Controversy as GQ magazine erases all mention of phone-hacking article
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Version 0 of 1. GQ magazine, which is facing a possible contempt of court penalty over an article about the News of the World phone-hacking trial, has come under attack in the US for removing the piece from its website. According to Gawker, GQ’s publisher, Condé Nast, has taken down the article, “The court without a king”, which was written by Michael Wolff and published in April 2014. The Gawker author, JK Trotter, calls it one of “several highly unusual steps” to prevent anyone reading Wolff’s piece and speculates that “the likely reason for the article’s erasure... is England’s notoriously strict laws governing speech”. It follows the legal action by the attorney general who told the lord chief justice last week that the article had created a substantial risk that the trial of Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and others “would be seriously impeded or prejudiced”. Andrew Caldecott QC, representing the attorney general, said the jury could have got the impression from the article that the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, or his senior staff, had either directed or known about phone hacking. But Adrienne Page QC, acting for Condé Nast, argued that the article had not created a substantial risk of serious prejudice. It was “a highly subjective, personal and impressionistic sketch based upon the experience of visiting the trial courtroom”. Now we await the ruling by the lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, on whether the piece amounts to contempt. In Britain, this kind of legal dispute is not uncommon. But Trotter, writing from the perspective of a country where the first amendment protects the freedom of speech, sees it very differently. He points out that Wolff’s piece occupied six pages in the April 2014 issue of British GQ. But digital copies of the magazine no longer contain the article. Even the cover line has been altered. The original billed Wolff’s article. A new one has “something completely different” by billing a Monty Python feature. “Nothing in the actual piece,” Trotter writes, “would strike the ordinary American reader as illegal, and there’s no indication that Wolff or GQ published anything inaccurate”. But, in the UK, judges can compel news outlets to refrain from publishing information or works that could somehow interfere with “the course of justice.” He continues: “These laws are self-evidently ludicrous, and the fact that a western government is harassing Wolff and GQ for publishing opinions about a public figure is preposterous. Thankfully, such codes are largely unthinkable in the United States, where journalists like Wolff enjoy, and deserve, strong press protections under the first amendment. But in this particular instance, the UK’s speech laws are acting as a de facto restraint on Wolff’s first amendment rights, here in the United States. After all, Condé clearly felt the need to prevent the article’s text from reaching American readers — a large, and possibly the largest, share of Wolff’s audience”. So Trotter, and Gawker, wish Wolff and GQ success in their case against the attorney general. Source: Gawker |