What happens when a press conference is hijacked!

A press conference used to be one such event – ​​journalists (the press) listened to statements and asked questions in order to submit their reports to their respective media outlets for printing, broadcasting and publication.

So when the Attorney General’s Office announced last month that it was holding a press conference to inform the public through the media about pending investigations and prosecutions of police officers accused of being responsible for extrajudicial killings, my attention was focused — very focused…

Why?

First, this is an unusual move; second, I have not been informed of any new developments, but since it was a DPP official who personally accepted media interviews, I think there must be some new and special reasons for the country’s top prosecutor to hold this unusual press conference.

I followed this online and was delighted because, like the bikini, this revealed as much as it concealed, and the balance of probability determined who was holding and weighing the scales of justice.

The press representative did not ask the DPP questions that he could not answer, because the journalists’ inquiries, though loud, were all about cases in the so-called “cold case” files, around which the wheels of justice turned slowly.

What I said did not surprise me, but what concerned me was the inability of the press representatives present to differentiate between media representatives (reporters, correspondents and others) as a professional entity and the frenzied comments on the case by numerous online agitators, which further exposed their ignorance of how the law works and how the press covers court cases.

There were only a handful of media people who asked questions. Some of them sounded loud but were not very interested in reporting. They were more concerned about the voices of online cannon fodder and did not really care about what the DPP said, could have said, or did not say.

But then, it soon became apparent that a meeting that was supposed to be a press conference had been hijacked and turned into a public town hall meeting where the families (relatives) of the victims and legal advocates who were in the process of legal proceedings decided to ambush and waylay the DPP “live” in both the global public square and the local opinion square.

This was not the usual political meeting on market steps or boulevards, but a public trial of the DPP, prosecuted by members of the press, legal and human rights advocates, without a judge or jury in attendance.

Journalists from outlets that don’t specialize in covering the daily news competed to ask unanswerable questions about cases that are still under investigation or still being prosecuted — or even under investigation — and that remain unresolved more than a decade later; while relatives of the deceased simply took the opportunity to once again express their understandable frustration at the sense that justice had been turned a blind eye to their cause for so many years.

The live broadcast lasted more than two hours and far exceeded its time. At the same time as the live broadcast was interrupted, a real reporter asked the most important question (in my opinion): Why was this press conference held?

Unfortunately, the audience (including me) did not hear any response, but despite some people who did not know how to ask questions or did not really want to ask questions declaring that the event was actually a waste of their time (online), I know that the DPP achieved his purpose: saying what he wanted to say and nothing more.

He dismissed the controversial IMPACS report as a bunch of hearsay with no evidentiary value. He said he had made undisclosed recommendations on unidentified cases, referred pending cases to the Police Commissioner and called for the establishment of an independent body to investigate police killings and crimes involving accused police officers.

In other words, the DPP wants everyone to know that, despite the fact that his office has thousands of pending cases to deal with at any given time, and despite the fact that the turnover rate does not allow it to process cases at the pace that people awaiting justice would like, he still wants his office to be involved in eventual prosecutions.

He did not explicitly object to the police investigating themselves, but everything else he said sounded like something that had never come out of his mouth.

The DPP recognizes that the local media is not well-informed in this area and is mostly unwilling to sit on the sidelines in the internet age, so he still invites the media to attend and report on cases that they are reluctant to report, but only expect to get statements from him online or in live press conferences because they can see and hear them better this way.

In this day and age, where the media, journalists and news workers are definitely more interested in getting “likes” online than getting offline after the fact, you always see tragicomedies like what we saw and heard last week, where journalists actually told the DPP that he should get around the law and answer their questions the way they wanted, simply because: “We are the press…”

As I watched the show, took copious notes in pen, and pounded away at my keyboard at home, I reminisced several times about the days when any new journalist’s first assignment was to “cover the courts” — not as a punishment, but to be able to understand how court processes work, how justice is measured and achieved, and to be able to better understand how to report without having your media outlet accused of reporting in a way that harms a case that is still pending.

The DPP did the only thing he could do: he invited the media to cover the court, but the response he got was that he should arrange for the media to report the case online – in this case, they would still ignore the bottom line: you have to be there to hear and witness the judge’s ruling on what can and cannot be reported.

Through reporting on the Magistrates Court case involving Philip Doxilly, whose land was allegedly sold one day after his mother’s death and who was ultimately declared a “vexatious litigant,” I learned a lot about why lawyers will also tell you “The law is a bastard!”

But today’s journalists are more interested in being the “first” news anchor to report “breaking news” rather than pursuing accuracy in news reporting, or even following the rules of news reporting.

I actually wrote a NB (Nota Bene) at the end of my notes that day asking for a call to the DPP to suggest that his office organise a seminar on the importance of ‘covering the courts’ but judging by what I see, hear and read every day here (and elsewhere in the region) attendance is likely to be low.