Stuart Bruce’s Post

DEALING WITH THE DREADED FRIDAY PM MEDIA CALL - TEXT OF PR WEEK ARTICLE You're planning to finish work early on Friday and have dinner with friends, visit the theatre, or enjoy some other well-deserved Friday evening treat, when the dreaded email comes in from one of the Saturday or Sunday papers threatening to publish a raft of serious allegations against your client. The British press being as it is, the likelihood is that the allegations are errant in whole or at least in part. What should you do? The answer begins by understanding why the email has been sent. A good journalist wants to provide the subject of any allegations with an opportunity to respond, not least because they may disprove them. However, that is not the primary reason why the dread email has been sent. Securing a comment in this way provides both regulatory and legal protection for the newspaper. If it is IPSO-regulated (as most of Fleet Street is – the exceptions being the FT, The Guardian and The Independent), then any complaint about inaccuracy is less likely to succeed if this exercise has been undertaken. In terms of the law, the public interest defence provided by the 2013 Defamation Act (Section 4) is virtually unattainable unless this has been done. That defence is the one all publishers prioritise because they are not obliged to prove the truth of the allegations at issue, and the email is primarily aimed at securing it. So what should you do? You should NOT just send in a statement for publication denying the allegations. That allows the paper to tick the requisite box to secure its defence and will be treated, in effect, as your client’s consent to the allegations being published in full, lurid terms, just as long as a brief statement is tacked on at the end. If the allegations are untrue, then a number of things follow. First, the IPSO Editors’ Code requires them not to be published; second, no public interest is served by their publication; and, third, the rights of your client (be it corporate and/or individual) would be infringed by the publication. All these points should be made robustly to the newspaper in a way which will convince it that, if the allegations are published, some form of sanction will follow. I say this with a degree of certainty, having for many years legalled out (inter alia) newsprint, magazines, films, TV programmes, etc. and, in the process, advised on these decisions. Editorial decisions are made based on an assessment of risk, and the only way effectively to influence them is to attach a credible risk to an errant publication. This is best done by a professional who is most likely cogently to communicate that risk, and who has at their fingertips all the regulatory and legal tools which are out there to protect reputation. Ideally, they should also be a known quantity to the paper with a track record of success in dealing with the press when it steps out of line.