One of the recurring concerns in recent years has been about whether local newspapers are carrying out one of their key public service functions: the coverage of courts.
In 2009, there were four separate claims that papers were failing to report court cases adequately. The Press Association’s managing director, Tony Watson, told a committee of MPs looking into the future of local press: “Things have got so bad in the regional press now courts and councils are not getting covered sufficiently”.
Marcel Berlins, the legal commentator, wrote in the Guardian of there being too few reporters to perform the “important task” of being “the eyes and ears of the public in our courts”.
Lord Judge, then the lord chief justice, told a Society of Editors conference that the absence of reporters in courts was a problem for the practice of open justice (a speech also touched on by Joshua Rozenberg, writing for the Law Gazette).
And Nick Davies, in his book Flat Earth News, asserted that it was “impossible to escape the conclusion that the number of court stories in both national and regional newspapers has fallen dramatically”.
In the seven years since, there has been plenty of anecdotal support for those views but precious little academic inquiry. Now come two small studies, reported in outline on The Justice Gap site, which indicate that the situation has anything but improved.
They were conducted by Brian Thornton, a former BBC2 Newsnight producer who now lectures in journalism at Winchester university.
In the first, regional and local editors were approached to answer a set of questions and 57 took part, although not all of them answered every question.
They were asked whether they agreed or not with a statement made by Berlins in the 2009 article I mentioned above: “It is abundantly clear that the courts are no longer being properly reported”.
Of the 55 who answered, 56% agreed (with 11% strongly agreeing) while 44% disagreed (with 6% strongly disagreeing).
In real terms, that equates to 31 editors agreeing and 24 disagreeing. The sample is obviously small, given that there are, say, 1,000 editors across Britain. So I think it fair to see this as an indication, a pointer, rather than any kind of conclusive proof. More details from this survey can be found below.
In a separate piece of research, Thornton updated a 2012 study carried out by a Birkbeck law school professor, Leslie Moran, which looked at the coverage of the courts in the national and regional papers on a single day.
Moran considered the content of eight nationals (Guardian, Times, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Express, Mirror and Sun) plus five regionals (London Evening Standard, Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail, South Wales Echo, and Western Mail). He counted 82 court stories in those titles with a 27,225 total word count.
When Thornton repeated the exercise four years on, he found 57 court stories with an 18,954 word count. In both instances, that represented a 30% decrease.
But the fall was greater in the regionals, down from a total of 30 reports to just 18, some 40% fewer. A snapshot, of course, but it does imply a continuing decrease in court coverage.
Thornton, in noting that fewer court proceedings were being observed by anyone outside the legal profession, is alarmed that there was “virtually no lay oversight, no-one to highlight problems or malpractice”.
He says: “The fact that the media is engaging less and less with the everyday workings of the criminal justice system means that journalists are increasingly unaware of what actually happens in such important settings as crown courts or coroner’s courts.
“I would argue that this ignorance is dangerous because it spreads to the public. If the public aren’t being informed about what’s happening in courts, how can they be expected to know?”
One of his major worries about a lack of court coverage is the loss of historical records. This poses a problem for anyone investigating miscarriages of justice, he says.
“If newspapers are reducing the number of court reporters, along with reducing the number of stories they cover, then there is a growing number of cases that will be lost completely to the collective memory.
“Hundreds and hundreds of cases each year will go unrecorded – bizarrely becoming essentially secret trials because no one will have any information about them”.
Here are some of the result of the editors’ survey:
Is there a dedicated court reporter at your newspaper? No, said 56%.
If you do not currently have a dedicated court reporter, did you have one in the last five years? 8% said that in the last five years they had a dedicated court reporter, but didn’t have one now.
If there is a court reporter at your paper, how often does he/she attend court? Once a week, said 62%.
How important is it to have a dedicated court reporter? 42% said it was useful, but not essential; 33% said it was very important; 21% said it was important; 4% said it wasn’t important.
If your newspaper covers court cases, where do you get your stories? 59% said they get their stories from a mix of reporters and agencies; 38% said it came entirely from their court reporter; 5% said they got it only from agencies.
Instead of sending a reporter or using agency copy – have you ever relied on a police press release for your court report? 55% said they would, 45% said they would not.
Has your court reporter at the paper used Twitter to report on a court case? 44% said they never have; 22% said rarely; 22% said sometimes; and 12% said often.
Do you think the courts are generally positive to journalists reporting on cases? 92% said they were.
NB: I appreciate the work done by Thornton, but I think we need comprehensive research - at courts and in newspaper offices alongside content analysis - to discover the true state of affairs.