The very name of Soham induces a strange mixture of disgust, boredom and pity. I return to it with reluctance. But we have to consider the conduct of the media, and in particular the criticisms made about the press by the Cambridgeshire coroner, David Morris, and by the Cambridgeshire police.
I’m certainly not going to defend the worst excesses of the media. The rewards offered by some newspapers are said to have encouraged hundreds of gold-digging callers to clog up police telephone lines. Some papers printed details I would very much rather not have read. The News of the World’s renewed call for ‘Sarah’s Law’, which would give parents the right to know the identity of sex offenders living in their area, seems to be a case of jumping on the wrong bandwagon at the wrong time. Then there was the nauseous sentimentality of some of the reporting, which must have encouraged the morbid day-trippers who have appalled the inhabitants of Soham.
But, with the exception of the rewards, these were in essence errors of taste on the part of the media – and errors which we can be perfectly sure will be repeated next time. The really serious accusation against the media is that they have prejudiced a fair trial by providing lurid accounts of the private lives of the defendants, Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, during the four days between their arrest and the bringing of charges against them by the police. According to some reports, the police fear that some articles breached the Contempt of Court Act 1981, which is intended to ensure that potential jurors are not influenced by prejudicial information that might alter the course of justice. One senior police officer is quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying, ‘Much of the coverage has clearly been in breach of the Contempt of Court.
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