Thank you for the 'compliment' of sorts. Unfortunately, freedom of the press does not guarantee quality of the press. I find just the opposite, that anyone who can find a big enough audience to stay in business will get published. No quality needed if that is what enough of the public wants. I was using profit to show that enough interest exists for those who want freedon AND quality to not get their way. By the way, who are you and I to define 'quality' for other people? Isn't that what freedom is about? If others used my definition of 'quality' in artwork a large number of artistic masterworks would be burned to ashes, and I guess the same applies to literature and other forms of expression. I guess that means I can apply my standards of quality in regard to the First Amendment freedoms to myself, and only myself. Just like everyone else in a free society. I think that means we can learn and teach ethics, but not legislate or restrict other's ethics. We can hold ourselves to our ethics, but not anyone else.
Sex, Privacy and Max Mosley
What a court's decision on the motor-sport chief could mean for sex reporting in Britain.
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Are Britain's rambunctious tabloids about to have their wings clipped? A London High Court ruling that a leading national newspaper breached the right to privacy of Max Mosley by publishing images of the Formula One boss at a sadomasochistic orgy has left journalists unsettled about the implications for their work.
Mosley, the 68-year-old president of the International Automobile Federation, won £60,000 ($120,000) in damages from the tabloid News of the World for a report about Mosley's sex session with five prostitutes. One of the women secretly filmed the bondage and caning encounter, which featured some of the participants in prison-style uniforms and was said by the newspaper to have a Nazi theme. However, the High Court judge ruled that there was "no public interest or other justification" for the publication of the pictures and the story, and he also dismissed the paper's suggestion that there were Nazi overtones to the session. Mosley, the son of fascist pro-Hitler British politician Oswald Mosley, welcomed the ruling as proof that his sexual behavior is a private matter. "I hope that my case will help deter newspapers in the U.K. from pursuing this type of invasive and salacious journalism," he said.
The impact on the downmarket British tabs remains to be seen. However, the decision underscored the fact that Britain, which has no formal privacy laws, is now subject to the more rigorous privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. NEWSWEEK's William Underhill talked in London to Stephen Rigley, the news editor of the Sunday Express—a mass-market rival of the News of the World—about the likely effects of the Mosley decision.
NEWSWEEK: Were you surprised by the outcome of the trial?
Stephen Rigley: My own opinion was it always looked bleak for the News of the World after its key witness failed to turn up. But in the end I wasn't so much surprised as saddened.
Why do you say saddened?
This is a black day for the freedom of the press in Britain. The serious part is the implications of the decision in the future. We are talking about the introduction of a privacy law by the back door.
Will the outcome of the case actually change how you cover stories in the Sunday Express?
We are not quite in the same kiss-and-tell market as the News of the World, but it has implications for us all. There will be concern in the whole of Fleet Street. Whatever the judge may have said in court about the case not setting a precedent, it could in effect put a block on their investigations into sex or other scandals.
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