New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online. An extract:
Moreover, yesterday’s behaviour by Murdoch’s Brisbane Courier-Mail of publishing edited extracts of a Liberal-National “dirt” file on Queensland Labor MPs rather suggests that it is high time for media behaviour to be placed under the microscope of public scrutiny. The “Fourth Estate” has been defecating in its own nest for too long and is unlikely to receive much sympathy from the general community if government seeks to bring it to account. …
However, 1 Holmes implicitly assumes that formal government regulation and heavy-handed bureaucratic oversight are the only available alternatives to the current system of self-regulation of the print media by the Press Council, which Holmes himself (and just about everyone else) concedes is “slow and toothless”. In fact there a range of possible options for achieving more effective oversight of media behaviour without undermining democratic freedoms.
PS I was tempted to use this image in the post at the official CDU site/blog but I resisted. I’m not quite ready for compulsory retirement.
- Jonathan[↩]
When people are advocating freedom of the press they really should also note Article 17 of the ICCPR:
Some rights counterbalance other rights.
The problem with an opt out provision is that the media has sufficient power to ensure that the revert to direct regulation provision is never activated. We would still have a toothless press council whose actions would be condemned as attacks on the freedom of the press. I really do not know the solution, although it seems to me that a right of reply and a privacy tort would be good reforms in themselves. It may also be a good idea to make racial vilification part of the law of defamation, although I note no-one seems to have mentioned that a defamation judgment would probably have been considerably more expensive to both Bolt and his publisher.
Brilliant idea to use the law as a yardstick to measure itself, fully recursive, no way in or out. Fortunately we just declare such attacks to be lawful and the necessary human rights are completely satisfied.
Ken, they didn’t publish any real dirt, except maybe an insinuation that someone was bonking another MP.
@Tel
Perhaps you are suggesting it should read: