Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has caused some controversy this morning after last night’s opening speech at the Society of Editors annual conference – leading to discussion on the Today programme – and widespread media coverage.
He says it is undemocratic that Justice Eady has repeatedly used the privacy law to prevent newspaper coverage of certain issues: he says the High Court judge has brought a privacy law in through the back door. Furthermore, he says it undermines newspaper sales…
“The British press is having a privacy law imposed on it, which apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds is, I would argue, undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market.”
Read the full speech here, or a report from the conference here. You can follow @journalism_live on Twitter for more updates from Bristol. So… it’s over to you: click through to vote in our poll:
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I blogged on this earlier today. My thoughts in full via link.
Hi Louise, do please tell us more…
http://tinyurl.com/6kkyaq for my blog on Dacre. This has been THE hot topic on the net today, especially on Twitter.
Come on, you can do better than that. Make us want to read your blog post. Better still, leave an actual comment!
Well basically it’s a case of legitimate public interest. There was none in Mosley’s case. It might have been different if the alleged Nazi aspect had indeed existed or if Mosley had been found to be paying his professional dominatrixes out of F1 funds. But neither was the case. It was a purely private activity. And I’m very sure that if Dacre suddenly had his and Mrs Dacre’s sex life splashed all over the front page of a red-top, they’d be crying “breach of privacy”.
If Dacre and co want to see an end to privacy rulings made on a case by case basis they can do this: firstly stop confusing public interest with the interest of the public and secondly stop running salacious stories that by definition are going to trigger legal action. Eady’s rulings will not, in any case, prevent legitimate investigative journalism, only sleazy invasions of privacy.
Now go read my blog and feel free to leave a comment!