Originally Posted by yoko1
No lawyer, for the defense or the plaintiff, is going to be lifting their arguments or facts from PPRuNe - sorry to burst your bubble if anyone was thinking otherwise.
Lawyers, no. But then why do you spend hours of your time composing replies? There is a saying that ‘debunking the stupid on the internet is like emptying the oceans with a teaspoon’ and you seem far too erudite to be wasting time on such futility. I think we both know that it’s because this site is a good source of lines of enquiry for investigative journalists, and whether they take any facts from here is less important than whether they subsequently ask the right questions of those with authority. So there’s a clear incentive for rebutting, discrediting or attacking certain arguments in what would otherwise be a corner of the internet that could safely be ignored along with all the others.
However wrong journalists sometimes get things, the influence of the press on government should never be underestimated, and while its work should have no bearing on legal outcomes it can certainly influence the process.