A new study of newsroom practitioners, media lawyers and press freedom experts has pulled back the curtain on how UK journalists actually manage legal exposure.

The picture it paints will feel familiar to anyone who's had a lawyer's letter land on their desk on a Friday afternoon: defamation and privacy still dominate the anxiety, national security barely registers, and the cost of "playing it safe" is quietly reshaping what gets published at all.

The research by The University of Sheffield is based on interviews with 31 journalists and editors, four media lawyers, and 14 experts from regulators, NGOs and press bodies, all conducted through 2023.

That timing matters as it was a pretty strange year for media law: the Online Safety Act, the National Security Act and the first-ever UK anti-SLAPP provisions all became law within months of each other, none of them yet tested in practice. The study offers a snapshot of what newsrooms were bracing for, before the ink had dried.

Defamation still rules the fear list

Ask any journalist what keeps them up at night, legally speaking, and defamation comes up first. 19 of the 31 journalists raised it unprompted, along with all four lawyers and 11 of the 14 experts.

One media freedom campaigner pointed out that the UK has at times been called "the defamation capital of the world."

A local reporter compared notes with US colleagues and came away envious, pointing out that libel protections across the Atlantic are far more generous to journalists than anything on offer here.

The reason keeps coming back to the same structural quirk of English law: the burden of proof sits with the journalist, not the claimant. If you're accused of libel, it's on you to prove what you published is true, not on the person suing to prove it's false. That single feature of the system shapes almost everything downstream, from how stories get evidenced to which ones get killed before they're even written.

The Bloomberg v ZXC ruling came up again and again as a turning point. The case established that people under criminal investigation have a reasonable expectation of........

© journalism.co.uk