THE Circuit Court judge's ban on media coverage of a criminal trial in Cork is significant, given that a large volume of news reporting is day to day coverage of court cases.

The ban has been queried by the National Union of Journalists and by The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Examiner.

About a quarter of the home news space in yesterday's Irish Times, for instance (excluding sports and finance), was taken up with court reports. In provincial papers the proportion can be much higher.

Court reporting has a great attraction for the media since it allows them to publish controversial and startling statements, including those which may be untrue, without exposing them to risk of prosecution under the defamation laws.

All that is necessary is for the reporting to be contemporaneous and accurate, requirements generally met by the employment of specialised journalists.

At the same time, there has been in the past and occasionally in the present, public disquiet at the level of crime reporting, including the reporting of criminal cases in the courts. There is even a little known provision of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, still in force but never to my knowledge used in practice, which allows for the banning of any publication on the grounds that it devotes too much coverage to crime.

STANDARDS of public taste change over time and it may well be that many of the criminal court cases which fill our media might not have been reported at all in an earlier age.

In this context, and without commenting on the Cork decision, it is worth noting a peculiarity of the Swedish system of court reporting, which helps to make that country's media situation particularly interesting.

As Michael Foley has pointed out in recent articles, the Swedish system is one of the most open in the world. Where court reporting is concerned, on the other hand, many Swedish journalists operate a voluntary censorship system which would strike their Irish counterparts as extremely unusual. In effect, they do not report criminal proceedings in the courts unless the cases concerned are in the public interest. This applies even in cases' in which the defendant is found guilty. If a senior civil servant or politician, for example, was involved in fraud, reporting, the resulting court case would obviously be in the public interest.

Shoplifters and many other criminals, however, including in some instances murderers, can generally assume that the evidence of their crimes and the punishment - they attract will not appear in the media - (although the courts are open to the public as here).

The rationale for this voluntary policy is threefold. It is based on a belief that publicity amounts to an additional punishment not envisaged by law; that publicity can injure innocent third parties (family members, victims), and that publicity makes the task of rehabilitating the offender more difficult.

OF course, the problem is that the decision on what constitutes a case in which there is a legitimate public interest is taken, not by the courts or by the defendant, but by the journalists.

There is a grey area here, and the Swedish press ombudsman often has to deal with cases in which complainants, perhaps ODCs (ordinary decent criminals), feel they should have benefited from this policy but instead find their activities held up to the glare of publicity.

There are already many areas in which the media can be legitimately excluded from Irish courts and we should be slow to add to them. The traditional media argument that by reporting such proceedings they are acting as a necessary agent of the public, is a strong one. It should be an overriding consideration even if there are occasional excesses. In any case, the difficulties involved in filling those acres of Irish newsprint with other forms of journalism might well give our editors pause.

We should be more certain than perhaps we sometimes are that publication of what goes on in our courtrooms is always and necessarily in the public interest, as opposed to being copy that sells papers. As many innocent parties caught up in proceedings as witnesses or otherwise can testify, media exposure can be a terrifying experience for those unused to it. And readers are not the only people who have rights.