Justice: A book so good that Garth McVicar plans to read it
March 28, 2011
A new book on the justice system has hit the bookshop shelves. It’s called “Justice: Speaking Up For Crime’s Silent Victims”. The cover features a staunch-looking Garth McVicar, whose name also appears in large letters at the bottom.
Guess who wrote this book. Hint: not Garth McVicar. I presume when you open it up you are told that the actual author is Michael Larson, who in fact also made big decisions about the content, such as which Sensible Sentencing Trust controversies to focus on.
But that’s okay, because Garth says he’s “checked the facts, made sure that things are right” , according to an interview with Victoria University student mag, Salient.
Except – and I almost fell out of my chair when I read this – Garth hasn’t finished reading it yet. But he plans to… because, he says, “I understand it’s a phenomenal read”.
UPDATE: Stuff has Garth’s explanation: he’s read it chapter by chapter during the drafting, but not all at once. (If he has read it all though, why does he merely “understand” it’s a phenomenal read?)
Topics: General | Comments Off on Justice: A book so good that Garth McVicar plans to read it
Paul Henry broadcasting complaint
March 27, 2011
The BSA has found that TVNZ’s actions in response to Paul Henry’s ill-judged comments about the Governor-General were sufficient. Good call, I think.
Along the way, though, they also found that the comments breached standards of good taste and decency, fairness and discrimination. Perhaps that’s not too surprising. TVNZ had upheld the complaint on all three grounds.
But I think it is a bit worrying. For the reasons I gave here, there are problems with all three grounds. Those problems are not discussed in the decision, and in fact none of the parties had any particular interest in raising them. But if we take the BSA’s decision at face value, it seems to have lowered the boom for successful complaints for all three of these standards, without explaining why the usual approaches to them don’t apply.
Topics: Broadcasting Standards Authority | Comments Off on Paul Henry broadcasting complaint
Sunday Star-Times looks to be in contempt
March 27, 2011
Publishing interviews with jurors about the case they have decided is a contempt of court. Our courts have said that if jurors thought their deliberations may be made public, they’d be less willing to serve on a jury and less willing to be frank during deliberations. Revisiting cases may also upset the finality of jury verdicts.
These premises are not unchallengeable, and do not even seem to apply with great force here. What’s more, such interviews take place regularly in the US without the sky falling. But our courts have been (sometimes ridiculously) staunch about the rule.
So it’s hard to see how the SST gets away with this and this.
Topics: Contempt of Court | Comments Off on Sunday Star-Times looks to be in contempt
Er
March 18, 2011
Shouldn’t some journalists be asking the government, and Rodney Hide in particular, whether the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act follows the principles in the Regulatory Standards Bill…?
Topics: General | Comments Off on Er
The earthquake privacy debate continues
March 18, 2011
The Court Report last week featured a debate over the quake coverage and whether it may have invaded the privacy of some of the victims. (I reprise my role as reporter for the show, and interview Tim Watkin from TVNZ and pundit.co.nz, who defends the coverage). On the panel are VUW senior lecturer Dr Nicole Moreham, Taylor Shaw associate Kathryn Dalziel and Izard Weston partner Robert Stewart).
Meanwhile, the exchange continues over on Pundit, where Tim has posted another column about the issue and there’s a lively thread.
Topics: Privacy tort | Comments Off on The earthquake privacy debate continues
Laws unto himself
March 18, 2011
Michael Laws comes up with a brilliant, savage parody of what a deranged right-winger might think about the case of Arie Smith.
Genius.
Topics: Media ethics | Comments Off on Laws unto himself
You’ve got to be joking
March 9, 2011
Okay, when you’re part of a trash-talking video barracking for Crawley Town in its upcoming fixture with Manchester United, it’s offensive to make airplane crashy dance gestures referencing the famous 1958 tragedy that killed eight Man United players. (Watch the plonker on the right).
But it is surely not criminal. Or so I would have thought. But no, said plonker has just been given a (suspended) jail sentence for using threatening, abusive or insulting words with intent to cause harassment alarm or distress. I think Britain has lost the plot.
Topics: Protest speech | Comments Off on You’ve got to be joking
God Loves Hate Speech
March 3, 2011
The vile Westboro Baptist Church, whose favoured method of proselytising is picketing funerals with signs like “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God For Dead Soldiers” has won its appeal in the United States Supreme Court against a $10 million damages award.
The 8-1 majority said the speech was in a public forum, on a matter of public concern and wasn’t truly aimed at a captive audience. The First Amendment serves to “protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.” There’s an interesting review of the court’s jurisprudence on what counts as “public concern”.
The church’s pastor (whose family makes up most of the congregation) is also involved in a series of cases working their way through the courts about the extent to which the government can regulate this sort of picketing by creating buffer zones.
Topics: Protest speech | Comments Off on God Loves Hate Speech
The personal touch
March 3, 2011
The US Supreme Court might have decided that corporations have speech rights, but it has just ruled that (in the context of freedom of information, anyway) they don’t have privacy rights.
Under the US federal Freedom of Information Act, information can be withheld if its disclosure “could reasonably be expected to consistitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”. AT&T tried to argue that documents it had supplied to the FCC could be withheld under this ground. It was a legal person, it said. Therefore, it could have “personal” privacy. (The equivalent provision in NZ applies only to “natural persons”).
The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. Writing for the Court, Roberts CJ concluded in style:
The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.
Topics: Official Information Act, Privacy tort | Comments Off on The personal touch
The Wikileaks Papers
March 1, 2011
Who said this, and when?
It’s time to quit making national heroes of those who steal public secrets and publish them in the newspaper?
When whole filing cabinets can be stolen there can’t be orderly government any more.
He’s offering aid and comfort to the enemy, putting himself above the President, Congress and the whole system of government.
No, not the US government, about Wikileaks. It’s the US government, about the Pentagon Papers.
I’m not the first person to point out that we’ve been here before. But I’ve just been watching “The Most Dangerous Man in America”, a terrific documentary about Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, and the parallels are eerie.
The Pentagon Papers came in 47 volumes. They revealed that successive US administrations had lied to the American public about the Vietnam War. Documents, says Ellsburg, have a power to be taken seriously that nothing else has. The government used the Espionage Act against him (but not the media). Nixon’s other response?
Let’s convict this son-of-a-bitch in the press. That’s the way it’s usually done.
If you get him tied in with some communist groups, that would be good.
What I didn’t know was that Ellsberg first went to US senators to see if they could use the documents. But they wouldn’t, out of fear of being called unpatriotic. Then he went to the newspapers. He kept pressing the New York Times to publish. A NY Times reporter said “he thought of himself as on the team” but that they didn’t think of him that way. It was “our job … to decide how and what to use,” he said. They dallied.
Why did they decide to publish in the end? Not out of principle, it turns out. It was because they couldn’t get away with not publishing it. As Max Frankel, head of the Washington bureau at the time, said: “We would never survive suppression the material. It would be known: we flinched.”
I suspect the Wikileaks lessons will be the same. The government cries wolf. It tries to demonise the leaker. It prosecutes. It claims the sky will fall. The sky doesn’t fall. The leaker hopes to galvanise the public against the government. Nothing much really changes. The prosecution fizzles.
One other lesson struck me. Ellsberg was originally part of The Man. He was uneasy about some of the things that were happening, but he was essentially the government’s guy. What moved him to start opposing the war was seeing the protesters who were prepared to go to jail for the cause.
That’s the importance of dissent.
Topics: Breach of confidence, General, Media ethics | Comments Off on The Wikileaks Papers
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