OFFENCES AND PUBLICITY.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 198, 23 August 1928, Page 6

OFFENCES AND PUBLICITY.

Mr. Justice Adams, with some pleasant references to reporters, has said in the Supreme Court that he felt he could safely leave the decision as to the suppression of a name or its publication to the discretion of the Press, In the Magistrate's Court at Christchurch Mr. Mosley expressed an opposite opinion, stating that the presiding official of the Court should alone decide for or against newspaper publicity. Broadcast publicity is, in effect, part of the punishment awarded for offences, and it is this alone which has left newspapers the freedom they enjoy in reporting such matters as divorce and sexual cases, a freedom which a certain class of journalism sometimes abuses. To make the journalist a sharer in the award of punishment, if only in degree, is to take from the Court part of its obvious duty, and although the Press can usually be relied upon to be duly sympathetic, there must be as undue strain upon the journalistic instinct for news when, as may happen, the name open to suppression forms the chief part of the report—its most interesting feature. When, and where the Court is open to the public the name of an offender is already known to so many persons that all interested parties are aware of it, but Mr. Mosley claimed that the judge often had special information unknown to the reporters, which remark "will set those young gentlemen wondering. It seems to me that in all trivial offences of every kind no names should ever be published, because it frequently happens that the publication of an appearance in Court and a tenshilling fine produces the most disastrous consequences, out of all proportion to the offence. In every serious case without exception the name of the offender should be published as a warning and a deterrent, and the partial concealment now permitted should be no possible amelioration of the punishment awardedBEEN THERE.