Kieran Lawrence looks at autonomous weapons and the effect they could have on modern warfare
Continuing a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Angela Merkel
Ben Bland examines the fallout from the Iowa caucuses and looks forward to the New Hampshire primaries.
In the first of a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Nicholas Sarkozy
Yes, careers have been ruined, people have been scandalised and now it turns out the thing that most appalled the British Public, that the phone of Milly Dowler, had been hacked and interefered with to keep the tabloids supplied with info and which led the girl’s mother to think she was still alive, was probably untrue.
Now the politicians, who’ve all been dancing around like they just got Al Capone on tax evasion, have a problem. The tabloids, which for years have had politicians wrapped around their fingers like cotton, were vanquished by the broadsheets. Then it turned out they were no better than their better-selling kin. Rather like when it became known J. Edgar Hoover was in the pay of the mob.
Now the politicians have a problem, how do they punish the Guardian? Certainly they’re going to be up before the Leveson inquiry and in heaps of trouble, but exactly how do you respond to what is in the end a form of sabotage? If a store went around saying a neighbouring store put orphans in its burgers, they’d be in trouble and in the dock faster than you could blink. We have laws to deal with this, but a newspaper doing the journalistic equivalent? Ah. We suddenly enter a very gray legal area.
Certainly politics without the journalists would be handy, but every party has the newspapers that are essentially their cheerleading squad, so they don’t want to write a law that could neutralise them. A free press is also a very essential part of Democracy, nothing terrifies a potentially crooked politician like the headlines they might generate when it gets found out. Not to mention the fact censorship just isn’t British, as the Duke of Wellington said, “Publish and be damned” (i.e. better to get sued later on than not publish), not “publish if the government says it’s fine.”
Overall we will probably not see any massive repercussions in the law, it’d restrict a free press too much. But for those of us looking for an ethical newspaper, it just got even more difficult to find something worth cleaning your windows with.
You must log in to submit a comment.
