Media ethics the winner in Namibia court ruling

Namibia’s national broadcaster has come off second-best in an important new High Court decision. It spells out that the process used by the Editors’ Forum of Namibia to deal with a complaint by the broadcaster, one of the members of the forum, was fair. And it stresses that courts are limited in the grounds on which they may review the decisions of administrative bodies like the forum. As Carmel Rickard explains in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, the dispute was over the handling of a complaint that the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation had aired paid-for content as news, without indicating that it came from one side in a dispute, and without providing a balance by way of ensuring alternative views to those of the outfit that provided the content.