Because this new regulator has a statute backed oversight judging whether it is effective.
Because some crimes are civil and nothing to do with the police.
Because corruption is never-ending and can never be stopped completely.
All this charter is doing is setting up an independent regulator that is not a poodle of the industry and providing an affordable means of redress for wronged people.
There is no political interference, there is no free speech issue.
If you could refrain from debating with the me you’ve made up in your head that would be great. I said nothing of the sort. And as you should full well know telling lies about people isn’t against the law. It’s just until now there’s nothing people could do about it in the face of media intimidation and unlimited legal funds.
Quite obviously this is a change as the regulator will be independent of the press and have teeth.
The problem is that any law that prevents the abuse of free speech can also be used to prevent free speech that the government doesn’t like. And given that the government, like any other entity, is going to put its own interests first, a law like this will be used against political speech.
Some may argue that reining in the gutter press is worth the cost of also limiting political speech. Maybe so. But acknowledge you’re making the trade-off.
Sorry, I won’t direct this at you personally.
I think it’s asinine to add additional regulations on the press when they were already in violation of existing regulations, i.e. laws, and those laws weren’t being enforced. The police and politicians need regulation if they are not enforcing the existing laws. Had they done their job the press would not have been doing these things in the first place.
All the Daily Mail folks will see here is a new set of people to bribe and corrupt.
Is it a self-regulation system or is it independent of the press? I don’t see how it can be both.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the only regulation that’s needed.
The thing is, what is the appropriate remedy for what happened to someone like Christopher Jefferies? To my mind, the editors and reporters of the newspapers involved should be in prison. He got some compensation, but what happened to him was a clear assault against his person and reputation, if not his body.
Gah, remove “person and”, and substitute “person” for “body”
This is exactly the sort of case I had in mind when I said the papers are partly to blame for this situation.
Thing is, without police tip-offs and people selling stories to the press we may not have found out about the MPs expenses scandal. And without the Daily Mail pushing we may not have seen Steve Lawrence’s killers behind bars.
There’s a great blog post by an ex-NOTW reporter called Neville Thurlbeck which explains how he broke the story about Chris Huhne’s affair (which ultimately led to the speeding issues to come out). It started as chasing up an MP’s affair from a tip-off and eventually led to a cabinet minister in prison for perverting the course of justice. Arguably the first is an intrusion into a person’s privacy, but it led to more serious wrongdoing.
Well, Neville Thurlbeck has such amazing investigative journalistic splashes as “Nick Brown is gay”. It seems to me that the worst of them have a few stories to their credit, but they are counting on no-one ever having read the shit-rags they normally produce.