If journalists are targeted for doing their job, what is the impact on democracy?

Two journalists at the centre of one of the biggest freedom-of-speech scandals to hit the UK in recent years are bringing their award-winning film to Bristol in partnership with the National Union of Journalists.

Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey spent years working on the story of the Loughinisland massacre – the murder of six Catholic men in a bar in Northern Ireland in 1994. Their film, No Stone Unturned, made with director Alex Gibney (Oscar®-winning director of documentaries including Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) named three suspected killers. Yet when the film was released, police didn’t arrest the murder suspects – they launched dawn raids on the journalists’ homes, seizing their files and equipment. It took almost a year before a High Court judge ruled that the police action was unwarranted and the journalists had merely been doing their job.

---