Tighten penalties for character assassination

In the midst of the Leveson Inquiry into the standards of United Kingdom newspapers following the phone hacking scandal comes another example of just how ruthless some national titles can be in pursuit of what they consider to be a good story.

Former Bristol teacher Christopher Jefferies, who gave evidence at the inquiry, has successfully sued a whole clutch of national media titles for things they wrote about him during one of the most high-profile murder hunts in Britain’s recent history.

Around 8pm on 17 December 2010, 25-year-old landscape architect Joanna Yeates left a Bristol pub where she had been having Christmas drinks with work colleagues to walk home to her flat in a nearby suburb. On the way CCTV cameras caught her shopping first for a pizza and then for a couple of bottles of cider. She was never seen alive again.

Two days later her boyfriend, returning from a family visit several hundred kilometres away, reported her missing. On Christmas Day her body was found under a pile of snow near a local golf course. She had been strangled.

Jefferies, who was Yeates’ landlord and lived above her flat, was the initial suspect and was held in police custody for three days. During that time the media went overboard in what amounted to a calculated character assassination. A series of lurid headlines described him as “strange”, an “angry weirdo with a foul temper”, and even without any evidence to back it, “a Peeping Tom”.

Much was made of his long and wild wispy white hair and his so-called eccentric habits; journalists found some of his former pupils who described him as “weird, posh, lewd and creepy…a sort of nutty professor”.

Of course none of these epithets describe a cold-blooded murderer and the media knew it.

The reasoning for printing the slurs was obvious – because Jefferies had been arrested and not yet charged, editors, assuming he was the murderer, declared open season on him for the titivation of their audiences.    

The gamble failed. Jefferies never was charged and was guilty of nothing other than being, in some eyes, something of an eccentric. He was released and Yeates’ next door neighbour, Vincent Tabak, was eventually found guilty of the crime. Even though Tabak was charged on 22 January 201, it was more than a month later before police officially cleared Jefferies of any involvement in the murder, something that later earned him an apology from the Chief Constable.

Jefferies received substantial damages and two of the papers were fined for contempt. This was not enough and criminal charges should have been pursued against publishers and individuals who authorised the libels. I do not believe in blanket regulation of the media because 99 per cent of the media behave within a voluntary code of conduct, but if individuals can go to jail for phone hacking, as seems quite possible, then there should be similar sentences for the deliberate character assassination of an innocent man.

I can only agree with Conservative MP Anna Soubry, herself a former journalist, when she said in the House of Commons: “What we saw in Bristol was, in effect, a feeding frenzy and vilification. Much of the coverage was not only completely irrelevant, but there was a homophobic tone to it which I found deeply offensive.”