I'll be the first to admit that I haven't had very much experience with Media Law lessons before. In fact, my experience of Media Law doesn't extend too far past College A-Level standards, which mostly covered the basics of Copyright, OFCOM and the likes. So, for anyone in these classes that is feeling a little daunted by any of this (especially after just having done 4 hours straight of Teeline Shorthand as well!), rest assured that these lessons will obviously be new to quite a few other people too.
So, my attempt with my blog is to simply share what I have picked up from the lessons myself in the way that I see it, and discuss everything from there. I'm assuming that these Media Law lessons will be mostly kept to intensive lesson work and then further studying outside of lessons will consist of chapter readings from textbooks, as that is what was explained to me at the start of the course.
The first lesson seemed like a pretty clear overview of the rest of the module - a new subject each week, and obviously each subject is of importance to us as journalists as they cover various areas of journalistic law that affect us both directly and indirectly from the things that we write and from the industry as a whole.
From my understanding (and my notes...), this is how the lesson panned out:
*The 12 weekly sessions consist of - Outline of the legal system (which is now done)
- Reporting crime and the courts
- Defamation and Libel
- Qualified Privilege and our protection
- Confidentiality and protection for secrets
- Freedom of Information
- Copyright
- Investigative Journalism
- Codes of Conduct (PCC, Ofcom, BBC)
- Recent Cases and how Law is Evolving
- Breifing and revision for written test
- Unseen class test - 1 hour.
*Blogs - we use our blogs to display the fact that you have a grasp of the information from the lessons and that there has been reading on the subjects covered... which you are now reading. Obviously.
*It is safer and better to know a lot of the legal side of journalism --> the key skill is learning how to recognise risks.
*"The Crown" is the state - everything in law flows from this point.
--> Criminal and Civil Law
--> People sueing each other - individuals vs individuals.
--> Supreme Court - Judge cases such as MP's expenses, etc
--> Court of Appeal
--> High Court
--> Crown Court
--> Magistrates Court / County Court - Tribunals.
*Media Law is about the struggles between restrictions and freedoms of writing.
*"Public Interest" - a very debateable term!
All of the definitions of each stage of the court system can be found on Page 8 of the Essential Law for Journalists book, so that would defintiely be a very useful page to have especially if you're like me and have nearly no superior knowledge of anything to do with the court system! Essentially, this should be a very useful module to do, even if it is somewhat daunting to anyone who hasn't covered any subjects like this before.
Personally, I think that the most useful subjects to cover out of these (for me, at least) are the ones on Defamation and Libel, Copyright and Freedom of Information as no matter what kind of journalism you're heading towards (case in point, me heading towards Music and Film journalism), these are still some key points and probably the ones we are most likely to get tested on (as well as aspects of Law and how these affect these subjects).
Anyway, next week my notes will be going up again, so come back then for another lot of something like this!
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