ANM

Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 consultation is over, and what a feast of misrepresentation, negative tropes and shouty non-sequiturs it has been for “The Press”. Anyone arguing in its favour is just naive, apparently.

As usual the sordid misdescription of regulation by those using their massive page-clout to dodge further scrutiny only serves to expose the need for it. Due to the level of rank misrepresentation, ANM recommends you read it for yourself.

Because listening to the likes of Judge Rinder in The Sun, the “enormous financial burdens” Section 40 would put on publications “that want to remain independent.” misrepresents the mechanism whereby if the publisher had refused to arbitrate and pushed to a full-blown trial, they may be liable for all court costs (theirs and the claimants’), even if they won.

Or this, by FreeThePress: “With nothing to lose complainants are more likely to launch legal cases against publications (both large and small) based on the smallest of disagreements. These are issues that can be easily resolved by letters to the editor and/or editor corrections.”

That’s a good time-waster isn’t it, “the system’s not even broken, and if it was it’s all sorted now”, go the deniers, like the tired frightener about parasitic lawyers being the winners – conversely always true, and so not news either.

The “it’s unnecessary” rubbish wasn’t true about there being no legal fears in off-label prescribing during the passage of the Access to Medical Treatments Act, and it isn’t true now. But that doesn’t stop The Press thwacking it, like Richard Littlejohn in The Mail:

“newspapers and their contributors are already subject to the criminal law, as the phone-hacking trials demonstrated, and the laws of libel.”

In other words, says Tim Fenton:

“unless you can interest the cops in helping you out – not possible in defamation cases – you have to be prepared to bet the house, and probably more, in order to get redress. Or … come and sue us if you think you’re hard enough.”

Well yes, but is that argument even just about “The Press” versus the people anymore, or is that just another red-herring?

 

PRESS BARONS – THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE.

“Press regulation is an important issue. But the greatest threat to the credibility of the media no longer emanates from newspapers. Instead it comes via the internet, where “fake news” spreads without regulation through social media platforms and numerous other channels. That should be a greater concern for us now.” MP Damian Collins

Regulation of the press necessitates defining terms of reference very exactly in an environment where “democratisation” of media makes that increasingly difficult. The cauldron is further heated by the demise of what Horatio Mortimer refers to as “attention tax”  i.e. advertising, newspapers’ fading privilege.  

You might think your blog is too small to figure in the argument but according to Section 40, if you have a site from which you gain income, which is run as a business, where more than one person publishes news related articles, and which is subject to editorial control, you could find yourself qualifying as a relevant publisher.

How long before that Section 40 definition is stretched to encompass anyone who publishes on the web? As Quackometer blogger Andy Lewis put it in 2009, “We now live in an age where we are all publishers, not just the press.”

So if someone cries “foul lies”, couldn’t any one of us then be exposed to the next question of whether it was reasonable not to have been signed up to an approved regulator under Section 40?

Then, in order to avoid paying all the claimant’s costs under if you didn’t settle or arbitrate but steadfastly pushed to court, you would have to prove “that the issues raised by the claim could not have been resolved by using an arbitration scheme of the approved regulator” and hope that a Judge would consider it “just and equitable” in all the circumstances of the case “to make a different award of costs or make no award of costs.”

Good luck. But wouldn’t it just be easier to stick to facts and if you get them wrong, apologise and correct them?

 

FAKE NEWS

Fake-news may seem to emanate from the giants, but they’ve always told lies and invaded privacy. So let’s dump the them and us for a minute and burrow down into the you and me plebisphere to see what a lack of regulation actually means here.

What bloggers lack in raw corporate power, they make up for in networks, and the latest incarnation of fake-news is a development of the same democratisation of the internet that is blurring publication boundaries, allowing lies and smears to spread underground before welling up all over the place.

But the public face of a supposedly democratised internet also requires at least an appearance of ethics, and so we see the phenomenon of some networked bloggers poncing about as free speech heroes on an increasingly public stage, whilst being ever more traditionally tabloid below the radar.

Peer-to-peer fake-news is passed on from blogger to blogger, post to post, tweet to tweet, DM to DM, but also by email, phone, face to face, and blogger to paper, just like the big guys, and just as dirty. As humanist Melanie Byng once said, “Just remember – there are lots of people who know about this now and they will tell each other. But let me know the minute you see anything because I can probably do something about it”.

Meanwhile, through the same networks, respectability is maintained on the surface, and during libel reform secular rationalists certainly got on their free-speech soap-box . Here’s part of skeptic Andy Lewis’ “Written Evidence of the Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill”:

ProteStArt: Andy Lewis reports difficulty of convincing Sid Rodriguez of Skeptics in the Pub that ordinary politeness is “mental illness”

“In reforming libel law, I will be looking for changes that allow me to feel confident that an honest, public discussion of controversial areas where there are potential vested interests involved need not expose me to arbitrary legal threats that could financially ruin me. The health of democracy requires ordinary citizens to be able to participate in public debate without fear of capricious and crippling harms.”

Because we wouldn’t want any of them, would we?

 

FULL DISCLOSURE – SKIN IN THE GAME

When ANM had to “bet the house, and probably more” in order to expose networked and coordinated hate-campaign of covert targeting, it wasn’t just  because of a refusal to mediate or resolve any issue whatsoever. It was because a blanket denial of right of reply was the specific modus operandi of the harassment campaign, achieved by classic tabloid privacy invasion, stalking in other words.

It wasn’t by any ordinary press outlet either, but by a coordinated campaign of skeptic and humanist bloggers, celebrity scientists, doctors and lawyers attached to charities such as The British Humanist Association, Sense About Science, and the Good Thinking Society, several “big-hitter” journalists who are still hiding, and Andy Lewis himself.

Let’s face it, if you’re literally forced into court, does it really cost any less to defend yourself from a refusnik skeptic bully with a massive gang than a Press Baron?

 

THE THICK END OF THE WEDGE – STATE INTERFERENCE

As Mortimer  states:

“There is a huge difference between state regulation, and state recognition that a regulator is independent”.

Regulators must further meet the test applied by the Press Recognition Panel, who made the provision that regulators:

“must have no power to prevent the publication of any material, by anyone, at any time”.

Can that be said of Judges?

When we were forced to court, HHJ Seys Llewellyn was quite comfortable with awarding costs to those tampering with publications to put words in claimants’ mouths. If that’s not interfering with publication I don’t know what is.

He also didn’t think offering a right of reply was necessary in a democracy. He did think, against all standards of democratic expression, that publishing an open letter about a global cult bigger than Scientology, was ‘striking’.

The Justice also stated, against scientific evidence, that ostracisation couldn’t be aggressive, and ruled that it was just and equitable to change chronology to allow thieves to prosper.

Those bellyaching about state interference are trying to obfuscate the fact that when you litigate, it’s always agents of the state that are in charge.

Oh I know the judiciary is supposed to be independent, but come off it – especially when you’re exposing something VBI (very bad indeed).

Ignoring the Defendants contemptuous refusal to mediate the situation for years before legal action, the only independence Judge Seys Llewellyn demonstrated was independence from facts and chronology, established principle, and ultimately justice itself. Could the demands of Section 40 really be any worse?

 

SECTION 40  – THE REAL ISSUE – TARGETIZATION

So is it true that the only people who would gain from Section 40 (apart from lawyers, obviously) are the rich and powerful who will have nothing to lose by bringing cases “based on the smallest of disagreements”?

Or is it truer to say that those close to power currently have no incentive not to be unreasonable whichever party in a dispute they are?

Riding on the coat-tails of Simon Singh’s “bogus” free-speech heroism, Andy Lewis’ words on libel reform, next to his actions, demonstrate exactly how tabloid blogging works:

“there is a duty to contact the authors of the material in preference to any other party that may be involved in the chain of publication, that the nature of the complaint is made clear and that simple and fast remedies are offered that do not involve attempts to silence beyond the scope of the complaint.”

Sounds good, no? But when we “dutifully” tried to contact him about the lies he spread about us and our children, we had to ask Simon Singh for help in overcoming Lewis’ comprehensive and provocative blocking of democratic exchange. I got temporarily banned from Twitter for even contacting Singh, which just shows how many people were involved even in November 2012.

Lewis then contemptuously published our request for resolution, calling on “I’m told” hearsay as authority, to distort events directly concerning our children, with no right of reply. As we were both blocked, and stalked, as well as being out of jurisdiction, he knew we could do nothing about this.

Shortly after that, we achieved a landmark human rights settlement about unchecked bullying in a Steiner school, which Andy Lewis didn’t want us to have, having been part of the group who had tried to sabotage it while it was in progress. In spite of the settlement having been in the press, and as he thought we still lived safely outside the UK, Andy Lewis deliberately re-published the same lies again about our family, this time on his main Quackometer site.

An “honest, public discussion of controversial areas”? Or contemptuous and deliberate escalation?

Eventually, having had to relocate our whole family to the UK because of the effects of this harassment, and with only months before the statute of limitations, he still would not engage in any opportunity to mediate the situation whatsoever.

So as a last resort we took our CPR compliant pre-action letter, the one he wouldn’t acknowledge receiving, and we went to an advertised open public meeting about Steiner Education, the cult he was pretending to expose, at Bath Skeptics in the Pub.

After sitting through his talk, and during the break, we tried yet again to give him the pre-action letter which included statements like “Andy we have faith in you that you can sort this out“. He refused to accept or even “touch” it. Months later, he was still lying about it in dismissive and contemptuous terms to make sure we were banned from any more “open” meetings, telling Jo Torres in Plymouth that we “showed up in Bath to ‘serve papers on me’. Idiots.”

Instead of his claimed “simple and fast remedy“, Andy Lewis lied to the Bath “open meeting” that he wanted “nothing to do with” us. In fact he was covertly soliciting information from others for a dossier he was compiling for “authorities”, and stalking us online.

The only reason he would give the surprised skeptics for not engaging was that we had been giving him “a little bit of a hard time” (i.e. publishing to expose the hate-campaign and offering him a right of reply), then he left.

But before he went, he stopped, pointedly waved his umbrella at us, and insinuated clearly to everyone present that we were a criminal danger to children.

Don’t believe me? Just watch.

 

Footage revealed through litigation

 

SECTION 40 – BECAUSE ANYONE CAN BE THE FASCIST PRESS

The more powerful will always pile on and run vexatious legal actions, and in a global age of attention deficit, that’s clearly just as true of your skeptics as your Paul Dacres, so deciding costs based on wilful obstruction to resolving issues seems very fair to me.

This is identified as the “germ of truth” in the Sun by The Conversation:

“If someone wants to exercise the right to affordable justice through arbitration and a newspaper refuses to cooperate, so forcing them to take the far more expensive route of court proceedings, then the judge will have the option of making the newspaper pay both sides’ costs even if the paper wins.

And that’s right isn’t it? Whichever party is vexatiously (and usually criminally) avoiding issues to push towards civil legal action, because they can afford to, should be the one to pay, because they’re the ones that are bothered by democracy.

And that’s about as far as regulation should go. If Section 40 was in force for Andy Lewis, his galloping vexatiousness would have been unmasked. He wouldn’t be able to hide the impossibility of him risking public debate behind copious mental health smearing, without being forced to pay for it.

And we wouldn’t have been exposed to the uncomprehending judgement of a now retired elderly judge who so clearly did not grasp the facts, the free-speech and privacy issues involved, or that the Defendants and their lawyers were lying through their teeth.

This contemptuous trolling of the judiciary by Robert Dougans of Bryan Cave began when he was rolled in prior to any legal action. Dougans said he would need more information before being able to consider mediation, which we of course sent. But it was never replied to. Forced therefore to serve the claim, we immediately asked about mediation again at which point Robert Dougans said “I think we are well beyond that now”.

Meanwhile, what we eventually discovered by having to sue was how the massive hate campaign was fuelled, by the willing use of Plymouth University Professor Dr Richard Byng’s authority to spread a totally made up “clinical judgement” of borderline personality disorder against me, in order to convince others that I am dangerous and must be ostracised. Is it any wonder it now turns out we’re not his only targets?

Due to Lewis’ lawyers willingness to lie, in and out of court, he was telling people in the background that “she” (me) “is making it very easy for me” by publishing. This was because, due to our family having exited what he himself refers to as an “insidious cult“, a massive authoritarian and controlling global organisation which he claims nobody will take on, our publications include cult references that they could materially alter to create false evidence. This was done to create a judicial knee-jerk response, to lead the judge to ignore the proven fact our words had been deliberately taken out of context and an extreme meaning applied to them by barrister Jonathan Price of Doughty Street Chambers.

Using this criminal tactic they’ve so far got away with stealing the home of a family exposing a cult, by leveraging child sexual abuse to obfuscate the very cult abuse they claim to be exposing themselves.

That’s the ugly truth of tabloid blogging folks, and why you and me fake-news, what Leveson described as “internet pub gossip“, is just as dangerous to any targets of it as the excesses of The Press.

It’s also why ANM considers Section 40 could actually make a difference, certainly unmask serial harassers, and potentially overcome or circumvent any lack of genuine independence among the judiciary, who are demonstrably so easily trolled by seasoned professional liars.

Because the motivation in Section 40 might also have the happy outcome of leading more publishers of all types to mediate situations properly before they ever get out of hand thus avoiding the need for either arbitration or litigation at all.

By unmasking vexatious anti-democratic publishers on all levels, Section 40 would give some power back to targets of elite, cult, or just plain vicious interests, and that is exactly why I’m predicting that it won’t be implemented.

I sure hope to be proved wrong.

 

 

Access to Medical Treatments Act, Andy Lewis, Bryan Cave, Chumbly, Crime and Courts Act 2013, Crocels News, Damian Collins, Doughty Street Chambers, fake-news, featured, FreeThePress, HHJ Seys Llewellyn, Jo Torres, Jonathan Bishop, Jonathan Price, Leveson 2, Leveson Enquiry, Melanie Byng, phone hacking, Plymouth University, privacy invasion, Quackometer, Richard Byng, Robert Dougans, Section 40, Skeptics in the Pub, Steinermentary, The Conversation, The Sun, Titirangi Settlement, trolling, Zelo St

By ANM

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