It is a fact that whether Michael Shields was guilty or not of the grievous assault on Bulgarian bartender Martin Georgiev remains a matter of opinion – specifically, divided public opinion – irrespective of the rulings of Bulgarian and European courts and irrespective of Jack Straw’s pronouncement of Shields as "morally and technically innocent".
 
There is the court of public opinion, and there the jury is still out. This is an indisputable fact simply by reading comments on internet forums responding to the news of Shields’s pardon, and moreover, by the fact that there are people from the trial judge to Bulgaria’s former foreign minister Ivailo Kalfin who continue to insist that Bulgaria’s courts were correct in their verdicts.
 
But this is not about the merits of the case. It is about the fact that the "free Michael Shields" campaign is a case for media studies, and yet further evidence – if any was needed – about how public opinion and the media feed off each other.
 
At what was termed a "celebratory" news conference after his release, Shields thanked all of those who had stoutly supported and defended him; perhaps his most heartfelt thanks should have been to the media who rallied to his cause.
 
On legal and procedural grounds, things had long looked dark for Shields. The appeal process up to Bulgaria’s highest court brought only a reduced penalty, but no reversal of the guilty verdict. The European Court of Human Rights found no fault with the process by which Shields was found guilty. As is well known, it took court action in England to even get the process of attempting a royal pardon underway.
 
Most of all, Shields had media support on his side of a force, local but equivalent, to the generally supportive treatment that was part of the Obama juggernaut – though with Obama there was at least the pretence of objectivity among media that otherwise were punching out the pom-poms in their cheerleader routine (disclosure: I’m rather fond of the 44^th president myself).
 
However, the Shields media campaign was not initially a monolith in the British media environment.
 
In August 2005, The Sun – a stalwart for Shields – drew flak from the Independent as the Indy alleged that the red-top was cynically using the Shields case to boost its circulation. The Sun had printed forms to be completed and sent to Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov to plead for clemency. The Sun said that it had collected 5000 letters.
 
Closer to home, among the most vehement backers of Shields was the Liverpool Echo (no relation to The Sofia Echo) which joined in other sympathisers in the use – no doubt in accordance with its stylebook and the idiom in which it customarily addresses its readers – as referring to Shields as a "lad", as "Michael" and "a Reds fan".
 
Pro-Shields media more recently referred to him as a "student" and visuals of Shields tended to be of the fresh-faced and healthy-looking young man at the outset of the saga, rather than more recent pictures of someone clearly less innocent-looking; in other words, the man we saw on September 9 2009, whose face evidenced, even before he spoke the words, the hell that he must have endured in respective confinements in Bulgarian and UK jails.
 
Now, it would be a very strange editor indeed who in Liverpool either wrote off as too tedious to report the gruelling campaign to get Shields freed, and a downright self-destructive one who did anything other than take up the cudgels for the local lad.
 
An editor who failed to take sides with Shields should surely be toppled from the editor’s chair, where he or she would have no place belonging. The equivalent would be if I, as editor of The Sofia Echo, preached from the editorial pages that Bulgaria should forthwith expel all expatriates and, for good measure, ban the publication of newspapers in any language but Bulgarian. Those who decide who sits in the chair that I occupy would, at very least, question my judgment, if not my sanity, if not my apparent wish for a change of employer.
 
Further, there is the cyclical nature of the media, especially in the internet age, or rather the age of Google News and copy-paste. Media at one remove from those close to the story – in other words, media other than the Liverpool Echo and others very well-acquainted with the details which had followed the story closely, irrespective of what conclusions they had come to in respect of their editorial policies – tended to accept at face value the pro-Shields camp claim that Shields was not guilty.
 
Thus British media came to accept as a given that Shields did not do it – again, that is not to comment on the merits of the case, but only about how it was reported – and so the phrase "in jail for a crime he did not commit" became a mantra. In the hours after Straw’s announcement, Shields’s innocence became a fact, even though the justice secretary of the United Kingdom has only the power to pardon, and not – that I have ever heard – the power to overrule and erase from the record the judgment of a Bulgarian court.
 
For the media, this is a tricky area. In several countries, writing that someone is not guilty when a court has found him to be so is the precise equivalent of saying that he is guilty when a court has found the reverse; that is, contempt of court.