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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (9851)	11/13/2001 4:11:51 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It's not "Freedom OF the Press" It's "Freedom FROM the Press" is needed in certain matters -g- <<snip>> It’s a disgrace, an affront to freedom, a shocking abuse of power, a travesty of justice. This outrage is — look, in order to freeze your blood more efficiently I must quote directly rather than just summarising the Sunday chorus — “an insult on this Remembrance Day to those who fought and died for Democracy and its bedfellow Press Freedom”. It is so bad, in other words, that even the poor dead boys of the Ypres salient must be co-opted to condemn it. And what are we outraged about, brothers? Is it David Blunkett’s new power of imprisonment without trial, the way war was declared without checking with Parliament, the proposal to pack the House of Lords with political appointees, or the way that your democratically elected MP is ordered about by press officers? Is that why the Fourth Estate is up in arms for liberty? Er, no. All the squawks above, including the one about Remembrance Sunday, were provoked by the fact that Mr Justice Jack won’t allow the Sunday People to tell us which footballer sent dirty text-messages to Miss B, a topless lapdancer, and omitted to wear a condom in her bed. Mr X then compounded his crime by picking up a nursery nurse (Miss C) in a bar, and misleadingly informing her that he had a dog but no wife before plying her with chocolates, smirching her honour and sending her 438 phone messages (the sweet innocent was clearly counting very carefully). <<unsnip>> ...Libby dear, ever thought of changing that surname? -g- <<snip>> Mellor, backing the newspaper’s appeal due to be heard next year, says that the ruling was especially dangerous “at a time when major British institutions from Parliament to the medical profession seem utterly incapable of policing themselves properly”. He’s right, alas. But what he, as an honest man, must admit is that one of the institutions which doesn’t police itself properly is the press. The reason that we will go on getting judgments like this, from exasperated courts faced with irrelevant tittle-tattle from affronted strippers, is that no government has ever had the bottle to face down the powerful press and create a proper, moderate, democratically backed law of privacy to keep it in order. <<unsnip>> hear hear thetimes.co.uk