Well guten tag mein lielinsblogees and welcome back to my too long inactive blogging world, sincere apologies for my u nforgivable absence from the world of righteous indignation but rest assured I’m back after my rest and have a whole variety of things to grouse about (People in restaurants taking large tables for two people, why????).
Anyway the idea of todays capsule rant has been fermenting away for a little while now and it regards one of our most major news stories that of the wikileaks scandal. Now those who festoon our newspapers and other optical and audio media with these scandalous things would claim to us that they are exercising their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press and that society as a whole has a right to expect such important things to be brought to light and those responsible taken to task. I suppose though what sits uncomfortably with me is whether or not this genuinely should class as “In the public interest” or not? The defenders of the wikileaks scandals would certainly claim so, they would presumably claim that we have a right to know about the relationships between the major heads of state and what each thinks about the other but I would exercise caution with this.
Okay if they have a wikileak that shows George W Bush and Tony Bliar Blair sitting at Camp David in canvas campaign chairs smoking massive cigars with a relief map of Afghanistan pushing crowds of soldiers of cliffs to their deaths that might be a story but I’m afraid that the fact that Kim Jong Il is not a pleasant man or that Silvio Berlusconi might have a slightly overactive libidio is not, in this minor bloggers view, news.
I suppose what it smacks of, to me at least, is the descent in “X-Factor politics” the idea that regardless of who is best for the job the media friendly star will always win out. Now this is not always a bad thing, David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s superior media image did, at least, spare us five more years of Gordon Brown steadily trundling our economy into the Irish Sea but is it a healthy precedent? These wikileaks are almost the sort of thing one might expect to see on the pages of a political version of Closer or Chat magazine, you can almost see the glossy news-stands declaring in garish colours “Angela: “What I really thinks about tiny Nick Sarkozy”” or “More Silvio!: nubile Italian temptress Yelena tells us all about Berlusconi’s infamous Bunga-Bunga parties!”
Now we may as a public have the right to know about certain decisions that impact upon us and have changed the world but that is not what these wikileaks are. These leaks are almost the equivalent of one of the tech guys in an office IT dept choosing somebody’s inbox at random and printing the sent items list and passing it around the office on the flimsy pretext that it is in the interests of the office to know what this person has said. Now I would say that anyone who has ever worked in an office can feel something of an affinity with those caught up in this wikileaks scandal because their private thoughts are now being made public, I would hazard a guess that most people at some point in their personal or professional career will have been invited to a meeting or other gathering and had a sly look at who else has been CC’d into the e-mail and seen a name and just sighed or maybe even sent a reply to another of the group saying maybe “Ogh god that awful sweaty bloke from human resources will be there” or “Christ they must be desperate they’ve invited that woman from IT who spends the day crocheting cats out of rubber bands” or some such thing. Now what right does anyone have to know what you have said in a private message? Much less what right do they have to start forming judgments and pillorying you for saying these things? Quite simply the answer is none. While it might be fun to find out what political leaders think of each other behind their backs it certainly isn’t in “the public interest” as Julian Assange and his wikileaking cronies would have us believe. By all means read the wikileaks and enjoy them but while you’re doing so just imagine what could happen if that bitchy text you’re about to send were made public and you’ll realise just why these private conversations really should have the right to remain just that.
This week Matt:
· Realised that he still hasn’t done a quite ridiculous amount of Christmas shopping.
· Tried in vain to locate his recipe for egg-nog, this may have to be a nog-less yuletide!
· Watched “Rare-Exports” a quite brilliantly subtitled Finnish film with such gems as the main characters saying “Fiddlesticks” as they stared death by naked octogenarian santa in the face!
No comments:
Post a Comment