You aren’t talking about the same thing. Ok it’s a huge attack on the press. I hope that satisfies you. I haven’t argued for or against injunctions beyond one sentence. After that I was simply asking if you had any proof something like that was done in this case. If you don’t that’s fine. You are free to draw your own conclusions. When you declare something as fact you may have people question it.
As was pointed out nothing was done to protect William. The mention of an affair remained. If someone asked for an injunction I can conclude it wasn’t the palace or if it was it didn’t go their way. But that’s just a guess.
Ordinary poor people end up in the media all the time. Most often when they caught up in a crime the tabloids find suitably titillating. And when they do they are mercilessly hounded by the tabloids and their privacy is not respected in the slightest.
But aspects of witnesses and victims personal lives that has nothing do with the crime are still routinely splashed over the tabloids. Once you end up in the public eye, for whatever reason, your privacy is not worth squat unless you can hire very expensive lawyers.
FWIW i actually think where the UK draws the line on reporting of ciminal trials more reasonable than the US, they take sub judice seriously, and don’t allow a blow-by-blow of each fragment of evidence and witness account on the news talk shows before they are entered in court.
I wouldn’t know - I mean, how could I? - but a quick google suggest that injunctions to prevent publication of private details are a commonly used tactic to protect domestic abuse survivors from harassment by their abusers so I’m going to go with: no, they’re not just for the rich, they’re an important tool by which everyone can defend their right to privacy.
But even if not, this:
is flat wrong.
There are many problems across many areas of law caused by the fact that rich people find it easier to access justice than the poor. But the answer to “this remedy is not in practice available to the average person” is absolutely not “therefore this remedy should in principle not be available to the avereage person”!
If there’s a problem with equal access to justice caused by financial inequality, fix that problem! Don’t go stripping rights away so we’re all equally unprotected by the law.
Teh reason super-injuctions came into being is that when there were mere injunctions, what would happen is taht the press would report one page that an un-named personality was having a juicy affair with their au pair (or whatever) and then three pages later report that Mr So and so had recently taken out an injunction. It was a blatant and in the short-term successful attempt to make a mockery of the court’s ruling but the end result was a fairly predictable example of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”.
It’s legitimate to report he’s having an affair - he’s a public figure and national figurehead. It would be legtitimate to report if his affair had led to an illegitimate child. As it hasn’t, I really don’t see the public interest in naming the person. What difference does it make if it’s one aristo or another?
I am absolutely claiming this, and I don’t know why you think you have a right to know about my personal life. And this is also true if that’s a general “you” - no-one has a right to know the details of some stranger’s personal life, absent demonstrable public interest.
And again, the fact that not everybody is able to enforce a right is not a good reason for stripping everybody of that right.
I’m just not sure I agree that the fact a royal or famous person having an affair is news, but who they have the affair with is private information.
What I do sympathize with is that fact that this seems to all be rumor, without any real facts to back it up. If you’re reporting on a rumor, something you’re not sure is true, I can see the argument for leaving out details that might cause more harm than good.
But I’m wary of there being a legal standard of that sort of thing. UK libel laws do seem to be too strong, and it seems that they are very strongly enforced around royals so they can save face. I get why these injunctions would rub people the wrong way.
But here you have an alleged “right” that is only accessible via very expensive involved legal process (super injunction are only available via the High Court, no one who is not very very rich is getting one). That completely meaningless, and not really a “right” at all, whether or not the “right” is itself valid or not. If you claim to have freedom of religion, but if you want to worship anything other than Lutheranism you need to apply for permit from the supreme court then you don’t have freedom of religion.
You are not stripping away rights. There are two sides to the “privacy” coin. My “right to privacy” means taking away your right to talk about things I think are personal. If I am rich and you are not, I can use the power of the state to punish you when you bring up things I want to keep private, but you can’t afford to do the same, so I can talk about your private life as much as I want. That is inherently far worse than neither of us being punished by the state for discussing each other’s private lives.
I don’t have the right to know that Joe Bloggs shat himself on his sofa last year. But I do have the right to make a joke about it if I do know, the state should have not use its power to stop me from making that joke. No matter how rich Joe Bloggs is, taking away my right to comment on a factual event that happened, is an abuse of power that restricts our freedom speech. Most especially if Stephen Colbert makes a joke about Joe Bloggs shatting himself on his sofa to millions of Americans, that is itself an important thing to report on (if say, I’m writing the column in the guardian whose job is to report on what has been said in the US television networks) if I’m stopped from reporting on it then that is a huge restriction on the freedom of press. Your “right of privacy” does not trump my right to know what was on TV last night in the US.
This makes zero sense. My point was, this sucks because it is literally only available to rich people. Your regular person is not applying to the High Court to get a super injunction, that “right” is only available to very rich people with very expensive lawyers.
Think of it? I didn’t even understand it until this thread popped up. Somehow I missed the main point and couldn’t figure out what the heck the big deal was. I’d see the photo with different parts highlighted to show where it was altered and I thought “who gives a rip if Charlotte’s sweater is mismatched in certain parts” or whatever. It makes slightly more sense now that I know Kate’s image was lifted from a prior photo. I guess I’m trying to reconcile the fact that “someone” thought it was crucial to provide proof of life with the half-arsed job they did of it. From what I’m reading it sounds like it is easily detectable. Assuming this isn’t anyone’s first rodeo, how could they not realize it would backfire?
Which leads to another question. Ok so it was a perfectly innocent mistake. Someone used a editing software like anyone wanting to make their family photo look better. So why not send out another picture right away?
As someone stated upthread, I don’t care about them as people. What will make me care is a mystery. The Palace is turning this into more of a mystery with every step.
Like others here, I seldom care what the royals are up to. But I’m interested in this because of the cover-up. And how inept that cover-up is.
I suspect the explanation will be boring, but part of me wonders if the whole incident isn’t a form of misdirection like how a magician will pretend a trick didn’t work in order to set up a better trick
The first thing that would come to mind is that her face looks bad in some way that she wants to hide.
That said, either her hands or her kids clothes are also obviously edited (depending on which part was actually cut out). So one theory has been that it’s actually an older photo with some changes to make it look newer.