Don’t give elites a legal way to strangle investigative journalism

There is a point in almost every journalistic investigation when you have to show your cards to the other side. It’s the heart-in-mouth moment when your research sees daylight, your findings are tested, your assumptions challenged. It’s uncomfortable – and it should be. In the nine years since the Guardian exposed industrial-scale phone hacking by the News of the World, we have continued to challenge the conduct of rich and powerful elites, most recently in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations. But projects such as these would be unlikely to happen again if MPs agree to some of the more radical clauses in the 250-page data protection bill going through parliament.

The possibility of an even broader Leveson 2 style inquiry remains real, and is underpinned (clause 142) by a belief that the balance between privacy and freedom of expression needs to be recalibrated towards the former – and that only this will properly make amends for past crimes. Nobody should be an apologist for those, and nobody I know working at the Guardian is. But the casual aligning of arguments (if you oppose Leveson 2, you are betraying victims of phone hacking) has rather overshadowed the practical consequences.

At the moment, when we show our cards, we anticipate that the responses we get back will very likely be from highly aggressive lawyers, who will use every adjective available to decry what we are doing and deter us from publishing – and/or threaten us with injunctions to stop us in our tracks. They are not usually bothered about the truth so much as protecting their clients’ reputations. It is hard to imagine the Guardian, or any other media group, pursuing a story, however accurate, however strong the public interest argument for doing so, if those solicitors and the barristers they hire were able to charge us for the full costs of any subsequent litigation, even if we won.

Source: theguardian