UK wants to reform Official Secrets law by pretending journalism doesn't exist
davidallengreen.com
davidallengreen.com
Doing this will only lead to government trying to attack the status of journalist, which will drag people through the mud. Everyone is allowed to report on everything, naturally. Especially on government misconduct.
That said, for any practical reason, just give the info that hasn't been authorized for release to someone outside of government jurisdiction and keep your head down. Problem solved, info is out.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/aug/27/obama-administra...
Is that the case? What legislation gives them that right?
Only because what they publish is, by default, going to see more eyeballs and thus more likely for the defamed party to wan to seek remediation.
Q&A is useful because it adds clarity, but the format means they can pick which reporters to favor.
Because that's less transparent. From an idealistic perspective, sure, this is fine. From a practical perspective, it's bonkers.
The higher standard you're referring to I think is the "actual malice" standard, but that applies when the target of the defamation is a public figure, regardless of whether the alleged defamer is a journalist.
This new law infringes on that freedom. It is reported as a law against journalists but it is a law against anyone who wishes to expose government wrongdoing.
They are politicising it as a fight for/against journalism, mostly because there is a large segement of UK society that have a strong disliking of journalists in general - many have living memory of several journalism scandals from invasion of privacy (e.g., "phone hacking scandal"), to dressing up as a "terrorist" to invade the palace (read: dress up in clothing worn by cultures in the middle east and, literally, blackface and then walk into the palace as a tourist and deliberately "get lost") to some general shitbaggery (e.g., The Sun blaming Liverpool FC supporters for the Hillsborough distaster)
It is so so important to remember/realise that a "journalist" is _anyone_ reporting or publishing something. Even just a tweet that exposes some wrongdoing by the government would get you nabbed by this law.
Also, I am also not sure how the distinction aren't obvious: this is happening because a journalist, seemingly acting at the behest of a nation state, leaked confidential documents relating to national security. The UK already has laws that make this a criminal offence (and btw, the reason why the 1989 Act was passed was because someone did something very similar in the 80s, and tried to claim a public interest defence...this is not new). It is not aimed at journalists criticising the govt. It is not aimed at leaking generally. The purpose of this act is legitimate: to dissuade people from leaking stuff that is confidential for a reason (and btw, when journalists do get access to this stuff, they usually ask the govt what they should do anyway...obviously, this is changing but the situation that people are concerned about already exists, and hasn't led to lower levels of scrutiny...the irony of people who are relentlessly critical of the govt complaining about being silenced).
This is just like the policing bill. The media are misreporting what the actual content is (not to a huge degree, but enough), the noisy minority are getting their views from other uninformed people on Twitter, and no-one actually has a clue what is going on (I have read one story on this that actually quotes an actor's tweets...who cares?). Democracy in action.
Also, your comment is exactly why people are confused. People read stuff like that on Twitter and think...oh, now MI5 is going to come round to my house, and torture me...why won't the journalists protect us? There are already legal protections against the actions of security services because the UK has a functioning legal system. That is the main protection in our society. Journalists, most of whom spend all day on Twitter sharing salacious bullshit with other journalists, are not the protection (that was my point, in your narrative journalists are the protection but, ironically, they are the main source of misinformation about this bill because their interests are threatened).
The UK would be wise to learn from our mistake.
Does that mean that you support prosecuting Snowden, despite the fact that disclosing mass surveillance is a clearly moral thing to do when the society doesn't know about it?
IMO, unless it's wartime, I couldn't care less about the motivations. I care that information has been disclosed at all.
So it just dissuades people from exposing the govt wrongdoing the govt is trying to cover up.
If we’re only allowed to know about the wrongdoing the government does publicly we wouldn’t need investigative journalism.
And investigative journalism does not only relate to non-public information either. Every journalist thinks they are Carl Bernstein, and you actually look at what they write about and is just salacious, Westminster bubble nonsense that no normal human cares or knows about. So we have the situation we have today, and there is very little serious scrutiny of the govt. Ooooh, a top adviser went to Barnard Castle? Ooooh, a SPAD who has been leaking me stories was fired? Get Carl Bernstein on the case. Utter nonsense.
It can be, and that’s the problem.
Sadly, modern journalism had veered more and more into the territory of activism, much more than it had fifty years ago. The Murdoch media machine is doing its best to accelerate this change of direction, as is the sensationalist new from the US.
With the current course of politics worldwide, extra protections for citizens is not the outcome I expect from abolishing journalistic freedoms. Instead, journalists will be downgraded to the limited and sometimes even oppressive rules citizens have in regard to freedom of information and conduct.
"Just keep your head down" is not a solution, because most people suck at OpSec. The government can and will find you if you release sensitive documents.
Nobody's ever going to be able to define proper journalism.
Murdock originally tried to use "public interest" to justify that.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
I've had a thought bouncing around my pachinko machine of a brain about this topic.
While at the single story/topic level you might be correct, I think there may be a pretty basic test for bias.
Using sentiment analysis, (manually or ML) couldn't you figure out which topics or groups a news org never speaks ill of?
The omitted criticisms could paint a pretty good picture of bias.
I'm trying to picture how it would work in practice. Say that there are two news organizations, one wildly pro-Trump, one Wildly anti-Trump. It's already clear that they are both biased and ignoring a lot of information. But wouldn't one group still be closer to the truth? How would anyone know which one?
Using your example, pro-Trump vs anti-Trump… one would have to wait until Trump is gone as POTUS and see how each news org treats the new POTUS. Maybe this analysis would only work over long periods of time.
The other aspect of all of this that you made me think about is that bias is not necessarily bad.
I am biased towards democracy, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Also, bias against something which is objectively "bad" is not a bad thing.
edit: Maybe the solution here is to embrace bias, and state your biases openly.
This isn't the case in any country and almost certainly should not be.
In some countries, a journalist is generally free to publish anonymously sourced information, regardless of its source (which may have been a hack), and report on that information. Journalists are never allowed to hack websites. Hacking websites isn't legal.
Making some level of allowed-hacker as long as they're labeled a journalist would be crazy, as it would (1) result in the aforementioned semantic debate over who is a journalist, (2) would be the antithesis of privacy to have hackers that are allowed to hack you legally.
In the UK, public interest has never been a defence. And given the increasing role that nation states are having in leaking stuff to journalists (even political parties, Labour used documents that were leaked by Russia at their conference in 2019 iirc...ofc, they were totally misleading, which was the point), it is reasonable to ask where the line with espionage actually is.
Who gets to define what constitutes "proper" journalism? You? Me? The government? What you're saying is so far beyond absurd that I can't even really address it.
There’s real human consequences in sharing secrets and the laws somewhat reflect that consequence. Can they be too harsh? yes. We should fight against that if they become too harsh, but I don’t think they should be turned off.
tl;dr Priti Patel thinks embarrassing government leaks are worse for her than actual espionage and so wants to criminalize them.
You could argue that she's the 'disgraced' Secretary of State for International Development if you wanted to.
She can still be disgraced, though, no? Not least because she's been pretty disgraceful as Home Secretary.
You are claiming that "fallen from a position of power" is the only valid meaning but "fallen from a position of favour" or "discredited" are also valid for Priti Patel.
See also, e.g., Collins, Cambridge
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/disgrac...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/disgrace...
Perfect example from the second link: "Many thought the disgraced president needed to resign."
[edit: added pertinent example]
I'm sure she doesn't have your favour, but you could find someone who doesn't like any politician, but we don't call them discredited because some angry person doesn't like them any more - that's just not what the phrase means.
> Perfect example from the second link: "Many thought the disgraced president needed to resign."
In that example they're doing what you're doing and arguing that you think she should be discredited, or you'd discredit her if you were the PM, not that they actually are discredited - because clearly neither were.
Which, as you know, is not the only kind of favour that exists, especially in a political context.
> and she hasn't been discredited - she still has her credentials
Again, you're taking a very limited and specific meaning of the word to bolster your position - you can easily be discredited with the wider audience and still be in your position (cf Boris Johnson for a prime example.)
> you could find someone who doesn't like any politician, but we don't call them discredited because some angry person doesn't like them any more
No, we would not. But if many angry persons disliked them because they continually displayed verifiable traits like lying, cheating, corruption, etc., we could perfectly well call them "discredited" or "disgraced", yes.
And of course we all know the real reason why Priti Patel rubs so many people up the wrong way... she's a non-white daughter of immigrants.
They're fans of priti patel too. The British racist far right really like her immigration policies if nothing else.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-do-those-who-abuse-p...
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/howard-beckett-labo...
I think whatever your politics we think we should stop and challenge when angry white men are calling for a white minority woman with immigrant parents to be deported, or similar obvious whistles or abuse, because they don't like her opinions.
It's equally predictable that the British right and far right would try to deflect this criticism by playing the race card.
I think whatever your politics we should stop and challenge when an angry white man tries to use cynical, performative, pearl clutching trumped up false accusations of racism to deflect criticism away from vicious and entirely real kind of racism they enthusiastically endorse.
Yes that was obvious to anyone with common sense. But when challenged they denied that's what they ever meant! Dog whistling. And rightfully called out as so by others on the left.
It was "called out" by Chris Bryant - a member of Labour Friends for Israel and thus very much a pretend member "of the left".
This is the same group that sent a delegation to Isaac Herzog, a party leader who is unapologetically and publicly racist to apologize for "anti-semitism" in the Labour party that barely existed.
This is, again, how racists protect each other - with false accusations of racism against anti-racists.