NEWSPAPER PRACTICE
– 253 candidates;
- 140 passed – 55 per cent

This exam tested the candidates' reporting skills, their knowledge of media law and how to apply it and ability to ask the right questions.

The two questions involving media law (each worth 50 marks) covered sinister goings on at a village flower and vegetable club and a male teacher's acquittal at a crown court of sexually assaulting girl pupils. Candidates had to answer either question and there was an almost equal split between the two.

The village club found itself embroiled in allegations of cheating and an official reading pornography in the potting shed. One issue was how much of this could be considered in the public interest. In the main candidates were able to apply their knowledge of qualified privilege and defamatory allegations.

Candidates tackling the aftermath of the crown court case were not so sure-footed in wading through defamatory and contemptuous protest placards, an invalid attempt to gag the press, the prohibitions of the sexual offences acts and libellous after court quotes.

It was difficult for candidates who failed these 50-mark questions to make up lost ground.

The other three questions, of which two had to be attempted, involved a chief constable urging the Government to decriminalise drugs, a council selling off a bronze sculpture by a renowned local artist and a planned march to protest against a cull of badgers believed to infect cattle with bovine TB.

The sculpture question proved the most popular. A problem encountered by several candidates keen to talk to the local artist was that since the question said she was middle aged in the 1930s the only way to do this in 2006, as one marker pointed out, would be by way of a séance!

With the drugs question, few candidates suggested interviewing the chief constable and preferred instead to approach the police press relations department. Those who did approach the chief constable were going in with bland and deferential questions. The few who came up with the sort of penetrative questions such an interview demanded were well rewarded.

Similarly, candidates could have asked DEFRA stronger questions about what evidence existed for the badger cull.

Nevertheless, there were some excellent papers and deciding the winner of the NCE Newspaper Practice section was far from easy.

Click for more on the: