Injunctions: The Good, The Bad & The Super

Yeah, we get the joke, Harding: But where's the Caitlin Moran commentary?

The traditional media silly season has kicked off a bit earlier this year. Rather than waiting for the traditional starting gunshot that is Parliament dissolving, packing its buckets and spades and heading off for the hols, the media is indulging itself in a frenzy of increasingly hyperactivity over Wills ‘n’ Kate, Cam ‘n’ Clegg (uncunningly disguised as the AV referendum) and the Greatest Threat to Western Civilisation As We Know It Since The Last One, the super-injunction.

Of course, after Kate has made an honest man of Wills this week, and the country decides on AV next week, that more or less leaves the latter to run and run. And, as they say in Hollywood, it sure got legs. The trouble is, one leg points one way, to which the other is directly opposed.

With the childish hyperbole that is increasingly the norm among today’s kidult university-educated journalists (even on the increasingly lightweight “heavies”), all injunctions are “super”, even when they’re not, some are even “hyper”, even though there has only ever been one hyper-injunction (a word made up by Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming) and that had nothing to do with privacy or the media per se, and the media has closed ranks to fulminate against, in words of Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail, “Amoral judges, shameless celebrities and a Britain that’s coming close to a police state”, with that ever-favourite judicial bugbear, Eady J, coming in for special attention (such as here in the Telegraph and here  in the Indy). In short, Their Honours are accused of making up privacy law as they go along, without recourse to any legislation enacted by Parliament. Those bewigged bench-entrenched bastards.

Whew. There are several aspects of media law swirling around here, some relating to privacy law and others to defamation law and a few relating to both which, either through ignorance or intent, the national media are conflating into one.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to at least pick apart some of these threads and make an attempt to sort them all out.

And while doing so, it’s also worthwhile to adopt the adage of that wise old bird Confucius: “Above all, call each thing by its correct name.”

Another great Sun front page you might have missed…

The Irish Sun: No Freddie Starrs were harmed in making up this headline

…unless you lived in Ireland and got the Irish Sun.

Meant to post this days ago, but have been looking fruitlessly for a better copy without luck, so this will have to do. The headline of course relates to this.

Fangs for the memory: A Devil Otter yesterday

Below is a close-up of what a “devil otter” looks like. Be afraid. Be very afraid…

H/T Siobhan Hickey

There’s a good reason paragraph breaks were invented…

…because otherwise you end up with unreadable rubbish like this, spewed up on unsuspecting readers by The Times’ achingly bleeding, cutting, pulsating-edge science supplement Eureka today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note to smart-arse “art” department page designers:

Taking out proper paragraph breaks and substituting them with cherry-coloured pilcrows is a bit like ending your sentences not with a full-stop but a fart.

Yes, you make your point, but you quickly empty the room.

Pity the poor sub who had to copy edit this article. No wonder if you struggled through it, you found it didn’t make  much sense.