Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm a little confused by Slater's angle. Surely the truth defence comes down to the truth of the statements, and Slater's evidence of the truth relies on the veracity of the source. Even if the source could not be compelled, the absence of any information about the source means that the evidence is useless, and his truth defense would fail.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to DexterX,
I feel Slater will likely challenge the judgment, the judgement will stand, Slater will refuse to attend to disclosure and will be held in contempt of Court – Slater will play the victim and milk it for all it is worth.
Well, at least "until his contempt is purged".
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Hard News: Media data, in reply to nzlemming,
And he's usually such a nice bloke too.
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Legal Beagle: Not burglary?, in reply to bbrooks,
It's probably more to do with them having footage, which does mean it's possible to make some progress.
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Legal Beagle: Not burglary?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
It's not OK to do what these kids did, but it's way low down on the list of crimes. Sounds like about half an hour's work to clean up, comparable to graffiti, less serious than breaking a window. I'm surprised the police bothered to look into it.
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Hard News: Media data, in reply to Stephen Judd,
This really speaks to the myth of WO’s influence.
Well, I'm not sure readership is synonymous with influence. A paper like the Herald is not only read for the political news. Of people who love to read politics online, Slater would get a decent fraction, I'd think.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don’t think it’s desirable that membership would actually define rights in law, but it would clearly make it more straightforward to claim news media status.
It's a pretty blurry distinction. If that claim is upheld, you have different rights. But yes, the law changes probably shouldn't confer the power to a particular body, instead it should define the kind of body, give some kind of guidelines as to what is acceptable. Then there could be several bodies, which strikes me as more workable, at least to get it started. This means that as technology changes, the bodies can change, too. There might be quite different standards for blogs vs twitter accounts, for example.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Could be a retraction a week without breaching your threshold.
Yes, a metric like that is too much of a blunt object. I'd think that membership to a professional body that can revoke your license to be protected by them would work better. You'd still be allowed to blog outside of it, but you just wouldn't be protected by the journalist laws, and would be treated like any other private citizen with respect to defamation. Which seems to be all that's going to happen to Slater.
I would think, though, that most of the people genuinely interested in the blogosphere would read outside of it all the time. Part of the whole attraction of blogs is that they aren't groupthinked and financially hamstrung into utter banality.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to ScottY,
It’s actually the other way round
Ta for the correction. So Slater is pushing the proverbial uphill!
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to ScottY,
How does that usually work? My understanding was that the truth defence was quite hard to beat, that the plaintiff had to actually prove the statements were untrue, which can be quite difficult.
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