Editorial: The Public Has a Right to Know

The ‘super injunction’ taken out by footballer Ryan Giggs to prevent mainstream media in England and Wales from reporting on his alleged extra-marital affair sets a dangerous precedent.

The ruling opens the floodgates for any actor, musician, or athlete who thinks they are entitled to a private life to effectively silence the fourth estate and prevent them from giving the public the facts.  Is this really a road we want to go down?  This is how dictatorships start.   In a functioning democracy it is not only the media’s right, but its duty to hold A-list celebrities to account.

If we do not protest this injunction the content of our hitherto independent free press could be dictated to by the courts and these rulings will inevitably be applied inconsistently.  Imagine if we were allowed to report on what Katy Perry thinks of Lady Gaga’s new look, but we were prevented from reporting that Rihanna and Chris Brown are talking again.  The implications of such a scenario do not bear thinking about.

Some may consider the salacious affairs of a footballer to be trivial and ‘not real news’, and some so-called privacy activists may even try to argue that an individual’s right to privacy outweighs a tabloid’s right to print gossip, but what these woolly thinkers do not realise is this injunction could be the start of a very slippery slope.  If we do nothing to protest this muzzling of free speech then maybe tomorrow we will be forbidden from reporting on what sort of dress Kate Middleton is wearing, and then we will not be allowed to tell the public whether Paris Hilton was wearing underwear when she disembarked from a limousine.  And then one dark day in the not too distant future we may be prevented from informing our readers which celebrity has had saucy photos and sex tapes stolen from their mobile phone, and that would be a great tragedy for democracy in the free world.