Adrian Monck alerted me to a remarkable passage from a Press Gazette story about a court case against a British broadcaster. As background, the story reported that, “ITV Central “was fined £25,000 for contempt of court after it ran a news item about a trial which was about to start – and included details of a defendant’s previous conviction for murder.”
Then there’s this:
ITV Central told the court that it accepted that a basic and serious aberrational error occurred through publication of the report, but argued in mitigation that regard should be had to the fact that the error of revealing an accused’s antecedents before trial was so “blindingly obvious” that it had not anticipated that a trained journalist preparing a news report for broadcast would make such an error.
Quite the legal argument.
