Media Law is one of the most complex and fastest growing areas of the law. Until fairly recently, it was not universally considered a discrete subject of study, and it was certainly not included in the syllabi of journalism or other media-related courses. The reason for this neglect was largely attitudinal: any legal problem which presented itself professional lawyer. The bigger media outfits have always had an in-house legal adviser, and the smaller ones usually referred cases to an outside lawyer. But a combination of factors made that arrangement less than satisfactory over the years. These included; rising litigiousness in society; runway growth in statutory and other regulatory activity; increasing complexity of the law; and an intensification of competitive pressures within the media which had led to, and in many cases actively encouraged, journalistic risk-taking on a much wider scale than had been seen in the past. Consequently, the awareness of a need for the working journalist-and other media practitioners-to gain at least a rudimentary knowledge of the law affecting their trade (if it can be called that) began to grow. The idea of "Media Law" as an integral part of journalism courses or vocational training programmes soon gaind currency. This branch of the law is, in fact, a slightly articial construct : "Media Law" essential consists of principles, concepts and precedents from a number of traditionally well-established areas of the law such as constitutional law, criminal law. As one leading expert in this field recently noted, "For an in-depth study of all aspects of media law, the practitioner would probably require at least half-a-dozen weighty textbooks". This handbook does not aspire to deal with the subject exhaustively. On the contrary, it is intended simply as a first port of call for any media practitioner who wants an overview of the basic rules on such matters as defamation, contempt of cout, copyright, official secrecy, individual privacy, and hate speech in the Asia-Pacific region. One of the challenges of compiling a work of even such limited scop as this is that there is a huge diversity of legal systems, principles and rules within this region, which makes it impossible to offer definitive and detailed guidane on the subject. This book should not, therefore, be treated under any circumstances as asubstitue for professional legal advice. //yn
