Freedom of speech & guilty before proven innocent

[Achtung Englander]

So the Mail, The Telegraph, The Mirror and The Express went to town today with pictures of the 2 suspects in the drone attack on Gatwick. The Mail, as usual, went straight to guilty by calling them "morons".

Today, as of Sunday 23/12, the 2 were no longer questioned by the police and all charges dropped. The 2 are most likely innocent of the whole thing but in the space of just 24 hours the media portrayed them as guilty before any light was shed on the matter.

It went from Eco Terrorists to a "couple gone mad" to all avenues of inquiry open again.

After the Christopher Jefferies and Cliff Richard cases you would think the media might learn from lessons that the law stipulates (quite rightly, because it has been know...thought through) that someone is innocent until proven guilty.

So out of curiosity will the Mail have a front page splash with "Sorry" to that innocent couple and retract the "moron" claim which was based on nothing more than self-opinion misguided hatred.

Good luck to any poor innocent sap who gets in the way of a good story. I was saying for the past 2 days to people I had talked to that this whole Eco Terrorist thing was based on bullshit because not a shred of evidence had been presented. This rush to judgement could be due to the Twitter generation that first to news is all that matters.

[Hatredsheart]

I bet their phone's ringing off the hook with lawyers wanting to represent them in a compensation claim.

[Raid]

I look at the British newspaper industry and can't help but wonder if it is genuinely the worst thing about this country. They seem to have so much sway over the thoughts of a vast portion of our population, and there's nothing holding them back from pedaling whatever lies best suits the agenda of the people in charge. They need regulating, badly, but it's never going to happen because they can make or break the government. They can get away with calling leading judges "Enemies of the People", and the leader of the opposition an "Apologist for terror". Despite this being utterly libelous, nothing gets done. They can tell blatant lies with inch-high letters on the front page, and then maybe issue an apology in 30 tiny words hidden away in the back somewhere the next day.

I never like to call for job losses, but I think we'd be better off if they all shut their doors tomorrow.

[Medicine Man]

I had no idea people still buy newspapers.

Huh, turns out everyday is a school day after all.

[Mantis]

It's alright, because the Mail is now on their side.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... drone.html

Good old Daily Mail.

[Wrathbone]

There’s a precarious line between total freedom of the press and regulation that suppresses the press, with effective regulation somewhere in the middle, and at the moment the press have free reign to do almost anything they want to the detriment of the public. Libel laws are woefully ineffective because any fool journalist can circumvent them with some juicy supposition. I’m starting to think we need legally-enforced colour coding for written press - anything that is a verifiable fact must be green, anything that is evidenced but unproven is blue and anything that is pure cooked up speculative bullshit (i.e. the entirety of the Daily Mail) must be red. At least people who skim read could see at a glance which bits are actually news and which bits are media invention.

Of course there’s far more to it than that. The turn of a phrase can render facts irrelevant in the eyes of many, for instance. But we have to start somewhere.

[Achtung Englander]

The Mail is like a demented old man and a grandmother rolled into one

[Snowy]

The press in this country are fucking vile.

[Achtung Englander]

In their press statement they looked pretty upset and quite rightly so as they were (probably) vilified by the media. I say probably as I did not follow the case closely. This rush to judgement is fucking up people's lives.

[Animalmother]

I've no doubt that they received multiple death threats and the like.

[fatbob]

[/lurk]

Last year in amongst an awful lot of snow I asked my retired steelworker neighbour if he needed anything from the shop.

I expected milk, bread, angina meds etc...

"A copy of t' express n' t' mail"

Upon on regaling my better half with this story, she did explain he'd spent a happy few weeks setting fire to spiders in his house using a deodorant can and a lighter (See: False Widows, The Daily Express)

Hum Ho.

Note: This is the same man that puts up with my 10 year old and 5 year old beating the shit out of our joining wall and still gives them icecream money every time they go away.

Hum diddly ho.

[Snowy]

Welcome and festive stuff too