This twerp “sent an explicit image of himself to an undercover reporter from the Sunday Mirror”.
I love the euphemisms they come up with. But in this case, taken quite literally, his words as he falls on his sword are quite accurate.
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I’m not sure this is a legit. bust - it sounds rather like entrapment. Was Mark Newmark committing a crime here, or was he duped into cheating on his wife and shaming himself?
If the Murdoch press are allowed to do this, then their victims should be able to bring civil suits against the journalists or their employers for fraud, and Newmark should be protected by the same laws that are designed to punish people who use “revenge porn” (typically men shaming their ex-girlfriends, but why not journalists shaming public figures?)
How would this go down if the entrapped politician was female?
It’s a pretty low form of “journalism”
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Isn’t everyone who cheats with a willing partner who isn’t a prostitute entrapped into cheating? And who is saying he committed a crime?
Where’s the fraud? The reporter promising she was sexually available when she really wasn’t?
I don’t know what revenge porn laws you’re talking about, but so far as I can tell the actual photo he sent hasn’t been published, just reported on. While he probably owns the copyright over the photo (unlike a lot of non-selfie revenge porn), it probably fits as fair use when used for news.
Totally agree.
Also, unless the politician was trading sex for political access, it’s none of my ‘‘fucking’’ business.
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Perhaps he was instructed to do it so the Conservatives could bury the bad news of another UKIP defection? 
Personally, as long as there was no corruption, and he wasn’t running on a family values platform, I don’t really care, and this does sound fairly entrapment-y. The reporter was sending naked pictures of ‘herself’ before he reciprocated. Icky, given he’s married with kids, but not really anyone else’s business.
Edit: Granted, his involvement with Women2Win makes this a little ickier, too.
It’s just as much bullshit as this is.
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The Mirror’s fishing via Twitter was aimed against only one political party (as opposed to politicians, or even politicians in power), and there’s evidence of the same reporter making similar approaches to smear six other MPs, which had each failed before they got Newmark to bite.
There is a code of conduct for editors in the UK which states they may resort to a “sting” if doing so is the only means to expose
a crime or “serious impropriety”
Instead, they’ve apparently been fishing for a random fall-guy amongst Tory MPs to create a story that wouldn’t otherwise exist - then they’re not reporting news as much as being the Rottweiler for one of the other political parties who are presently out of office.
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I’d be interested to know where the reporter got his photos of “Sophie”, and whether he had permission to use them for this.
There’s only one of those 
(major parties, anyway), and it’s the one The Mirror has always batted for. Also, The Mirror has a history of making stories up and employed Piers Morgan as editor for years, so they can fuck right off. They have no more credibility as a newspaper than The Sun does (and Robert Maxwell was more of a scumbag than Rupert Murdoch, which takes some doing).
The Guardian must be pretty unique in not being owned/having been owned by truly awful people - Murdoch, Maxwell, Richard Desmond, Conrad Black, The Barclay Brothers…it’s like a parade of scumbags. The Daily Mail isn’t as bad as most, seems that the 4th Viscount Rothermere is just a tax avoider (of course, great-granddad was a Nazi), but that ‘newspaper’ is bad enough on its own regardless.
Edit: Worth reading the Twitter conversation between Evan Harris (@DrEvanHarris) and Lloyd Embley (@Mirror_Editor).
In response to that, here’s a Guardian article that does talk about the questionable nature of the work done by The Mirror to get this story. Looks like The Mirror is going to be answering some questions - whether they want to or not.
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I’m not sure it was done by The Mirror, TBH, sounds like some freelance hack. I wonder if he hocked it around a load of papers, or just them?
Currently the Mirror’s editor-in-chief is defending the story. That makes it sound like it might have been an in-house job. His defense of the story rests on the idea that “public interest” was involved.
Which might hold up if this MP were specifically chosen for his campaigns to get women into Parliament, but it sounds like they went fishing, and it seems that they found that if you pretend to be a pretty young 20 something and flatter and flirt with a load of old guys, there’s a chance one might be flattered enough to respond ‘inappropriately’. BFD. Hardly surprising, hardly news. I guess this guy has learnt something he doesn’t like about his own personality, that’s about it.
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I totally agree - it’s not a defense they’ll be able to use. They weren’t after just one guy who had founded his campaigns on access to women. They went after various guys - and all in one party.
Maybe the Tories had this little gem lined up for a ‘bad news day’. Like when one MP resigns, and one crosses the river of filth and turd to UKIP.
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Noob mistake. First ask for naked pics with today’s paper, showing the date, and some random word written on it.
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Sure, but it does seem ridiculously easy to provide “nudes” from say, stock photos, or even grabbing random photos from some low traffic corner of the Internet.
This is one level up from Nigerian 419 scams…
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Yep, check out the article I posted from The Guardian. They’re already asking if there was permission to use that girl’s image, or if it was just used without her knowledge.
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The photo of the girl identified as “Sophie” is apparently some random image scraped off a blog from Finland … it seems likely it was used without permission.
Further analysis here, but in summary:
- Getting someone to take part in a sexual act (which includes photographing their bits) without consent is a crime
- Case law establishes that consent cannot be deemed to have been given by a person who was subject to a deception at the time
It would be amusing if the editor at the Mirror was made to sign the sexual offenders register…
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Lots of Guardian links on this, they’re really going after it.
Sounds like the story was considered too dodgy even for The Sun or The Mail:
I suspect that The Mirror weren’t told about the other fishing expeditions. Seems that it was conducted by someone who works on Guido Fawkes’ blog (not exactly renowned for its high journalistic ethics).
The Mirror’s sticking to its Public Interest line, though.
Edit:
I see at least one of the models whose photos were used is now going to “tell her story” in the same paper. Odd that several different people’s photos were used and that Newmark apparently didn’t notice.
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