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.”

Kate & Wills fail to set US sleb mag racks alight

An interesting entry on the journalism.co.uk editor’s blog about the best and worst selling covers in the US last year led me to the original source of the info, here.

What’s striking (on this side of the pond, anyway) is how the Kate & Wills love-match hasn’t exactly been the money-spinner for US sleb magazines as their UK counterparts obviously believe it is here.

The worst-selling covers for Life & Style Weekly and US Weekly were these:

 

Hardly Chuck 'n' Di: The worst selling magazine covers for US sleb mags Life & Style and US Weekly

For those interested in this sort of thing, the best selling cover of Life & Style is here and US Weekly’s is here.

No, I don’t know who Kourtney Kadashian is either, but apparently she floats the Yanks’ boat more than Catherine Elizabeth does.

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that Kourtney Kadashian is “an American entrepreneur, socialite, model, and reality television personality who gained fame as a cast member of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kourtney and Kim Take New York, and Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami.”