A tale of 2 Super-Injunctions

Two people were outed in Parliament for super-injuncted sex in the last few days, driven by the names being bandied about on Twitter and other social media sites. One was polishing the glass ceiling with a senior colleague while his bank, a major UK one, was crashing - and this potentially has all sorts of corporate malfeasance implications. The other is a premier league footballer polishing his street cred by bonking a "big brother" z-list sleb*.

The mainstream media of course has gone gaga over all this, virtuously citing freedom of the press. But if you look at what they are doing, the reason isn't freedom of the press. They have said virtually nothing about the banker's bonus bonks, and pursued the footballer relentlessly because - lets face it - most readers don't really understand the banking fiasco, but an on-the-ball footballer is far easier to grasp,and thus sell papers.

Also sadly amusing is the UK judiciary, who have been caught defending the rights of the rich red handed - NYT:

The Sun [Newspaper] then went to the High Court, asking it to lift the injunction on the grounds that there seemed to be few people left who did not know ........ was the man in question.

But Justice Michael Tugendhat turned The Sun down, saying the Twitter campaign had actually demonstrated the need for the injunction.

“The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the Internet confirms the fact that the claimant and his family need protection from intrusion into their private and family life,” the judge said.

That these people like to use the media and judicial system to publicise the good and privatise the bad, and that this hypocrisy was the only reason why the social media stories carried so well, did not seem to enter the judge's head. The reason the law is an ass is that so many practitioners are clearly assholes.... campaign indeed!

Now, MSM, if we can just get back to bank malfeasance after this - that after all is the real role of a Free Press...... at the moment the only people going after Fred the Shred in any detail are on the blogs.

(* Personally I think "Premier League Footballer Does Not Bonk Z List Sleb" would be the Shock Horror news - I thought this sort of thing was in the job description)