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Freelance journalist seeks legal changes to help media challenge super injunctions

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

August 9, 2011 | 2 min read

A freelance journalist and researcher, who specialises in media law, is claiming that making court data public would allow media coverage of super-injunctions to be challenged.

Writing in The Guardian yesterday, Judith Townend declared: “Legal data collection should happen as a matter of course. Lawyers and judges often scold the media for its representation of legal cases.”

Townend points to Mr Justice Eady telling legal journalist Joshua Rozenberg that: "There are lots of judgments that have been criticised where it's quite apparent that people haven't read them."

She added that a number of injunction decisions and applications were hidden behind a paid-for subscription service, or may not even be in written form.

“It is feasible that some newspapers, with their commercial agenda, would not make use of such data, if it were at odds with the popular editorial narrative,” added Townend.

“Perhaps not, but it would enable members of the public, researchers and bloggers to interrogate journalists' analysis and challenge misrepresentations where they occur.”

Townend said that the super injunction row brought the courts data issue to the fore and added that neither the Ministry of Justice or the master of rolls was able to give a number of ‘super injunctions’ to the media because they "simply did not know.”

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