Even more privacy stuff …

It’s over a month since I first wrote about superinjuctions, and of course everything’s got much hotter since then.

Much of the printed press – and the BBC – seem to be toeing the line at the moment, and the most insightful article (i.e. – the one which most reflects my sensibilities 😉 ) I’ve found was on the Wired site. One link follows through to Roy Greenslade’s blog – also informative.

These provide the answer to the question – Who Makes the Law? Now, to remind you, the options previously available were:

1. Parliament – a popular answer with MPs, although they seem to be reluctant to actually do anything about it.
2. The Courts – who don’t really want to be involved – especially if it means their majesty is mocked by a bunch of oiks on Twitter
3. Europe – it’s actually nothing to do with the European Union, but it still winds up Nigel Farage and the Daily Mail, so lets leave it in 😀

Now we find out that the answer is … the Press Complaints Commission. Here’s the quote from Dave, as reported in the Wired article:

“there’s still more to be done to recognise that actually the Press Complaints Commission has come on a lot in recent years”

Nobody else seems to have noticed. The adjective routinely applied to the PCC is “toothless” (check Google if you don’t believe me). It has consistently failed to provide any protection for those who want to keep their private lives private. And despite the protestations from the reptiles of Her Majesty’s Press that they take complaints “very seriously” (see Fraser Wood being viewed with incredulity after about 4 minutes of this BBC Newsnight clip) , it’s hard to think of a situation where real sanctions have been applied. There may be a 3-line apology on page 94, but that’s yer lot, mate.

Wired looks on this as a “coded warning” to the PCC. I hope so, ‘cos most of us would say “what has he been smoking ?”

Or else we might suspect that – after thinking a bit harder about it – the MPs don’t want to regulate their mates in the press, but they can see that the judges will keep passing them the hot potato …

[Edit]

I seem to recall from this interview with Dave that he said something on the lines of … the right to a private life expressed in the European Convention was intended to protect us from the state, not the press. Total b*ll*cks of course.

[Edit #2]

Almost forgot. My solution (to the Twitter outing) would have been for the courts to order The Sun’s articles to be made available in the public domain – and to their competitors – 24 hours before The Sun could publish them. This goes against my instincts on copyright, but – as with heroin – remove the profit and remove the problem…

What hacks me off about TV News

I like 24-hour news. I sometimes watch a lot of it. But there are some things that are just annoying. Sometimes when there’s a bad news day, and they’re desperate for content. Sometimes when something big has broken.

• Journalists posing non-sequiturs to interviewees – drawing a spurious conclusion from a statement. In the recent student demos, for example, when those opposing tuition fees were deemed to support the abuse of the heir to the throne (there’s a whole post waiting to be written on that).
• These dodgy statements are often prefixed with the phrase “some people might say …”.  If I was the subject, I’d be tempted to say “Who are they ? Bring them in, so we can all have a laugh”. A really crass attempt to generate “controversy”.
• Political correspondents more interested in showing off how “in the loop” they are, than in reporting the facts. Often trying to push a soap-opera narrative they’ve constructed.
• Generally, a lack of nuance. Politics involves shades of grey – it was described by Bismarck as “the art of the possible”. So compromises have to be made. We don’t always need winners and losers, but we do always need to find the right balance.
• I really get annoyed with charities and pressure groups generating fear as a way of raising funds. And then the newsreader asks something like “has the government done enough ?”.
  When have you ever heard a pressure group rep say “Yes, that’s just what we wanted, we can wind up and look for a new job now” ?