Australian Cardinal George Pell convicted of child sex abuse offences - but reporting of this is banned in Australia.
So... here's an article I read in my newspaper earlier this week: "Why the media is unable to report on a case that has generated huge interest online". As you might imagine, this left me quite unenlightened. I had no way of knowing or guessing what this case was, or who was involved. It was only a few days later, in conversation with some people I work with, that I found out what had happened.
And this is the first chance I've had since then to sit down and research the story for myself.
In short, Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic Church official to stand trial for sexual abuse, has been convicted of sexual abuse offences relating to his time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the late 1990s.
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From the National Catholic Reporter: "Cardinal Pell found guilty of sex abuse, expected to appeal, reports say"
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From the Washington Post: "Australian court convicts once-powerful Vatican official on sex-abuse-related charges"
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From the Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/vatican-no-3-cardinal-george-pell-on-trial-for-historical-child-sex-charges (I can't confirm this one - it's reportedly geo-blocked for Australian readers)
However, the Victorian court hearing the case has imposed a suppression order on the case, which applies in every jurisdiction in Australia. We have seen no reporting of the case as it proceeded, and no reporting of the outcome.
Before some people start assuming that this is protecting the Church, it's related to the right of an accused person to a free trial. Cardinal Pell is facing another trial in a few months for further charges of sexual abuse on a minor (relating to his time as a priest in Ballarat in the 1970s), and the court feels that reporting the outcome of this trial will potentially influence any possible jurors for that trial. Those possible jurors should go into that trial without any preconceived ideas of the accused person's guilt - and reporting that he is guilty of similar charges will undermine his right to a fair trial.
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From the Washington Post: "A top cardinal’s sex-abuse conviction is huge news in Australia. But the media can’t report it there."
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From the New York Post: "Australian media barred from covering cardinal’s conviction for sex abuse
All that we in Australia are being told is "George Pell removed from Pope Francis's cardinal advisory body". It's obvious why he was removed... if you know about the conviction.
That's not entirely unreasonably, IMO. However, let's be honest here, no matter how much they try to suppress the news regarding the outcome of this trial, I think Cardinal Pell is unlikely to get a completely unbiased jury considering how well known he is, how high profile the case was/continues to be, and how long this debacle has been dragged out due to him essentially hiding in Vatican City since it all started and being "unable to return" for years now "due to poor health". The shithead even testified to the Royal Commission from his hotel room in Rome, and it wasn't until things got too politically expensive for Pope Francis to keep protecting him that his health suddenly improved enough that he could return to Australia to face justice.
p.s. Come Home (Cardinal Pell) - Tim Minchin
True. But, assuming that Australians don't read international media, those possible jurors in the March 2019 case still won't know that Cardinal Pell was convicted of child sex abuse in December 2018. They can proceed on the basis of "innocent until proven guilty" because they (theoretically) won't know he's guilty of similar crimes.
Also, even if the judge who made the ruling knows that people will still report the conviction, that doesn't stop it being the right thing to do. We have to try to do the right thing even if we know it's going to fail. Sometimes the attempt is just as important as the success.
And, as someone pointed out to me the other day, this also removes the ability for Cardinal Pell to call for a mistrial in March due to the jurors being tainted by knowledge of his previous case. The court can rightly point to this suppression order and say they did everything possible to maintain Pell's right to a fair trial. It therefore removes one possible avenue of appeal.
Oh for sure, I am not criticizing the gag order at all. It's the right thing to do, IMO. I just think it's a bit unrealistic to expect it to really do much to prevent a tainted jury pool, especially with the internet and Streisand effect. But that's also a good point about it at least giving the Crown plausible deniability and the ability to fight any appeal based on it since they did everything in their power to prevent that.
This may be an unpopular belief, but I tend to think the "Streisand effect" isn't an effect at all. Instead, it's just a feeble attempt to observe the media interplay when the suppression of some story becomes a bigger story than the initial item being suppressed. I doubt that would happen here. The base story being suppress was already too huge to be entirely undone by a gag order, and that was true probably before the order was issued.
Making news harder for a people in an entire nation to hear will mean that only the most clever and media savvy will hear it, which will have the net effect of successfully mitigating the spread of the story and keeping this particular wave from hugely impacting the likely jury pool in a few months. I don't think anyone reasonably expects the gag order to be perfect. It is merely better than doing nothing (in terms of protecting the rights of the accused).
Edit: I mean, just to put this in a different light, one other aspect of the Streisand effect pertains to how jealously and carefully she permits people to use her work. It means that very few people my age can think of a single song she's ever sang. We might call this the "success case" for getting around the Streisand effect.
I can see where you're coming from, but the MSM is not the only way in which the Streisand effect plays out. Even stories that don't get any MSM coverage can experience the effect through other channels like twitter, blogs, reddit, etc. So IMO it's not just a feeble attempt to point out the media interplay with suppressed stories, although that is certainly one aspect of it. I think the effect mostly stems from basic human nature; People inherently dislike when someone or some organization attempts to suppress a fact/story that sheds them in a bad light, and the effect arises directly out of a natural desire people have to fight against that by instead making sure that unflattering light is cast as far/wide as possible in response.
"Oh, you don't want people to know about this? Well fuck you, now I'm going to make sure everyone does!" ;)
And I think two things: first, it's rhetorically effective to paint your argument as something that someone else doesn't want you to know, even (and especially) when there is no attempt to keep you from sharing that argument.
The second thing is that when there is a group that does make a concerted effort to suppress information, I think on the whole it is effective in actually suppressing that information. If you limit access to the information, fewer people have that access. The only time you can start talking about a Streisand effect is when someone specifically notices and says "fuck you, I'm sharing this," and that is NOT the normal case scenario when it comes to suppressed information. That means the "Streisand effect" from the get go is talking about a minority of cases of suppressed information, not the majority like its often portrayed (with the usage of the term "effect").
The reason I don't think it is an effect at all is because it doesn't talk about a major use-case scenario but a prominent exception to the rule. That's why I think it's a feeble attempt to talk about media interplay in these usually one-off situations.
That's not what the Streisand effect is at all.
Someone posted photos of her house on the internet, and she didn't want them there. She values her privacy, and didn't want people seeing where she lived.
So, she decided to kick up a fuss to get those photos off the internet.
Unfortunately for her, the fuss she kicked up only drew attention to the photos' existence, so more people went looking for them and more people saw them. If she'd just kept her mouth shut, most people wouldn't have even known the photos existed, let alone that they were posted on the internet for all to see.
Her attempts to hush something up gave it more publicity: that's the Streisand effect.
I'm not sure how that relates to her published recordings, which she's obviously not trying to hide.
I know exactly what the Streisand effect is. I was talking about another thing that Streisand does to arguably suppress content when I said "in a different light." That you saw a greater need to try to correct me than read into what I was actually trying to say concerns me, especially when I was talking about her root behavior that caused her to kick up that fuss rather than the specific context of the original fuss kicking.
To be honest, I didn't even realise you were making another point about Streisand. I occasionally find your comments confusing and difficult to understand. For example, this didn't make sense to me:
So, I focus on the one thing in the sentence/comment that I can see is wrong, because I assume it's that wrongness which is causing the rest of your comment to not make sense to me (i.e. the foundations are making the building crooked).
I find it baffling that you go from think “this doesn’t make sense to me” which is understandable to “this must therefore be wrong.” Why must anyone be wrong? Why can’t I just have failed to communicate in a way that makes sense to you?
I don't automatically assume someone is wrong if I don't understand them. Sometimes, the reason I don't understand them is because they're just flat-out crazy. Sometimes, they're talking way over my head. Sometimes, they're using English as a second language.
But you're not insane, or a super-genius, or a non-native speaker. So you I assume you should make sense. When you don't, I look for why. And if I see you misusing "Streisand effect" to refer to something totally different, I assume that's the key to why I can't understand you. Because the Streisand effect is not "a feeble attempt to observe the media interplay when the suppression of some story becomes a bigger story than the initial item being suppressed". That might be a real thing, but it's not what people mean when they use the phrase "Streisand effect". Nor does it have anything to do with how she releases her recordings.
If you start using words and phrases to mean what you think they mean, rather than what everyone else thinks they mean, you're undermining your ability to communicate.
Two things:
The part where I seem to have failed to communicate for you seems to be specifically the point where I talked about the tactics Barbara used, and relating the behavior and motive to other areas and parts of her life where she acts much the same way (thus keeping "Streisand" in the conversation). At no other point was I referring to anything other than the commonly used attempt to squash a story that then gets spitefully spread.
The feeble attempt to observe media interplay is talking exclusively about the commonly understood meaning behind "Streisand effect," which as I explored with cfabbro is more about the one-off exceptional cases than anything that can be statistically referred to as a trend or effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is an effect. The Streisand effect is an exceptional spite-driven media campaign.
At its root, I feel like we got off on the wrong foot here (and maybe that's got some overlap in other exchanges we've had). Mostly I'd just prefer for things to seem like the way you and I interact isn't so much about correcting each other's supposed wrongness. I think that shit gets tedious, especially since we're both obviously proud of our respective mastery of the English language. I would much rather have our exchanges positioned from a place of questioning than a place of knowing. Because I trust that you sure as hell know what point you're trying to make, just as I sure as anything know what point I'm trying to make. Sometimes the execution is lacking, but that's just a fact of communicating with an almost stranger.
Fine. I'll start peppering you with questions about what the hell you're talking about, instead of trying to correct you when you're wrong.
Here's a Techdirt article about this from yesterday that I thought was good too: Super Injunction Silences News About Vatican Official's Child Molestation Conviction, And That's Bullshit
Well, that's not true. In other reading, I saw that some of the charges were dropped.
I'm torn on this matter, myself. I strongly support the right of an accused person to a fair trial, which this suppression order is intended to enable, but I also strongly support the right of the public to know about matters like this. However, my (admittedly limited) experience is that suppression orders like this are usually temporary (I wouldn't know if they weren't!). If the purpose of this suppression order is to ensure that Cardinal Pell receives a fair trial in March, then I expect that the order will be lifted after that trial ends. I have seen this happen before, where a newspaper will report something like "Now that this trial involving John Smith has ended, we can finally report the outcome of a previous trial involving Mr Smith". I therefore expect our Australian media in March/April to be flooded with news about Cardinal Pell's two trials.
Considering that the offences Pell has been convicted of are already 20 years old (and the charges he's facing a further trial about are 40 years old), I think this "currency" argument doesn't really have any legs to stand on.
Really? Even I, an Australian, was able to find these stories. (How else could I have put this post together? haha)
Interesting. I wonder if they'll be able to find enough people in two months that haven't heard about it? Most people don't even get news through official channels nowadays.
They've been purging posts and comments about it in /r/australia and similar subs, supposedly due to a contact either from authorities to them or authorities to Reddit to them.
What I don't get is how this could poison a jury - past, known, convicted offences do predispose someone to further offences, the prejudice a jury would have is appropriate to the circumstances.
Maybe so, but a defendant is not on trial for past deeds. Everyone deserves a trial as fair and unbiased as possible for the transgressions they're accused of, and not to be "retried" by preconceptions and bias for previous crimes during the course of any new proceedings.
A judge can reveal previous convictions etc if they feel it pertinent to the current charges though, and that does happen quite often.
Everybody deserves to be judged for their actions - and criminals are more likely to commit new crimes than the general population. A lack of context is not 'fair and unbiased' - quite the opposite.
You answered your own question: knowledge of this conviction would prejudice the jury.
And, just because someone committed one crime, that doesn't mean they should automatically be considered guilty of committing another crime. Each case has to be addressed on its own merits.
But these aren't past offences that Pell has been convicted of. The current convictions are for crimes which Pell committed in the 1990s, while the charges he's being tried for in March related to offences which he is alleged to have committed in the 1970s... 20 years earlier. These convictions are for crimes that happened after the previous alleged offences. Even on that basis, your argument doesn't hold water: these are not past crimes that would predispose him to commit further offences. If anything, they would be the further offences.
EDIT: I accidentally an important word!
I disagree. The past thing is not the relevant part of the predisposition, it just usually happens that way. If someone was willing to sexually abuse a child 10 years ago, they are far more likely to have been willing to 20 years ago than someone who didn't. This is relevant information and the prejude of the jury is 100% valid.
So, under your system, how do people who've reformed ever get a fair deal? Even if someone gives up their life of crime, you think it's proper for a jury to be prejudiced against them if they ever come under suspicion again (even if they're not guilty this time). You don't seem to believe in second chances.
The same way everyone else does - the content of your character is part and parcel of a fair deal.
Having the jury know you committed crimes in the past does not equate to a guilty verdict. It just means that arguments like 'the defendant would never do something like that because they're an upstanding member of society blah blah' - which are used as part of a reasonable defence all the time - would obviously not work in the case where someone would do something like that (because they've been convicted of doing so in the past).
When one person comes out and says 'so and so sexually assaulted me' - it's easy to dismiss them. When 10 people come out and say 'so and so sexually assaulted me' it's much, much harder. This is something we've seen over and over again in just the last couple of years.
In a post on r/Australia about this story (to an article that also does not mention his name), the mods are threatening to ban anyone who mentions his name. An Australian on a link to the same story in r/Privacy is at least under the belief that he could be imprisoned for mentioning Pell's name online in relation to the story.