As reported by the Newspaper Society: In the response and Law Commission seminars, the NS has stressed the importance of open justice and the role of the local press in its practical application; that the Contempt of Court Act 1981 was intended as a liberalising measure; and that the review should not usher in new restrictions upon freedom of expression or media reporting, nor attempt to justify them by reference to the new media.
For example, fears about jurors’ internet research and searching out information about defendants or other matters from past press reports should be countered by strong clear directions by the trial judge and constant reminders to the jury that they should not do so, perhaps accompanied by temporary deprivation of jurors’ access to their ‘internet enabled devices’ during their deliberations.
Such fears did not justify the creation of new powers for the courts to order newspapers to remove material from their online archives during a trial, even though those past reports had been lawfully published prior to any arrest and commencement of active legal proceedings.
The NS response points out the danger that such orders could otherwise become the routine at local level, leading to enforced monitoring and weeding out of online archives by local and regional newspapers, through wholly unjustified fears about the content of their historic collections of anything from weekly court round ups drawn from the register of judgements of the magistrates court to reports of past crimes, police investigations and trials.
