Thank you for having me on the panel. Defamation law and how to avoid being on the wrong side of it run like a seam through everything that we do on the “Disclosure” team, and freedom of expression is something that we are fiercely passionate about.
The work that we do, which is all about holding the rich and the powerful to account, giving a voice to the voiceless and producing journalism that actually changes things, is fundamental to a functioning democracy. I would always argue that we should be given as much freedom and protection under the law as possible to tell stories that matter. However, the chilling effect that everybody else has described is certainly real. It is something we come across all the time in our work.
There are very few media outlets left in Scotland that have the time or the resources to do what we do. During the couple of years that “Disclosure” has been up and running, there have been lots of things that I think you and the general public might not know today if we had yielded to pressure not to broadcast. They include important new evidence in the Sheku Bayoh case, the police investigation of Emma Caldwell’s murder, historical allegations of sexual abuse at a children’s home, investigations into a rogue national health service surgeon who managed to do untold damage to patients over a number of years, the environmental and human cost of oil platforms from Scotland being broken up for scrap halfway round the world, and the adverse impact of salmon farming in Scotland.
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Those are some of the important stories that we have told in the public interest, and in many of those investigations we received legal letters—sometimes numerous letters—warning us not to broadcast our allegations. I can understand why, in some instances, a smaller news organisation or a freelance journalist who has less experience or just fewer resources and less backing might yield to that sort of intimidation.
I have to say that, when we get a legal letter threatening us, it tends to indicate to us that we are on to something and it makes us try even harder to verify the story that we are looking at. However, I have to be absolutely honest with you and say that, even with our experience and resources, we sometimes do not broadcast everything that we would like to in such circumstances. That is not because we doubt the veracity of the allegations; I am talking about situations where we are absolutely convinced that the story is true.
I am thinking of a recent example where painstaking digging had found allegations from 13 separate credible sources against the same company but, after a lot of legal debate, we stepped back from the most damaging allegations. What was the reason for that? Scotland is a small country and, understandably, many of the people involved were worried that, if they were to go public or even to say that they would be a witness if the matter came to court, they might never get a job again in the business concerned.
The company that sent those letters knows that, and we know that. In the end, we as a public broadcaster have to evaluate whether it is worth the financial risk to publish and be damned.