I am all for a free press, but......."

[Arachnophobic]

Sienna Miller having 10 men chase her down the road in the dark with their wide-angled lenses?

JK Rowling's 5 year-old having a journo's details planted into her school rucksack?

Madelaine McCann's siblings being scared in their own home due to the journos peering through their ground floor window?

WTF!!

Brilliant, Norman!

Garlic - yes in the public interest these things should be available to journalist's - and we know that all over the world reporters risk their lives and that of their families to expose corruption.

But why should phone tapping be used to get dirt on celebs? Or find out who is offering who exclusives?

Just to clarify one thing - phone tapping is hardly ever used by journalists. What we're talking about is dialling your voicemail in hopes you've omitted to set a PIN code.

Yeah, go check your settings ...

Sorry yes the pin code thing. Been watching too much Wire

Oooh, is there a new series?

How does dialling my voice mail to see if I have forgotten to set a PIN differ from coming into my house and nicking my stuff because I left a window open.

Free press is a mainstay of our democracy. But with great power comes great responsibility. I feel it is incumbent on Editors to have the backbone to manage their journos accordingly.

And as the buying public, we must show our disguise with inappropriately sourced information/pictures by not buying the rags that print it.

Disguise = disgust obv.

I agree with everything in your 15:02 post, Enjoy.

Our appointed rulers - and their unappointed benefactors - do use underhand methods, though, and are literally above the law. That being so, I feel we need some less-biased entities on our side doing the same. They're only less biased because they rely on our interest to keep them in business. But that's fine.

Mistakes clearly are made, and it was a further error of judgement not to come clean at once over the Dowler/hacking fiasco. Somebody should have realised that deleting the messages would interfere with the investigation and 'fessed up (or, better, not done it!)

But I don't want them gagged. I'd like them far less restricted than they already are. The funny thing about unfettered freedom is that it usually makes people behave more responsibly, although they'll still make mistakes.

In general, those who strive to restrain others turn out to be corrupt. That is the argument for a free press, and I see nothing to prove it faulty.

if people didn't read it then it wouldn't be printed, don't blame the journos they are just making a living, blame the sickos that are buying into it.

got it in one

if there is no demand, they wont do it

Unless they put falling sales down to not being tawdry enough.

With Millly Dowler, it's all very well to say 'Public outrage will stop them'. But it didn't - possibly because no-one knew about it because the press didn't report the phone hacking of a girl who turned out to have been murdered. If you have hit a level where you think that is acceptable, then I'm all for further regulations. It made me wonder if that actually affected the search for her - if her parents had told police and the police had changed tactics as a result, or not. I doubt it, but if you are searching for a missing girl that you think is abducted (and therefore unlikely to be accessing phone messages), do you do things differently than if you think she's run away and is lying low somewhere? Another case like this could see a child not being found in time due to media interference and if the media cannot regulate themselves, which in this instance they clearly couldn't, then someone else has to.

And it's not as though these are the only 'nobodies'. What about the family whose daughter died and the girl was then so maligned in the press that her brother couldn't cope and committed suicide?

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940)