The Media Decides Guilt or Innocence

The reason that Kafka's The Trial has seized so many readers is the fundamental human terror of suffering false accusation. The explanation for the success of the many books and films in which patients discover that their medical tests were confused with a terminal case is the exhilaration of the fantasy of escaping fate.

John Leslie - who thought he was in the Kafka story - must now feel as if he's in the laboratory mix-up one. And the same plot was played out in other news stories this week. After six different hearings in the court of appeal, Michael McMahon and David Cooper were posthumously cleared of the 1970 Luton Post Office murder, for which they spent 10 years in jail. And Steven Horkulak, a City trader, won £1m legal damages after proving that he was bullied out of his job.

These are all stories of vindication, although they show how complicated absolution has become in our culture. After the prosecution withdrew two charges of indecency against John Leslie, the judge told him: "You leave court without a single stain on your character." Oh, yeah? Judge George Bathurst-Norman's contention would certainly get a lively discussion going on ITV1's This Morning or another of the mainstream TV shows which Leslie probably shouldn't be expecting to present ever again.

He cannot even expect the guiltily sympathetic treatment from the press which was given to another ITV presenter, Matthew Kelly - wrongly accused of paedophilia - because newspaper photographs of Leslie apparently taking cocaine will be enough to justify to many editors their treatment of him. (Such judgments seem confused. Steven Horkulak admitted to past cocaine abuse during the Cantor Fitzgerald bullying case, but has received entirely sympathetic press coverage.)

So, although John Leslie understandably feels euphoria at the confirmation of his innocence, it's not a happy thought for him that, in a brutal view of reputations, Michael Barrymore is officially less besmirched in that the scandal which freeze-framed the comedian's TV career never led to charges. While it's greatly to Leslie's credit that the guest-list at his parties all made it through the evening alive, he still stands on a lower rung of the ladder to liberty along with others - such as the royal butler Paul Burrell - who were faced with cases which then collapsed in court.

Wrong as it is, we tend to have a sense that exoneration comes in grades. Though juries can be wrong, the best hope for a reputation is still to hear the foreman say "not guilty". Collapsed prosecutions and appeal court reversals - especially when, as in the Luton shooting, those being vindicated are now dead - lack the same clarity of acquittal. Something clings.

Perhaps realising this, the judge in the Leslie case was trying to promote the view - which the legal system needs to be believed - that mud doesn't always stick and that there can be smoke without fire. But the prevailing winds of our culture - fanned by newspapers and airwaves - are strongly against that idea.

While no legal smoke clings to Leslie or Kelly, social smoke does. In theory, John Leslie ought now to be able to present the dating game - offering romantic holidays as prizes - which ITV cancelled when the allegations first emerged. But it would be a surprise if he did. Television executives will mutter that the publicity alone would still make him "inappropriate" in such a context. And - regrettably - they're probably right. Despite the outcome, the case itself has soaked him in a bad smell which can never quite go.

The lord chief justice's call for parliament to examine whether defendants such as Leslie should be granted anonymity is clearly an attempt to address this problem but, as well as the rules about mud and smoke, Lord Woolf needs to note the one about stable doors. Competitive journalism and the internet have made it impossible to keep the names of those investigated (especially famous names) out of the public domain, and only a system of fining and imprisoning editors - which no government is going to want to risk - could restore invisibility now.

As a result of cynicism and journalism, we live in a world of image-blur, in which guilt need not now be final (it's probably too much to hope that we've seen the last of Lord Archer) but neither is innocence. This atmosphere clearly has implications for the investigation which Lord Hutton has just begun into the death of Dr David Kelly.

A government, a broadcasting organisation and the family of a dead man all pray for certain names to be cleared. But we have again been reminded this week that mud and smoke are stubborn substances. The words "vindication" and "vindictiveness" have similar roots and the former is rarely now clear-cut enough to end the latter.