Why the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to the citizen journalist

Jeremy Forrest's sister, Carrie Hanspaul, appeared on ITV's "Daybreak"
programme this week to defend her brother

HARD as we try to move on, the Jeremy Forrest child abduction case continues to dominate the news agenda in East Sussex.
The Eastbourne schoolteacher has now served the first week of a five-and-a-half year jail sentence for his naive and foolish pursuit of a love affair with a 15-year-old schoolgirl.
We've had Forrest's sister share ITV's "Daybreak" couch to insist her brother is not a paedophile but is in love with the teenager.
The girl's biological father managed to eke a shekel or two from one national newspaper proclaiming how he would shake Forrest's hand to walk his daughter down the aisle should the couple one day decide to tie the knot.
And we have had the great and the good moralise over the rights and wrongs of this story - "Jeremy Forrest is no Romeo, neither is he a pervert" (Guardian), with the NSPCC patronisingly reminding the media not to romanticise the case, warning us to be careful of presenting the relationship between the teacher and pupil as a love story. Thanks for the egg sucking exercise guys!
Now there are whispers, totally unsubstantiated, that one tabloid has offered the schoolgirl £60,000 for her exclusive story, as the newspaper tries to persuade a judge to lift the anonymity clause - a request I find hard to believe any judge would oblige.
Yet that is the nub of a thorny problem, which I wrote about last week since the schoolgirl's identity was once in the public domain. Although the media have and will comply with the law, in other words a section 39 order under the Children & Young Persons Act, the public won't necessarily have the foggiest that a ban exists, or even understand the complexities of the law.
There was an interesting article written this week from by David Banks, one of the top journalism law lecturers in this county and who I know well, who wrote about the dangers of Twitter relating to this case. www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jun/26/jeremy-forrest-twitter-users
He correctly pointed out the dangers of Twitter users who named the schoolgirl, either out of ignorance or pure defiance, and who will have broken the law.
We've seen this before with the libel case involving Lord McAlpine and Speaker's wife Sally Bercow over her errant and ultimately costly Tweets. Then there was a court case in April when two men received suspended jail sentences for posting photographs on Twitter and Facebook of the killers of toddler James Bulger.
The genie has well and truly escaped from the bottle. There urgently needs to a complete shake-up of the laws, as well as their application to society as a whole, now that social media has opened up the channels of communication and a huge worldwide audience to anyone with a laptop or mobile phone.
There also needs to be a greater awareness campaign of digital media social responsibility.
Citizen journalists can seemingly Tweet or Facebook what they want. At times it is as if they can do so with impunity, without having to carry that same social responsibility as the media. Yet on all fronts, the law has been caught napping and doesn't seem to be doing anything about. The nine-month suspended sentence for the Twitter and Facebook photos was ludicrous.
This is why I worry about the rise of the citizen journalist. Not because we as professionals are special or being protective about our trade, but because we as professionals know the boundaries, the right boundaries, which society sets to protect the individual. Without them you get a form of digital vigilantism.
Too often the sword is struck in the belly of the media. Too often it is forgotten how justice requires those reporting the courts to do so with exacting standards where those who fall foul are punished.
Maybe it's time that the clever armchair journalists who disobey the law, or report in such a cavalier fashion are held to account too. That would certainly sober people's minds.