More self-examination by the media after the Leech verdict would have been appropriate, writes NOEL WHELAN.
THIS WEEK a jury of ordinary citizens sent a €1.87 million message to the Irish media, but unfortunately it fell on deaf ears. On Wednesday, the jury found that a series of articles printed in the Evening Heraldin 2004 damaged Monica Leech's reputation by wrongly suggesting that she was having an extra-marital affair with Minister Martin Cullen.
One would have thought a finding that our only national evening newspaper libelled somebody to that extent would have attracted a wave of media comment about the damage to her reputation. One might have hoped that with such a damning verdict, the media, always and rightly quick to hold everyone else to account, would have undertook some self-examination.
There has, however, been almost no media analysis of how such a story could come to be written, how such editorial judgments came to be made, and how and why it has become common practice to distort and doctor photographs of the type used to support the vulgar insinuations which formed the basis of the Heraldstories.
Almost all media coverage of the outcome of the Leech case has focused on the size of the award and how the awarding of such an amount reinforces the need for libel law reform.
The National Union of Journalists issued a statement on the outcome on Thursday. It was posted on its website under the tabloid-like headline "Big libel award against Independent Group blasted". The NUJ did not denounce the stories in which Leech had been grievously libelled, but instead directed its anger at the level of damages. Having decided to comment on the case, even pending a Supreme Court appeal, it is very peculiar that the NUJ, which after all purports to be a professional body with a code of conduct to which journalists must adhere, had nothing to say about the quality of the work of the journalists who wrote and edited these Heraldstories.
The short NUJ statement did describe it as "unfortunate" that much of the media coverage in 2004 focused on Leech rather than on the decision to appoint an outside PR consultant to the Minister's department. It is shocking, however, that the NUJ has so little to say about the substance of the jury's verdict. The import of the verdict was not only that the focus of the Heraldreporting was out of place but that the stories contained a sleazy and inaccurate innuendo. What the NUJ should have posted was a statement headlined: "Bad journalism in coverage of Leech story blasted".
In the tone of their remarks on the verdict, the NUJ, the Heraldand other media commentators have sought to characterise the jury's "lottery-sized" award as the crazy, arbitrary decision of an amateur collection of citizens not working under judicial direction.
The amount of money awarded to Leech was clearly much greater than should be required to compensate her for the damage done, but the reason why a randomly selected jury of 12 persons with no axe to grind chose to award her this level of damages merits consideration.
On TV3 on Thursday night, Vincent Browne suggested one rational explanation for the size of the award, pointing out that an award on such a scale was necessary to re-enforce how wrong the story was, and that a smaller award might leave a suspicion in the public mind that there may have been some truth to the story. There may be something in that analysis.
The reach of the various stories suggesting Leech and Cullen had been having an affair was such that there may still have lingered a suggestion of no smoke without fire. It is a reflection of the impact which a false story given this prominence can have that, 4½ years later, a jury felt that an award of €1.8 million was necessary to extinguish any residue of the libel.
It may, however, also be that the majority of this jury, having been shown the articles in question, having watched the way in which the Heraldsought to defend their publication, and being ordinary consumers of media in Ireland today, concluded that only an award on this scale could both adequately punish the particular media outlet and prompt change in the media generally. The jury might not have been strictly legally entitled to be punitive in this way, but it says something about how annoyed they felt and what the evidence revealed about how sectors of the media operated.
New defamation legislation currently going through the Oireachtas will enable a judge to give a jury some guidelines on the amount of money appropriate where people are libelled, but even under the new law a jury will still be free to choose the amount. There is every likelihood that if such bad journalism persists, juries will still be minded to punish it by awards on this scale.
In an opinion piece in its Thursday edition, the Herald, with typical overstatement, described the award as a "clear and present danger to press freedom". It is, however, the failure of the media industry and the journalistic profession to recognise and check falling standards which poses the real risk to press freedom.
If an award of €1.87 million to a plaintiff won’t make them sit up and take action – then what will?