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- The Guardian, Monday March 12 2001
David Briffett has been a journalist for 46 years and an editor for 35 of them. For the past 24 years he has edited the West Sussex County Times in Horsham, and he expected to retire next Friday without a stain on his character after a successful and satisfying career.
Further down the county, Simon Bradshaw has edited the Brighton Evening Argus for almost three years, having spent half of his 21 years on newspapers as a senior executive. Until last week, he also had an unblemished record.
These men run papers that are the backbone of the British press, the local weeklies and regional titles that exist to serve their communities.
They are not risk-takers. They don't print scandalous kiss-and-tell stories. They try not to intrude into people's private lives unless there is good reason.
Like all editors, they are conscious of the many laws which constrain what they can and cannot publish, especially when it comes to reporting on children involved in court cases.
So on the day in February last year when a story appeared on their screens about a boy who had secured a judicial review of his expulsion from school, they noted that the court had imposed a section 39 order. This is the section of the 1933 children and young persons act which bans the media from identifying children in court hearings.
Briffett and Bradshaw knew the drill: no name of boy, no name of school, no addresses, nothing that should lead their readers to identify the boy.
The stories they published did give his age, but didn't make clear whether it was his current age or at the time he was expelled in 1998. They both stated the reasons for his expulsion, giving the exact date it happened and the exact date of his starting at another school.
After publication, the boy's mother was furious. She claimed that the stories had enabled people in her community to identify her son.
What followed was an extraordinary departure from legal precedent. After tightening the section 39 order, a judge gave a broad hint that the editors should be prosecuted for breaching the original order instead of suffering the much more usual penalty of being hauled before the high court for a contempt hearing.
Briffett and Bradshaw were therefore charged with publishing articles that contravened section 39, a case heard before Mid-Sussex magistrates in Haywards Heath. Last week, that court found them guilty and fined the pair £2,500 each, thus criminalising them.
Their barrister, Gavin Millar QC, says: "The whole exercise in taking them before a criminal court is inappropriate and disproportionate. They were making a professional judgment, and this conviction could well be in breach of the human rights act."
The editors and the owners of their papers, Newsquest and Johnston Press, are sure to appeal, but the convictions show just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to make editorial decisions while carrying out the prime task of the press: to inform.
Since I must also avoid falling foul of section 39, I cannot go into the details of the offending story, but my reading of it suggests that the boy's court victory was important for the Horsham community to know about.
As for the case against Briffett and Bradshaw, it was clearly inadequate, if not absurd. It largely consisted of the boy's family and friends telling the court that, in their view, the story had identified the boy. Well it would, wouldn't it, because they already knew about the expulsion? In passing sentence on the editors, magistrate Rosemary Scott said: "We accept that a total stranger would not be able to identify him from these reports but the question for us is to what extent persons with some knowledge of the boy would be able to identify him from the reports.
"We believe parliament's intention was to apply this law to this kind of person and not just a complete stranger."
She accepted that work colleagues of the boy's mother had identified the boy because of their background knowledge and not because of the articles.
The magistrate pointed out that another family friend, with children at the same school as the boy before he was excluded, had been able to identify him.
So what? If papers are to have any merits at all, they must be able to publish information, even about children, which is important in the wider public interest.
The editors had taken the necessary precautions by removing any details which could have led Horsham and district's 120,000 citizens who did not know the boy from discovering who he was. With six secondary schools in the area, it was also virtually impossible for anyone to recall who left one and started at another on specified dates some 21 months before.
Briffett, whose paper sells 25,000 copies a week, is baffled and upset by the action against him. He says: "We have a system here that the newsdesk flag up any section 39s. Then my deputy and I always go through the stories together. We felt it complied with the act and published in good faith. All editors face an impossible situation now. When these stories occur we have to try to ascertain who has prior information on the case without knowing what they know."
As Bradshaw points out: "Editors will be expected to second-guess what a close family friend knows. It could lead to us not reporting anything, and surely that isn't what parliament intended."
Both men have received strong support from the society of editors. Director Bob Satchwell says the case has "dangerous implications for the key principle of open justice."
He echoes the editors' solicitor, Dominic Ward, who says that "the danger of this [decision] is that it is likely to lead to a climate of self-censorship in the press."
I share that view wholeheartedly and I also want to take issue with the magistrate's final admonition to Briffett and Bradshaw. "You are both professionals in your field," she said, "and you should have taken more care."
That is manifestly unfair. They took great care. They are victims of an implausible restriction on freedom and the people's right to know.
• Six weeks ago I wrote an article criticising Peter Mandelson in robust terms. Though I do not take back most of what I wrote, which centred on my belief that his poor relationship with the press stemmed from his manipulation of it, I must put the record straight.
I accepted that he resigned because he made an inappropriate telephone call in support of Srichand Hinduja's bid to obtain a British passport.
I would not have written so trenchant a piece unless I believed that to have been the case. The Hammond Report establishes that the position was a good deal more complex than it appeared at the time, and it seems only fair to apologise for the tone of the article I wrote then. It would be good journalistic manners if all those who rushed to judgment that day say sorry too.
