Law
Can live-blogs and Twitter take court reporting into the 21st century?
Several US media organisations are reporting court cases in this way, but some UK counterparts have reservations.
There is something rather quaint about journalists in the 21st century using pens and notebooks to record what goes on in court hearings when the tools of the trade now include laptops, mobiles, BlackBerrys and other digital paraphernalia. Why not use them in court? In fact, why not report live from the courtroom? The obvious answer is that judges won't let you.
In the US, lawyers have been fighting for the right of reporters and others to live-blog and tweet from court with some success. The Tribune, in Greeley, Colorado, is currently tweeting the trial of a man accused of killing his wife and last year, in Iowa, the Cedar Rapids Gazette live-blogged a tax and mail fraud case.
The practice is not yet widespread, and this month the Media Law Resource Center published a model policy on using electronic devices in court, which aims to persuade judges across the US to abandon restrictions on journalists. Fears that court proceedings would be disrupted and jurors prejudiced by live-blogging and tweeting can easily be overcome, the MLRC policy argues, by requiring electronic devices to be switched to silent settings and instructing jurors not to use the web to research cases they are hearing.
Central to the debate is the principle of open justice, which requires that justice should be seen to be done. Connected to that is the long-standing recognition that journalists (and now others) carry out an important social function when they witness court proceedings and inform the general public about them. "The role the press plays is an important role and the question becomes why shouldn't they do it in the courtroom as opposed to stepping outside the courtroom at intervals," says Steven Zansberg of Denver law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz.
He makes a good point. The current set up, unchanged for decades, is that reporters, especially those working for wire services, rush out at convenient points during hearings to file copy based on their shorthand notes. The Press Association often has two or three journalists operating a relay system during trials so that when one leaves court to file an update another takes his or her seat. That seems like a lot of faffing about when journalists could be filing stories, blogging, and tweeting, live from the courtroom.
The Contempt of Court Act 1981 does not allow sound recordings to be made without the court's permission. It's also an offence to take photographs or make sketches (in court) of judges, jurors and witnesses – although the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 says that doesn't apply to the supreme court. Since there isn't a statutory ban on creating text by means of electronic devices, it surprises me that journalists and bloggers haven't already lobbied British judges about reporting directly from the courtroom.
There are some lawyers and journalists who have reservations about this: "You'd need to trial it, to see how it worked," says Mike Dodd, editor of Media Lawyer. "I'd be very suspicious about tweeting – I'm not sure that court cases are the sort of thing where you'd want to put out short, pithy messages."
The difference between scribbling notes (publishing later) and filing copy instantly from the courtroom using an electronic device is self-evidently slight and there's a lot to be said for the sort of full, accurate, contemporaneous, reports of court hearings that live-blogs and twitter reporting could achieve.
Zansberg dismisses arguments that tweeting and live-blogging shouldn't be allowed because they don't provide the whole context for a case. "No account reports the entirety of the proceedings whether it's a newspaper story or the evening news on television," he says. "There is always a snippet, a soundbite and [journalists] are always going to be engaged in an editing function." He argues that the decline in newspaper sales and changes in the way that the people access news is one reason to embrace new ways of reporting trials: "Look at the statistics on how many people are getting their information from the web and social media sites," he says.
(Published by The Guardian – July 29, 2010)