The press is bound but not gagged, says Stephen Loughrey
In his recent speech to the Society of Editors Conference, Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail editor and Associated Newspapers’ editor-in-chief, launched a stinging attack on what he considers the most dangerous threat to press freedom in many years—the imposition of law protecting an individual’s right to privacy. Mr Dacre, entreated his colleagues to “concentrate…on how inexorably, and insidiously, the British Press is having a privacy law imposed on it” and laid the blame for this perceived aff ront to freedom of expression squarely at the feet of one man, Mr Justice Eady, the senior High Court judge who hears many of the libel and privacy cases in this country.
Protection
It is not yet three years since Lord Justice Sedley commented “that privacy —prominently but not solely private sexual activity, which sells so many newspapers—is something which our law does not yet adequately protect”. On carrying out a review of the tabloids on any given day, one could be forgiven for concluding that little has changed. However, there is no doubt that there has
