This has easily been the biggest news in media for the last few months. And it's understandable why. This inquiry began on the 13th July 2011 to investigate the role of the press and police in the phone-hacking scandal.
What? You've never heard of the phone-hacking scandal? Where were you?
Basically, last year the News of the World were caught tapping into people's answering machines (breaching the Human Rights Act and the PCC's guidelines) and obviously using the information they gained to get information that otherwise would not be available to the public. From as early as 2005 it was discovered that the News of the World were hacking the phones of celebrities, politicians and the Royal Family, and these investigations concluded in 2007. However, in July 2011, it was discovered that the News of the World had unlawfully accessed the phones of relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombings.
This soon led to the complete liquidation of the News of the World on the 10th of July, only days after investigations discovered this latest scandal. Many of the major advertisers that used the News of the World for advertisement, boycotted the paper, and on the 7th of July 2011, James Murdoch (the chairman of News Corporation) announced the closure of the News of the World.
Since then, the Leveson Inquiry has unveiled further and further scandals, but it seems like we all now know exactly whose phones were hacked and it's unlikely that News International (the parent of News of the World) have anything else to hide, especially since the FBI on their backs now.
In any case, the Leveson Inquiry is being used to determine the future of press regulation, which relates back to my previous post about media regulation. This could change the face of the press, giving it less freedom than it once had. However, it's not exactly like the press had the freedom to hack phones in the first place, which is exactly why this Inquiry is taking place.
Phone hacking is obviously a serious offense, and gives us a good understand of exactly how petty reporters can be just to sell a few papers. Yes, it is a good idea to delve deeper than the average person to obtain the information that the public need, but it depends on what that need is. For example, hacking the private phones of celebrities and families of the victims of the London bombings obtains no useful information at all. Literally no one on Earth should care about what Wayne Rooney got up to last week behind the bike shed with 55 year old Shirley, nor how much she cost. The public especially don't need a look-in on the pain that the families of attack victims go through, especially since most of those messages are probably condolences.
What needs to happen is the re-definition of the idea of "public interest". It is part of the PCC's guidelines, and newspapers do generally follow it. However, a paper like News of the World, should surely comment on ... oh let's call it News shall we? Events that affect us. Those are the things that we need to know about. Of course it is down to the public as well to try and redefine what the press conceives as public interest, because let's face it, most of us follow celebrities using their Twitter feeds now (I say 'us', but that definitely doesn't include me). I'll tell you what public interest is. The current situation of the government, the war in the Middle East, etc. The press shouldn't care about people, unless those people directly affect us. I genuinely don't think that the mishaps of John Terry are going to make me miss my lecture tomorrow morning. And if they do, then I will forgive the press.
However, until that time, shit needs sorting out.
Pete out.
Wednesday 29 February 2012
Friday 24 February 2012
Media Regulation
This post may be a little outdated, but it relates to last year's huge big massive rants about media regulation and newspapers and such. Of course the big topic of the moment's regulation is ACTA and SOPA, but I've already covered that, so here goes.
The citizens of the United Kingdom are supposed to live in a world with freedom of speech, and on the most part we do. The media, however, is restricted by laws and guidelines so certain information never reaches public ears. These rules and guidelines are followed quite closely by the press, one of the topics that will be raised in this essay, but the internet can and will ignore all of them simply because it is public domain and anyone can say anything, and that is the other topic for discussion.
The press are bound by the laws of the Press Complaints Commission who have the right to sue newspapers if they ignore the guidelines, so they generally abide by them. The commission works in the same way as the Advertising Standards Agency, in which readers make complaints to them and then they act accordingly. This system usually works quite effectively, because the regulations placed on the media are quite fair. The ways in which the press is restricted is really only with publication of children affected by abuse, which is fair enough. These regulations though are up for discussion right now due to the ongoing row over super injunctions. This started when Gyan Riggs’ name was unveiled on Twitter as the person who slept with Imogen Thomas and then got a gagging order to stop the press printing his name. A wave of Twitter users then started exposing more and more super injunction users, and the current count is now more than 30 people who have been affected by these claims (referenced from the Independent 07/06/2011). On the 23rd of May, David Cameron revealed that injunctions “should be reviewed” since the law was “not working”. This is a direct call from the Prime Minister for the want of tougher regulation. The government is now looking for new privacy laws to be brought in that could see that the internet is more regulated, especially with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, if this goes ahead then the government could take legal action against the 30,000 Twitter users who revealed the identities of those who got gagging orders (referenced from the Independent 07/06/2011). While this is the government saying that the internet needs regulation to help those with super injunctions not have their names exposed, it can surely be argued that it is the public who are exposing these names, and so it is “within the public interest” (article 14 of the PCC guidelines) to have these names in the papers and for injunctions to be abolished. Surely in our democratic society it would make sense for the government and the courts to listen to the public on this one? It is a pluralist ideology that freedom of speech is a must, and if these “role models” are performing misdeeds then the public has the right to know about it, since the truth is always the right way to tackle things. The idea that someone with a lot of money can buy their way out of the spotlight so that they can keep their secrets and lies secrets and lies is a Marxist ideology, and therefore doesn’t really have a place in where I believe the media is heading, which is towards freedom of press.
On the side of the internet, regulation is quite scarce. Fortunately there is enough regulation on the internet to stop paedophile rings and other such criminal sites, since these particular things are against international law, and therefore any country has the right to take down these sites. However, media piracy and sites like Wikileaks can operate in countries where the law is lax enough to stop the servers from going down. For example, the popular Torrent site Pirate Bay was once taken down by the American government and then re-established in Sweden where the law allows torrenting, which is gradually being illegalised in many countries including the United Kingdom. This is where regulation needs to be tougher, since of course media piracy is completely illegal and yet millions of dollars worth of movies, music and games are downloaded free of charge everyday via peer-to-peer sharing. In the case of Wikileaks though, no laws are broken. The freedom of information article in the human rights act states that all information is public domain, and so it is actually the governments who are breaking the law by withholding information from the public. The American government successfully brought down Wikileaks once, but as is the ways of the internet, a new server for the website popped up on nearly every single domain, making it nearly impossible to take down again. Then again, the freedom of the internet brought together the campaign groups in Egypt that started the chain reaction of the peoples overthrowing their governments that led to the current situation in Libya via social networking.
To conclude, regulation is definitely needed on both the internet and in the press, but the laws do need to be tweaked slightly. In my view, super injunctions should be abolished and a review of the official meaning of the phrase “public interest” should be taken into account. For example, we always absolutely need to know the state of the economy and the overall state of the country, but we don’t really need to know what Ryan Giggs got up to when he visited his dear friend Imogen Thomas, although this is more of a spam filter than actual regulation. I think that the guidelines that the PCC follow right now are definitely the right ones to follow, so long as one of these rules doesn’t become “If someone buys the right to silence, then you definitely give it to them,” but that’s just scepticism. On the side of the internet, again the regulation is sound as long as the government knows how to control things. The Twitter row shouldn’t even be an issue because the things said on the internet are controlled by the users, and therefore the things that are read are controlled by the users as well... so that’s more about self-regulation than spending lots of our money trying to crack down on internet spam, whereas that money should be spent trying to swindle other governments into banning Torrent sites so that media piracy can be brought down, which is where internet regulation is lacking.
Sources: My A-level exam practise papers 2011 (hence the out-dated-ness)
I wanted to include this in my portfolio because it raises a lot of good points. The very last sentence pinpoints the exact areas in which internet regulation is lacking, and as of this year that has been on the agenda of the American government. You'd think that I'd be pleased, but the way they're going about it through "tracking IPs" and such is ridiculous. All they need to do is to make Torrenting illegal in Sweden (one of the only countries left that allows it) and Torrenting will be down, and that'll be a huge blow to internet piracy and could help be its downfall so long as the PirateBay don't actually manage to form their own country. Either way, to counteract my statements of last year, even if we don't stop internet piracy, barely any of the film and music producers are going to care because they make millions already. In fact, lots of film-makers make low-budget and terrible films with racey names (i.e. Nude Nuns With Big Guns) specifically to be released onto Torrenting sites so that they can catch out Torrenters, and potentially sue all of the people who downloaded and uploaded the film to make potential billions in profits. Now that is a good idea. Exploiting the idiots.
I hope this post has been a good insight into my mind.
Pete out.
The citizens of the United Kingdom are supposed to live in a world with freedom of speech, and on the most part we do. The media, however, is restricted by laws and guidelines so certain information never reaches public ears. These rules and guidelines are followed quite closely by the press, one of the topics that will be raised in this essay, but the internet can and will ignore all of them simply because it is public domain and anyone can say anything, and that is the other topic for discussion.
The press are bound by the laws of the Press Complaints Commission who have the right to sue newspapers if they ignore the guidelines, so they generally abide by them. The commission works in the same way as the Advertising Standards Agency, in which readers make complaints to them and then they act accordingly. This system usually works quite effectively, because the regulations placed on the media are quite fair. The ways in which the press is restricted is really only with publication of children affected by abuse, which is fair enough. These regulations though are up for discussion right now due to the ongoing row over super injunctions. This started when Gyan Riggs’ name was unveiled on Twitter as the person who slept with Imogen Thomas and then got a gagging order to stop the press printing his name. A wave of Twitter users then started exposing more and more super injunction users, and the current count is now more than 30 people who have been affected by these claims (referenced from the Independent 07/06/2011). On the 23rd of May, David Cameron revealed that injunctions “should be reviewed” since the law was “not working”. This is a direct call from the Prime Minister for the want of tougher regulation. The government is now looking for new privacy laws to be brought in that could see that the internet is more regulated, especially with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, if this goes ahead then the government could take legal action against the 30,000 Twitter users who revealed the identities of those who got gagging orders (referenced from the Independent 07/06/2011). While this is the government saying that the internet needs regulation to help those with super injunctions not have their names exposed, it can surely be argued that it is the public who are exposing these names, and so it is “within the public interest” (article 14 of the PCC guidelines) to have these names in the papers and for injunctions to be abolished. Surely in our democratic society it would make sense for the government and the courts to listen to the public on this one? It is a pluralist ideology that freedom of speech is a must, and if these “role models” are performing misdeeds then the public has the right to know about it, since the truth is always the right way to tackle things. The idea that someone with a lot of money can buy their way out of the spotlight so that they can keep their secrets and lies secrets and lies is a Marxist ideology, and therefore doesn’t really have a place in where I believe the media is heading, which is towards freedom of press.
On the side of the internet, regulation is quite scarce. Fortunately there is enough regulation on the internet to stop paedophile rings and other such criminal sites, since these particular things are against international law, and therefore any country has the right to take down these sites. However, media piracy and sites like Wikileaks can operate in countries where the law is lax enough to stop the servers from going down. For example, the popular Torrent site Pirate Bay was once taken down by the American government and then re-established in Sweden where the law allows torrenting, which is gradually being illegalised in many countries including the United Kingdom. This is where regulation needs to be tougher, since of course media piracy is completely illegal and yet millions of dollars worth of movies, music and games are downloaded free of charge everyday via peer-to-peer sharing. In the case of Wikileaks though, no laws are broken. The freedom of information article in the human rights act states that all information is public domain, and so it is actually the governments who are breaking the law by withholding information from the public. The American government successfully brought down Wikileaks once, but as is the ways of the internet, a new server for the website popped up on nearly every single domain, making it nearly impossible to take down again. Then again, the freedom of the internet brought together the campaign groups in Egypt that started the chain reaction of the peoples overthrowing their governments that led to the current situation in Libya via social networking.
To conclude, regulation is definitely needed on both the internet and in the press, but the laws do need to be tweaked slightly. In my view, super injunctions should be abolished and a review of the official meaning of the phrase “public interest” should be taken into account. For example, we always absolutely need to know the state of the economy and the overall state of the country, but we don’t really need to know what Ryan Giggs got up to when he visited his dear friend Imogen Thomas, although this is more of a spam filter than actual regulation. I think that the guidelines that the PCC follow right now are definitely the right ones to follow, so long as one of these rules doesn’t become “If someone buys the right to silence, then you definitely give it to them,” but that’s just scepticism. On the side of the internet, again the regulation is sound as long as the government knows how to control things. The Twitter row shouldn’t even be an issue because the things said on the internet are controlled by the users, and therefore the things that are read are controlled by the users as well... so that’s more about self-regulation than spending lots of our money trying to crack down on internet spam, whereas that money should be spent trying to swindle other governments into banning Torrent sites so that media piracy can be brought down, which is where internet regulation is lacking.
Sources: My A-level exam practise papers 2011 (hence the out-dated-ness)
I wanted to include this in my portfolio because it raises a lot of good points. The very last sentence pinpoints the exact areas in which internet regulation is lacking, and as of this year that has been on the agenda of the American government. You'd think that I'd be pleased, but the way they're going about it through "tracking IPs" and such is ridiculous. All they need to do is to make Torrenting illegal in Sweden (one of the only countries left that allows it) and Torrenting will be down, and that'll be a huge blow to internet piracy and could help be its downfall so long as the PirateBay don't actually manage to form their own country. Either way, to counteract my statements of last year, even if we don't stop internet piracy, barely any of the film and music producers are going to care because they make millions already. In fact, lots of film-makers make low-budget and terrible films with racey names (i.e. Nude Nuns With Big Guns) specifically to be released onto Torrenting sites so that they can catch out Torrenters, and potentially sue all of the people who downloaded and uploaded the film to make potential billions in profits. Now that is a good idea. Exploiting the idiots.
I hope this post has been a good insight into my mind.
Pete out.
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