Scrutable

https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1 ... r1WU6LBb2A

John Cleese in this thread accuses Daily Mail of illegal background checks and Paul Dacre of lying under oath.

Thing is I want my cake and eat it.

I want celebrities and civilians to have privacy.

I want politicians and the powerful to be scrutinised mercilessly.

noggins wrote: Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:56 am Thing is I want my cake and eat it.

I want celebrities and civilians to have privacy.

I want politicians and the powerful to be scrutinised mercilessly.

It depends on what you call "scrutinised". It is right and proper that any politician has their political life and decisions fully and completely scrutinised. And if their private life influences those political decisions (or could have the potential to do so - e.g. having a wife who's a non-dom when you're Chancellor, breaking laws that your party made etc) then it is appropriate for the scrutiny to fall on that as well. However if elements of the private life are not directly pertinent, then politicians have as much right as everyone else to privacy.

CF

I want The Mirror to tap Farage’s phone.

noggins wrote: Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:56 am Thing is I want my cake and eat it.

I want celebrities and civilians to have privacy.

I want politicians and the powerful to be scrutinised mercilessly.

The two things are different. In the vast majority of cases it's trivially easy to distinguish between politicians/powerful people & normal people/celebrities (although there will be some blurring of the lines between celebrities & powerful people).
This isn't a cake & eat it situation, you just want the press to do what they claim their purpose is, and what they use as their justification to avoid any scrutiny or obligation to behave like decent civilised human beings

Yes but I feel like the celebrities are a stalking horse for the politicians.


btw what struck me about Levenson was that tabloid journalists were bribing the police for information and the reaction seemed to be "gosh, horrible journalists " rather than "f.cking hell, corrupt cops" . Is my recollection wrong?

noggins wrote: Tue Jun 07, 2022 2:44 pm

btw what struck me about Levenson was that tabloid journalists were bribing the police for information and the reaction seemed to be "gosh, horrible journalists " rather than "f.cking hell, corrupt cops" . Is my recollection wrong?

I think a couple of Met chiefs had to resign after being embarrassed by the Leveson inquiry but I don't remember any coppers being charged (wasn't it only NOTW staff that were nicked?) and iirc the public did seem at the time to be more interested in the dodgy journos than the corrupt cops.

jdc wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 5:38 pm

noggins wrote: Tue Jun 07, 2022 2:44 pm

btw what struck me about Levenson was that tabloid journalists were bribing the police for information and the reaction seemed to be "gosh, horrible journalists " rather than "f.cking hell, corrupt cops" . Is my recollection wrong?

I think a couple of Met chiefs had to resign after being embarrassed by the Leveson inquiry but I don't remember any coppers being charged (wasn't it only NOTW staff that were nicked?) and iirc the public did seem at the time to be more interested in the dodgy journos than the corrupt cops.

Didn't the journalists keep schtum about who their sources were?

jdc wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 5:38 pm

noggins wrote: Tue Jun 07, 2022 2:44 pm

btw what struck me about Levenson was that tabloid journalists were bribing the police for information and the reaction seemed to be "gosh, horrible journalists " rather than "f.cking hell, corrupt cops" . Is my recollection wrong?

I think a couple of Met chiefs had to resign after being embarrassed by the Leveson inquiry but I don't remember any coppers being charged (wasn't it only NOTW staff that were nicked?) and iirc the public did seem at the time to be more interested in the dodgy journos than the corrupt cops.

Police officers were arrested and some were convicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Elveden

Also, Leveson was explicitly about journalism after the phone hacking scandal. Hacking the phones of dead people was very much a "gosh, horrible journalists" moment.