National media exulted this summer when broadcasters won the right to film from Crown court sentencing hearings, following a campaign that lasted 20 years. The Ministry of Justice declared that seeing judges explain their reasoning for sentences would help members of the public better understand their decisions.
‘This is a landmark moment for open justice,’ declared John Battle, head of legal and compliance at ITN and chairman of the Media Lawyers Association. ‘Court reporting is vital to democracy and the rule of law.’
So it is. And yet, across legacy media as a whole, fine sentiments are proving no substitute for meaningful intervention in a market-based reporting model that is failing the public. As our own Sam Tobin reflects this week, the number of specialist court reporters has dropped sharply over the period alluded to by Battle.
That has much to do with the flatlining profitability of newspapers, but also the resource-intensive nature of the job. Court reporting remains an unambiguously ‘old media’ discipline in a world of declining attention spans and proliferating deadlines.
Many ‘reporters’ just don’t get out much any more. They aren’t allowed to. Too many spend their days wallpapering acres of white space with PR puff, or chasing ‘clicks’ by writing about misshapen root vegetables that look like celebrities.
There is still hope, however. Earlier this year the MoJ published a reporters’ charter, summarising the rights and obligations journalists should be afforded when reporting judicial proceedings. Its publication was timely, amid concern about threats to open justice arising from the transfer of proceedings online.
What would really make a difference, however, is an injection of cash to safeguard what ought to be universally regarded as a critical component of civil society. A House of Lords report on the future of journalism in 2020 addressed the decline in court reporting, but limited its recommendations to the conduct of proceedings. That was a missed opportunity.
The then media minister, John Whittingdale, told peers he favoured expanding the government-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service to include courts as well as councils. This was and remains an excellent idea.
No comments yet