CIPIL Webinar: 'Media Freedom in the Age of Citizen Journalism'

Title: 'Media Freedom in the Age of Citizen Journalism'

Speaker: Dr Peter Coe, University of Reading 

Biography:

Dr Peter Coe has been a Lecturer in Law specialising in Media Law and Criminal Law at the University of Reading since September 2019. Prior to this, he was a practising barrister specialising in privacy, defamation and reputation management, having been Called to Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 2007 as a Lord Denning Scholar and Hardwicke Entrance Scholar. He has also held a Senior Lectureship in Law at Aston University, where he taught Media Law and Criminal Law. His primary research interests are: (i) citizen journalism's impact on free speech, media freedom and regulation, and the concepts of privacy and reputation; (ii) defamation, including the protection of corporate reputation; (iii) media power and plurality, the role the media plays within society and its impact on democracy. His work in these areas has been published in leading journals such as Legal Studies, the University of Melbourne's Media & Arts Law Review, the Journal of Business Law and Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. Peter is also co-editor (with Professor Paul Wragg) of "Landmark Cases in Privacy Law" which will be published by Hart Publishing in 2022. In 2021, his research led him to be invited to join the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Information Law and Policy Centre as an Associate Research Fellow, having been a Research Associate at the ILPC since 2018. In 2020 he was also appointed as an Advisor to the University of East London's Online Harms and Cyber Crime Unit.  

Abstract:

Journalism has changed. The internet and social media have permanently altered the media ecology and have shifted the media paradigm beyond recognition by enabling new actors to enter the media marketplace, and by changing the way that news is generated, published, and consumed. Central to this communication revolution are citizen journalists, who's newsgathering and publication activities have made them crucial to public discourse. In my recently published book, Media Freedom in the Age of Citizen Journalism, which I will discuss in this seminar, I interrogate how the internet and social media have enabled citizen journalism to flourish, and what this means for the traditional institutional press, the public sphere, media freedom, and press regulation. I argue that the law's treatment of media freedom as a concept needs to be modernised, as citizen journalists are operating as media, but are not recognised as such. To facilitate this modernisation, I advance a new functional definition of the media that distinguishes media from non-media actors, and which provides a conceptual framework that recognises twenty-first century methods of newsgathering and publication. In doing so, I deal with some of the legal challenges this creates, including those arising from anonymous and pseudonymous speech, contempt of court, defamation, and how voluntary self-regulatory press regulation might be ‘reimagined’ to attract this new breed of journalist.  

Zoom Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cmyuGoUORBaE5mNniB9eRg