Friday 22 March 2013

Publish and be Damned

First of all, despite the fact that I am not a lawyer, I am a deeply cynical person and arguments such as this do not compel me in the slightest:

In light of these definitions individual bloggers are unlikely to be subject to the new proposed regulatory regime. So for example those individual blogs on WordPress or Blogger would remain unregulated and not subject to the adverse costs awards, or possibility of exemplary damages, that can result from not signing up as members of the proposed regulator. On the other hand websites such run by those such as the Huffington Post or Guido Fawkes could be.

Paul Staines’s ‘Guido Fawkes’ website for instance has a number of contributors, is run as a business and despite being off shore is targeted primarily at an audience in the United Kingdom.

If I enable Google Ads on my blog, I would fall under this regulator, because I've got a couple of guest posts on my blog.

The article goes on to say:

Whilst he is entitled to protest and refuse to join the regulator one has to ask, from a commercial perspective, why such a website would do so?

Well, up to a point, your honour. The events that led up to Leveson were NOT issues of regulation, they were quite clearly acts that were proscribed by law in which the media, police and the political establishment were complicit. The whole Hacked Off bollocks was not a failure in the existing media regulatory system, it was a failure of the criminal justice system to which the media were a party.

That is quite a different matter altogether and one that our glorious politico-legal Establishment has quietly glossed over with some fetching Farrow & Ball Red Herring emulsion.

The whole issue of media regulation (or not) should much more correctly be looking at the consumers of this tripe. The Sun, the Daily Star, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, etc. all feature swathes of salacious, scandalous gossip because that's what people want to read. If people didn't want to read this shit or see tits on Page 3, they shouldn't buy papers that provide that sort of thing.

The fact that this tripe gets bought and read so avidly is because there are cunts who want to read this sort of shit. It's a fucking lie to say that if papers didn't print it people would suddenly start reading Tolstoy, because there is a massive market for vacuous magazines filled to the brim with the banal details of Z-list-sleb lives.

You can regulate yourself to death and not fix the root cause of this shit.

And, of course, the slebs themselves are not at all blameless for this situation. It's insane for Hugh Grant to live the vacuous life of a sleb, trolling from movie star wife to movie star wife, enjoying all the glamour to then get the hump when the same media that fawned over him suddenly get the chance to report that he's been sucked off in a car by a prostitute.

The people who are actually the least to blame in this whole farrago of bullshit are probably the media, who are simply providing consumers with what they want.

The people who buy this shit and the slebs who whore themselves around for media attention both need to take a long, hard look at themselves.

The cunts.

3 comments:

Bill said...

Or if you are Hugh Grant get a mirror and take a long look at your hard self!

NielsR said...

Either it was already against the law (which it was), and a failure to prosecute as you say, or it wasn't against the law, in which case what's a new regulator going to do about it, exactly?

Create some kind of extra-legal instrument to prosecute people doing stuff that we don't like them doing, but don't want to make illegal in case it affects us too? You know, like ASBOs?

...

Ah shit...

Anonymous said...

Spot on, the people responsible should have prosecuted to the full extent of the law and very quickly.