himself “becoming a total irrelevance”.

“… what happened in the past, and we’ve seen it more recently with Calcutt and others, is that you have this great brouhaha, there’ll be an Inquiry, there is an Inquiry, and it produces recommendations that are quietly forgotten.”

To which Leveson LJ replied (as partially quoted at the start of this post),

“Mr Paxman, I am entirely cognisant of the problem and have said on more than one occasion during the course of this Inquiry that the one thing I am determined not to do is to produce a document which simply sits on the second shelf of a professor of journalism’s study for him to discuss with his students as yet another attempt that went nowhere.”

“As high as the second shelf, eh?” quipped Paxman, getting the last word in before a break in proceedings.

The Calcutt report to which Paxman referred, provides a significant backdrop to the 2011/12 Public Inquiry. In 1990, it recommended setting up a new body in place of the old Press Council; it is that new body, the Press Complaints Commission which has, 22 years later, been so heavily criticised in the lead up and during the Leveson Inquiry. Calcutt foresaw the PCC as “non-statutory self-regulation” but by 2012, the definition had shifted, with its former director admitting it was not a regulator but a “complaints body”.

Other reports in the 20^th century archive include Royal Commissions on the press in 1949, 1962 and 1977 and a follow up review of the Calcutt report in 1993.  The Media Standards Trust, which actively called for the Inquiry as part of the Hacked Off campaign, sets out the history of these various inquiries in one of its submissions to Leveson. Its account creates a sense of reverse déjà vu, as it describes a “repetitive cycle” of a “continued failure of the various voluntary self-regulatory bodies that have existed since the first Royal Commission on the Press published its report in 1949″ (p 10-22, PDF). In its view,

“One of the most striking lessons of the past is how easy it is to miss the opportunity for change. 2012 represents just such an opportunity. Any delay could continue the repetitive cycle of failure demonstrated in the past six decades of press regulation” (p.22).

Other recommended preliminary reading on this topic includes an account of Calcutt in the Index on Censorship archive by David McKie, and the latest issue of the British Journalism Review (Sept. 2012 vol. 23 no. 3 27-33), including ‘Leveson on the shelf’ by Professor Roy Greenslade, which should be read in in conjunction with this response and clarification by Gordon Ramsay, Media Standards Trust research fellow, here.

We might also look to Australia when considering Leveson’s potential legacy: one take can be found in another article in the BJR (by subscription) by Stephen Brook, media editor of The Australian, who explains the parallels between Australia’s Finkelstein report and the UK’s Leveson Inquiry and some of the politics at play.

For another account read this talk by Matthew Ricketson, a journalist and Professor of Journalism at the University of Canberra, who assisted Ray Finkelstein QC in his report. He argues that the Australian press have “under-report[ed] a lot of what was presented to the Independent Media Inquiry late last year” .. and “either misreport[ed] the inquiry’s findings or … ignore[d] large parts of the report altogether”.

It seems likely that Lord Justice Leveson will have spotted the parallels for himself, and, in fact, will be taking a trip to Sydney in December to speak about privacy.  It will be interesting to see if he makes any comparison between the two inquiries and their immediate outcomes.

*******

In the penultimate episode of TwentyTwelve, Kay Hope finally manages to set up a sustainable tree planting ceremony … only to forget the acorn. A sticky chocolate nut has to be used instead, much to the surprised disdain of celebrity guest Tanni Grey-Thompson.

There may well be members of the media who will try and portray the Leveson Inquiry’s “legacy” as a farce, but there is nothing of Kay Hope about Lord Justice Leveson and there certainly won’t be any silly tree planting stunts.

He is clear that his name and findings should mean more than a dusty tome for media academics. And at the very least, an extensive digital archive has been created, putting serious criticisms and first-person accounts on the record. Unlike his predecessors, Leveson has a chance to leave a substantial digital legacy, accessible with each new Google search.

Pics: 1. AustinEvans on Flickr;  2. soil-net.com

Judith Townend is a PhD research student at the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism, City University London, where she also co-ordinates the ‘Open Justice in the Digital Era‘ project. She is @jtownend on Twitter and blogs at https://meejalaw.com.