It is an unprecedented case. And it risks triggering an unprecedented threat to journalism. The UK police have repeatedly tried to obtain the passwords to the phones of the British independent journalist, Richard Medhurst, the first reporter arrested in London under Section 12: his analyses and comments on Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza – which Amnesty International has characterised as genocide – have been interpreted by the police as support for organisations banned from the UK, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The British journalists’ union, the NUJ, and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) publicly condemned his arrest and the use of anti-terrorism laws against journalists “simply for carrying out their work”.
If you search his name, you’ll see exactly zero big news orgs covering this story. BBC, Reuters, AFP, every British newspaper, all notable by their absence. Why? This is A Story, right?
There are a few reasons this can happen.
Super Injunction (sometimes self applying). But these tend to be used for privacy issues.
Unverifiable sources (which is why jumping to assuming a gag order is sometimes premature)
And it’s possible that the major outlets are trying to prepare reports in a watertight way. Or that part of the story just hasn’t been proven/released yet.
I’d like one of these to be the reason, but I see no evidence to support it.
Super injunction - as you say, usually used for privacy issues, unlikely to apply here and if it is the case, then the other, smaller, news orgs covering the story would be in trouble.
Unverifiable sources - the IFJ is a rock solid source. Even if it weren’t, then this claim would assume that the news orgs that have published are all guilty of cowboy journalism.
Watertightness - for the Panama papers, yes. For this small story, no way. It’s A Story, and it’s the journalist’s job to get copy out as quickly as possible.
As I said I’d like it if any of these were the case and thanks for pointing them out as I certainly hadn’t thought of them when I wrote my comment, but I’m still just not seeing it. It seems like a decision has been made not to pursue this story, but I’m not jumping to conclusions as to why. It’s hard to keep the faith though, when there are zero major outlets reporting on it, which means that decision not to pursue has been made multiple times by multiple different editors. WTF
According to the article the British Journalist Union condemned the arrest.
Medhurst openly supports Palestinian armed resistance. Which is probably why the big newspapers do not report on him.