Defending Journalists

British reporters who break the law while pursuing stories “in the [genuine] public interest” have an unlikely ally–the UK’s outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer. He tells the Guardian,

“We’ve got to recognise that in the course of journalism, journalists will rub up against the criminal law and that is why, in our guidelines, we took the approach that we would assess where there was evidence of a criminal offence, whether the public interest in what the journalist was trying to achieve outweighed the overall criminality.”

 More here from the Guardian.