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Media companies face uncapped penalties after admitting they breached suppression orders in publishing details of Cardinal George Pell s since-overturned convictions for child sexual abuse.
Dozens of companies, reporters and editors were charged with contempt and breaching suppression orders over their coverage of the conviction, which was banned from publication in Australia until February 2019.
Cardinal Pell s five convictions have since been overturned by the High Court and he has returned to Rome.
A contempt of court trial has been underway in Victoria s Supreme Court since November last year, beginning two years after charges were first laid.
But the case resolved on Monday after the 12 corporations agreed to plead guilty to 21 charges of breaching a suppression order made by County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd.
The only thing that could be reported was that Pell was facing historical child sexual offences in the county court of Victoria. Nothing could be published that was “derived” from the trial, including the verdict, the nature of the charges, or the number of victims, charges or trials, under the order.
Within 24 hours of the jury handing down its verdict, the mood in some of those newsrooms had seemingly shifted. It was no longer a case of what they couldn’t publish, but what they could.
Two journalists with decades of experience, former editor of the Age, Alex Lavelle, and Australian Financial Review (AFR) news editor Mark Coultan, gave evidence this week in the supreme court trial of 27 media companies, reporters and editors charged with contempt for their coverage of the Pell verdict.
“I didn’t think the story had any merit, there was no story at that time because there was no social media discussion of the case,” Lavelle told the court on Thursday.
“It was never an intention to write a story about what happened in the Pell trial, the possibility was that because of . the extent of social media discussion of this story, potentially it could come to the point that I or the Age could consider it was possible to run a story in some form.”
Lavelle said the situation changed by the afternoon of 12 December 2018: international websites had published articles naming the cardinal which could be found with a Google search of “George Pell guilty”, leading to widespread comments on social media, and to several Age readers calling the newsroom asking why they had not reported the verdict, including one that suggested there was a “Catholic conspiracy”.
Claims by some readers that The Age was part of a conspiracy protecting the Catholic Church and George Pell were a factor in the newspaperâs decision to publish its initial article about the cardinalâs conviction on child sex abuse charges, a trial has heard.
The Age,
The Sydney Morning Herald and some of their journalists are on trial, along with other Australian media, over contempt of court charges stemming from reports they published and broadcast in December 2018, in the days after Cardinal Pell was found guilty at trial in the County Court.
Cardinal George Pell.
Credit:AP
Cardinal Pell had his convictions overturned following a successful appeal to the High Court last year and was released from prison.