London--Vilified for their dark arts since the phone-hacking scandal, Britain's popular press won a victory this week after prosecutors acknowledged that the long-held practice of paying sources for stories was legitimate.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on Friday dropped cases against nine journalists facing trial for illegally paying police and other public officials for information, while another four were cleared in court.
At the same time, the CPS issued new guidelines making clear that journalists should not always be prosecuted for paying for scoops.
"It is simply obvious that there are circumstances in which it can be in the public interest for journalists to pay for information," a former head of the CPS, Ken Macdonald, told BBC radio on Saturday.
A total of 29 journalists have been prosecuted under the £20-million (28-million-euro, $30-million) police investigation into illegal payments to officials, codenamed Operation Elveden.
But just three have so far been convicted and only one of these verdicts looks set to be upheld.
Prosecutors have blamed the poor success rate in part on their use of a 13th-century offence, misconduct in public office, that is very hard to prove.
But Macdonald said that "not enough weight was attached to the public interest in free expression and the freedom of the press, and that was an error".
AFP
