A newspaper company’s bid to use Twitter to provide live coverage of the trial of two men convicted of helping gunman Raoul Moat was rejected by a senior judge, it emerged yesterday.
Karl Ness and Qhuran Awan, who had denied a string of serious charges relating to Moat’s murderous rampage, were convicted, and jailed for life on Tuesday.
It has now emerged that ncjMedia Ltd, publishers of Newcastle dailies the Evening Chronicle and The Journal, had asked for permission to use Twitter to report the trial and verdicts.
However Mr Justice McCombe refused the application because he believed that the interests of justice would be best served by the production of full, balanced reports.
Lord Chief Justice Judge cleared the way in December for Twitter to be used for court reporting, providing that presiding judges gave their permission and that it would not interfere with justice.
As reported on HTFP last week, the Worcester News has since used the microblogging site to report directly from a courtroom while covering an ongoing murder trial.
However in the Newcastle case, the judge ruled against the newspapers, saying that “pressure for speed has a tendency to produce unfortunate results.”
“I think that the administration of justice would be best served by the production outside court of fair and balanced reports of the proceedings after the event, without the pressure of a perceived need for ‘immediacy’,” he said.
The judge went on: “In general terms, I think that there would be much to commend the grant of permission to report verdicts in an instantaneous manner, unobtrusively from the court room.
“Unfortunately, to the prejudice of the orderly transaction of court proceedings, a tendency has arisen among press representatives to rush headlong from the court immediately when verdicts are announced, without regard to the fact that the court is still in session and further matters have still to be dealt with by the court after pronouncement of the verdicts.
“The tendency is sometimes to report the result only and the reaction to it from immediately interested parties, such as the family of a victim or of the accused, while neglecting to report at all the reasoning process by which the judge has arrived at the sentence actually passed.
“This is prejudicial to the proper administration of justice because the public then read only the brief report of the type that I have described, without being informed at all about the judge’s reasons.”
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Sounds like Mr Justice McCombe’s decision has more to do with his beef with the press in general than much to do with this case.
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This is a shame. worcesternews.co.uk’s Twitter coverage of the trial has been welcomed by our readers (not the contributors to HTFP, however) and we’re expecting the verdict today. Our Twitter coverage has been balanced – giving equal weight to both prosecution and defence, and it has stuck to reporting what has been said in court only. I don’t see the problem with that at all.
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This is a clear example why judges are accused of living in the past. Since when has it been a judge’s role to set the news agenda or tell journalists how to report a story. This is pompous in the extreme. A good judge should be like a good ref – invisible.
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I’m with the judge on this – whose response seems quite reasoned – and disagree with the comments here. I also wonder if Mr Kelso has ever been a full-time court reporter and understands the unique pressures that comes with the job? It can be hard enough to report a complicated trial accurately and fairly, and also in some instances file copy quickly for the web, without having to send 140 character updates to Twitter every few minutes via a mobile phone. Not that there isn’t a place for journalists to tweet and use Twitter – far from it. I’m just not convinced it should be regularly used in court in this fashion. I’ve been in court rooms where families of victims have complained about journalists’ use of mobile phones and also regularly seen members of the public gallery thrown out by judges when their phone ring-tone has gone off. So i’m interested to see how this develops. I also think its inveitable the need for speed will mean there’ll be a creeping number of complaints from those directly involved in court cases (assuming they read Twitter!)
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Yorkshire monkey – I was a daily newspaper crime/court reporter for seven years prior to moving to the Worcester News so I know all about the pressures on court reporters. Our own reporter on this trial has handled the case admirably throughout and Twitter has had absolutely no bearing on his ability to do so.
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The judge was correct. Twitter should not be employed for such sensitive court cases.
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I personally agree that Twitter feeds are a bad idea. However, the judge here seems to be miss the point that without the ability to report directly from court, reporters are going to continue to rush from the courtroom at verdict. If he wants us to hang around for the “further matters”, perhaps being able to file reports from within court would actually help?
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