How British journalists talk about people they're not allowed to talk about

Libel laws are irrelevent to most people in the UK. Yes anyone can be libelled, but you have to be insanely rich to either bring an action for libel or to get one of these super injunctions.

Oddly, I was listening to the Spectator podcast this morning (donā€™t judge me!) and Matthew Parris was saying that in light of the response (or lack thereof) to the John Whittingdale ā€˜scandalā€™ that he thought that people generally didnā€™t care about who had sex with who so much any more.

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[quote=ā€œcubby, post:6, topic:76652, full:trueā€]
However, having your private life be tabloid fodder is the price of celebrity. [/quote]

Iā€™m not comfortable with that philosophy, and I donā€™t think you should be either. To borrow from the articleā€™s example, Bill Clinton is a celebrity, but so is Monica Lewinsky by association. Divine Brown might be called a celebrity by association with Hugh Grant. What about those who associate with Divine Brown? And those that associate with them? There has to be a rolloff or cutoff somewhere.

But in some sense, there isnā€™t. Celebrity is bestowed by other people, how many other people depending entirely on the size of the gossip pool. For example, Jessie Slater became an ā€œinternet celebrityā€ when 4chan raked her over the coals. Sometimes celebrity just happens. You can then invoke soft concepts like degrees of celebrity or circles of relevance, but nothing strong enough that Iā€™d want to base a system of rights on it.

There are a few paths to celebrity (politics) where we probably should get some insight into a personā€™s private character. There are others where you canā€™t practically expect the sort of comfortable public anonymity most of us enjoy. But saying thereā€™s no way for a sufficiently famous person to construct some private corner of society for herself is just crazy. I believe that we must be able to talk about pretty much anyone, if only to protect speech for those relatively rare public good cases. But we also need to recognize that puts some responsibility on us to use our judgment and only jump on things that actually matter.

In other words, if the public good is to be served by free speech, the public needs to grow up and stop buying every dead tree with ā€œSEXā€ written on it.

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The Elton Effect: the Streisand Effect but with jurisdictional arbitrage

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Iā€™ll be the pedant; the injunction here is not ā€œsuperā€, as English / Welsh press can talk about it, but not who it relates to. If it were a super-injunction, they wouldnā€™t legally be able to disclose its existence.

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This stuff, and things like warrant canaries in the US, reminds me more than I care to dwell on of the verbal gymnastics people need to use to talk on the internet in China.

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Uhm, you are only speaking about the plaintiff side. The fact that nobody in the UK is even allowed to talk about the fact that an injunction exists shows that this very much does affect average people in the UK. Hell, ask Simon Singh if libel laws affect people.

I get annoyed by these stories, because people pretend to complain, but really theyā€™re just entrenching this kind of restriction of speech by treating it as a funny silly game to try and make themselves seem clever and important.

If Popbitch (and other media collectively) were actually opposed to courts restricting speech, they would just name Elton John & David Furnish, and anyone else who tried to have them gagged, as a matter of course. The UK is not so illiberal that the state would be seen to spend all its time prosecuting news organs for reporting the truth; these injunctions persist because they never have to be enforced. Our world-beatingly foul, craven media wonā€™t challenge the status quo, because theyā€™d rather have something to pompously declaim about than, you know, serve the truth.

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Unfortunately, you also need to be insanely rich to defend a libel case, which does affect most people. Some directly, some indirectly:

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Yeah, @cubby kind of told us that when he used a ā€œBritish singer and his husband.ā€

But Iā€™ll give you a like for not dancing around and just putting it out there. :relaxed:

What was interesting was a lot of English papers would go on to say that a Scottish newspaper had named [Elton John] as the person in question, but then went on to say that they couldnā€™t name the newspaper.

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For the curious

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Wait, Elton John is gay?

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Of course not, you Funny Girl !!

Perhaps Iā€™m just a spiteful First Amendment Absolutist; but Iā€™d be inclined to view anything you purchased a hefty dose of prior restraint on as being presumptively worthy of broad publication; unless presented with rather compelling reasons to the contrary.

If you just left the matter alone, Iā€™d be inclined to respect your privacy unless presented with rather compelling reasons to the contrary.

Itā€™s sort of like flag-burning and blasphemy that way. Usually not worth the effort, and often a bit tactless; but if itā€™s actually forbidden; thatā€™s reason enough to do it as hard as you can possibly get away with.

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I thought a super injunction was an injunction where nobody is allowed to even reveal that it exists.

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It is; Coryā€™s using the wrong term.

Obviously, and in any case an anonymous person is posting about another anonymous person. The point I was trying to make is that in the absence of libel laws you can make untrue statements about identified persons that cause them actual damage. Iā€™m not sure if this is a different sides of the Atlantic thing or whether you are deliberately misunderstanding the point Iā€™m trying to make, but I could extend your argument to say that the Internet facilitates fraud and blackmail, so we should stop bothering to enforce laws against fraud and blackmail.
You havenā€™t explained why a law intended to protect people who criticise the government has been extended to make it possible for the media to wage campaigns of falsehood against individuals.

It isnā€™t UK; itā€™s Irish and the guy who runs it is virulently anti-English. The clue is in the name.

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Thatā€™s the wrinkle, this is a civil case, so as long as the people who the injunction is about* want to keep paying Carter Ruck to keep suing people, they can, nothing to do with the state.

(* I live in the UK, so I assume I canā€™t name the people already named in this thread, thanks law!)