German Court Issues Gagging Order onMail on Sunday over Schröder In what is believed to be the first case of its kind, a British paper faced being silenced by a ruling handed down by a foreign judge. A lawyer acting for the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, announced on January 14, 2003, that he had won an injunction from a court in Hamburg forbidding the publishers of the Mail on Sunday from reporting on aspects of the chancellor’s private life. Michael Nasselhauf said that the interim ban applied to six assertions made in an article published by the paper, which linked the chancellor to a famous German television interviewer. Mr Nasselhauf said that if the paper ignored the injunction it would be fined £164,000. John Wellington, the paper’s managing editor, reacted defiantly: “I can’t think of any other case like this. Our view is that we publish in Britain for British readers and we don’t see why the chancellor should be able to tell our readers what they can and cannot read.” Mr Wellington said the Mail on Sunday had not so far received a writ from Mr Schröder. “We had a letter from his lawyer asking us if we would not repeat certain things said in our article,” he said. “We have not been served with anything and our lawyers are investigating to see what implications this has for us.” The case was a prime example of something about which the Mail on Sunday and other papers had long been complaining: the step-by-step extension to Britain of laws made on the continent. In this instance, and apparently for the first time, it was German highly restrictive privacy law. A leading expert in the field, Michael Smyth of Clifford Chance, said it was not uncommon in commercial cases for judges in one country to set conditions applicable in another. But he added: “I am not aware of any libel or press law case in which an injunction has been won in Country A against a newspaper group headquartered in Country B. But the law permits Chancellor Schröder to do it because the EU treats Europe as one jurisdiction.” The Mail on Sunday’s story was reported on in several German newspapers. “Mr Schröder faces a choice. He could sue in Germany or in Britain. I don’t see that this injunction would have been awarded in London had he applied to a British court,” Mr Smyth said. The chancellor’s private life surged to the fore when he announced that he was seeking an injunction against an east German regional daily to prevent it from repeating a claim that his marriage was in difficulties. A hearing on his application was held in Berlin. The magazine Stern published an interview with Mr Schröder’s fourth wife, Doris, flatly denying the claims. The private lives of Germany’s politicians are strictly protected under laws and are rarely mentioned in the media. But more than one commentator protested that the Schröders themselves blurred the line between private and public in the general election campaign, when Doris Schröder-Kopf, a former political journalist, played an unusually prominent role in her husband’s campaign. (From ‘The Guardian’) Answer the following questions and present your own commentary on the given points.
1. Can you single out the specific implicating information the Mail on Sunday published about the German Chancellor? What was it? 2. Find the following quotation in the article: “Mr Nesselhauf said that if the Mail on Sunday ignored the injunction it would be fined.” What does ‘ignoring the injunction’ mean in this particular case? 3. The implicating information was published. Will the newspaper be fined? 4. Find the following quotation: “We have not been served with anything and our lawyers are investigating to see what implications this has for us.” What were they to be served with? 5. Find and comment on the quotation: “But the law permits Chancellor Schröder to do it because the EU treats Europe as one jurisdiction.” 6. Why did it happen so that Schröder’s private life was commented on in the German media despite Germany’s highly restrictive privacy law? 7. Why couldn’t ‘The Guardian’ specify what implicating information had been published in the Mail on Sunday?
Vocabulary 2
12. Read the following article and guess the meaning of the words given in bold type.
Mutiny at the Times Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, had two visions for the most prestigious newspaper in America when he took over in 1992. He wanted it to be bigger as a media outlet, more national and more aggressive, competing with papers across the US on their turf. He wanted it to be happier as a workplace, more humane and more democratic. Howell Raines, the man he chose to run the paper in 2001, was perhaps the best man to achieve the first half of Sulzberger’s mission and possibly the worst to achieve the second. Under Raines’s hard-driving leadership, the Times dominated coverage of news, including 9/11, and won seven Pulitzer Prizes in 2002. But in the process he infuriated reporters and editors, who complained that he favored a small coterie of star writers, pushed workers beyond reasonable limits and ruled by fear. Raines and his No. 2, managing editor Gerald Boyd, resigned in an unprecedented downfall at a major American newspaper. At first glance, their toppling was the climax – the Times hopes – of a humiliating season of scandal that began with the disclosures that young reporter Jayson Blair had plagiarized or fabricated a string of stories. But at root, it was something more mundane and yet amazing: a workplace’s staging a public mutiny to take down an unpopular boss. Speaking to TIME last week, Sulzberger said he was saddened by the resignations but not because he was responsible for choosing Raines. “You make choices,” said Sulzberger. “Some work. Some don’t work.” And indeed the Blair scandal and its aftermath followed a decade in which Sulzberger had modernized and in many ways improved the staid Gray Lady. The son of the previous publisher, Sulzberger beefed up the paper’s features and cultural coverage, raised its profile nationally and internationally. Still, says Susan Tifft, a former TIME writer, “Howell was really Arthur’s 100% pick …. So this would have to be seen at one level as a failure of Arthur’s management.” At first, Raines seemed like the right man for the right time. The 9/11 attacks – which occurred six days after he took the job – required firm, aggressive leadership. But the heads of the Times ’s bureaus traditionally had leeway in deciding what stories to cover, and as the crisis ebbed and Raines’s top-down crisis structure became business as usual, it began to rankle. He shook up the staff, giving choice assignments to cronies. He was brusque and domineering. He launched a crusade against the Augusta National golf club exclusion of women and then was at least partly responsible for spiking two sports columns that didn’t square with the paper’s position. Of course, many successful leaders are not nice guys – and bosses, perhaps. But Jayson Blair turned Raines’s leadership into much larger issue. That Blair, a smooth talker who ingratiated himself with Raines and Boyd, went so long uncaught despite warnings about his sloppy work was blamed on Raines’ playing favorites and his unwillingness to listen to others. But Sulzberger took an aggressive role in trying to gauge newsroom discontent, including holding a meeting of hundreds of employees – which made it clear that Raines and Boyd needed to act very fast to fix morale. Among other things, the paper appointed a committee to make management suggestions – and began looking for other Blairs. Then came a second scandal: Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize winning feature writer, was suspended after he filed a story about oystermen in Florida that had been largely reported by an uncredited intern. Bragg further enraged the newsroom when he claimed that Times national reporters did things like that all the time. When Raines issued a mild and tardy response, many of his people felt he had sold them out. The Bragg case caused a minor public flap compared with Blair’s, but it was ultimately more damaging to Raines. Journalists started giving anti-Raines quotes to competitors. It didn’t help that when Sulzberger went to the Times Washington bureau for a brown-bag lunch, an employee said, “he got a harsher message than he expected.” Some have speculated that his family, particularly his father, pressured him to act, but Sulzberger says that although he talked with family members, he made the decision to accept Raines’ resignation himself. He also insists that he did not order the editors to quit. There was a sense from the two of them that the hill that they had to climb was becoming too steep. Sulzberger named Joseph Lelyveld – a measured manager, liked in the newsroom – to be the interim executive editor while a replacement search is under way. Sulzberger tells TIME he’s looking for a “great journalist” who is “an effective leader and manager” – which, in the wake of the Raines war, may be more than mere corporate-speak. Times employees say they are relieved to have a respite from the turmoil with Lelyveld, who addressed the newsroom, ending with four simple words: “Let’s go to work.” (From ‘Time’, abridged)
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