Standards of journalism will deteriorate across the media as a whole if unregulated bloggers and websites are not forced to abide by the law, Lord Justice Leveson has said. In a speech at the University of Melbourne in Australia, the author of the Leveson Report into press standards said journalists might be tempted to "cut corners" so they could "steal a march" on bloggers and tweeters.
Despite his failure to address the problem of regulating the "Wild West" of the internet in his 2,000-page report, the judge insisted the problem was "not insurmountable". He did not, offer any answers to how foreign-based websites could be forced to abide by British laws on defamation and contempt of court.
He said: "If this issue is not resolved to ensure the law is equally applicable against both bloggers and tweeters as well as against the established media … it has a potential effect on media culture, on journalistic culture.
"If the media in general … see the law going unenforced against those who blog and tweet, might this undermine media standards through encouraging them to adopt a casual approach to the law?
"In order to steal a march on bloggers and tweeters, they might be tempted to cut corners, to break or at least bend the law to obtain information for stories or to infringe privacy improperly to the same end. It may encourage unethical, and potentially, unlawful practices to get a story."
He added that if "appropriate standards" are to be maintained, "we must meet those challenges, and ensure that the media not only remains subject to the law but that it is not placed at a disadvantage where the enforcement of the law is concerned".
He also warned that society will be "less well served" if more newspapers are forced to close because of competition from the internet. "If the vital role that the press occupy is to be preserved, hard won stories, sometimes extremely expensive to research and frequently very much in the public interest, must be part of a commercially viable model," he said.
