Hi Antaletriangle,
Mainstream media is exactly that mainstream. It's the 'Bay City Rollers' (if you are old enough to remember) of the news.
A Yugoslav man once said to me years ago when I lived in the UK that he was envious of the English, because when they got their daily paper, they would turn straight to the back page and look at the sports, then they would look at the TV pages and the more horney men would turn to page three.
He said that in Yugoslavia the people would look for the political pages first, then the headlines, which were normally political, and the last pages they would read were the sports.
What does this mean? It means that the typical English guy doesn't want to know about 2012, or global economical collapse, they just want to go to work, go home, watch telly and on Saturday go to a football match. That is their world.
As for the new measures about what can and can't be published for national security reasons, I would have thought that journalists that would want to publish information that would put the UK in any danger should be fired. Remember that we talk only about information that could affect national security.
I remember back in the old days when in the UK certain words were not allowed to be said because they could have been construed as racist or sexist. Consequently, we no longer had balckboards in schools, we had chalkboards, we no longer have man hole covers in the streets, they are people protection covers. Enid Blyton books (the "Five" series) were banned from libraries because they were considered sexist. Even Noddy and Big Ears more recently have come under scrutiny. Are we to assume that the powers that be wanted to control our free speech?
Names of alleged criminals are not to be published in the press. Names of convicted criminals may be. The police frequently ask the press not to publish information about cases that they are currently investigating so as not to prejudice their work and the possibility of making a collar.
What I'm trying to get at here is that there are and still need to be certain rules and regulations in the popular press to better the quality of life, even though I thought that banning Enid Blyton was stretching it a bit far.
I think hiding details that protects criminals wrong. That's if the crime was big enough to make the national press. I do think, however, that the hiding of certain information to benefit national security is something positive.
Best regards,
Steve
Quote:
Originally Posted by Antaletriangle
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...a-1006607.html
I think that most of us agree that the mainstream media are in full compliance with the powers that be in what they report as important for public knowledge,the news below appears to bring out the cenorship into the public sector.The national security mantra in full swing;what a surprise?
Exclusive by Kim Sengupta
Monday, 10 November 2008
Britain's security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall.
The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security.
The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are deemed to have implications for national security. The ISC is to recommend in its next report, out at the end of the year, that a commission be set up to look into its plans, according to senior Whitehall sources.
The ISC holds huge clout within Whitehall. It receives secret briefings from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and is highly influential in forming government policy. Kim Howells, a respected former Foreign Office minister, was recently appointed its chairman. Under the existing voluntary code of conduct, known as the DA-Notice system, the Government can request that the media does not report a story. However, the committee's members are particularly worried about leaks, which, they believe, could derail investigations and the reporting of which needs to be banned by legislation.
cont.on link above.
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