Good week, bad week

A MIXED week for the British press saw freedom of speech saved on the one hand and abused on the other.

I refer, of course, to the lifting of the ban on the Guardian's reporting of Parliament on Tuesday - and to a separate incident courtesy of Jan Moir's homophobic bile in her Daily Mail column.

While I was beaming at the ultimate victory of the Guardian in the first story, Ms Moir's comments left me shaking my head with bewilderment.

Firstly, the Guardian's victory was hugely important as the defence of a fundamental point of democracy - the right to report parliamentary proceedings openly.

This was enshrined by the Bill of Rights in 1689. It states: "Freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament."

Yet, incredibly, Carter-Ruck, the lawyers for British oil-trading firm Trafigura, had been granted an injunction preventing the reporting of question tabled by an MP to a minister.

The injunction not only prevented the question being reported but also stopped the identification of the MP, which minister might answer it, or where the question could be found.

The Guardian could only report that Carter-Ruck were the lawyers involved and that they had been prevented from reporting in Parliament.

But their front page story provoked Twitter users and bloggers into action over what lay behind the mysterious ban.

Within hours, Twitter accounts began to display the details which the Guardian could not report, making a mockery of the injunction against the newspaper.

The question was from Paul Farrelly, the Labour MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme. It concerned the reporting of an incident in which toxic waste was allegedly dumped by the company in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast.

Eventually, the story was picked up on by the mainstream press, featuring on two prominent blogs and in the Spectator and Private Eye.

News of the gag caused outrage on all sides of the House of Commons with Speaker John Bercow describing it as "quite astonishing".

At lunchtime on Tuesday, Carter-Ruck withdrew its gagging attempt, shortly before a 2pm High Court hearing at which the Guardian intended to challenge it.

But, though it was the Guardian newspaper which benefited, this has been seen as an even greater victory for new media.

The users of Twitter were particularly influential on the result, finding out the details and spreading them like wildfire to cause enough noise to get the lawyers to back down.

Just days later, the Twitter users were at it again. But this time they were in opposition to the press or Jan Moir of the Daily Mail, to be precise.

Ms Moir was the target of their ire because of her spurious, unfounded comments about the nature of the death of pop star Stephen Gately in her Friday column, a day before he was even buried.

She suggested that Gately had lived "a life... shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice" adding that his death "strike[s] another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships".

The story has attracted more than 500 comments, mainly critical, to its own website.

Twitter users posted outraged updates, some from the website's most famous exponents, Stephen Fry and Derren Brown, who are both gay.

On his feed, illusionist Brown urged the public to lodge a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission whose website crashed.

The PCC are unlikely to be able to do much about it. As stated on their website in the FAQs, they are unable to impose fines because they are a non-statutory body.

Even if they had that sanction, they do not "generally accept complaints from third parties about cases involving named individuals without the signed authorisation of the person concerned".

They also do not make decisions on matters of taste and decency, citing that this would restrict press freedom.

Mail editor Paul Dacre, who is current chair of the PCC Editors' Code of Practice Committee, would be showing great ignorance if he attempts to let this story blow over, however.

As shown by the Guardian this week, the freedom of the press is a constant, hard-fought battle and the Fourth Estate is vital to the running of democracy in this country.

But some of its members would do well to remember not to abuse their rights.

They should also recall that a journalist's first duty is to the truth and not their own agenda - and that includes columnists.