Old Europe

As I’ve said multiple times before, freedom of speech includes the right to offend others with what you say. Which should be obvious: if it didn’t include the right to offend, then why do all of us feel so critical of communist countries and dictatorships on the freedom of speech topic?

How about freedom of the press? You’d think that Western democracies are pretty much the same on that front. And you’d be wrong in thinking that. As Emma Garman wrote while comparing the US and UK:

“In the US, the idea of muzzling the press is, of course, constitutionally anathema. Not so across the pond, where since around the turn of the century, a quirk of law has meant that anyone with sufficient means can, by making a legal claim of privacy invasion, kill an embarrassing or damaging article before it is published.”

The UK supports the concept of super-injunctions. What’s that?

“(Super-injunctions) which, as well as barring the publication of the names and details of a given case, bars the very fact of its existence being reported.”

So who uses these super-injunctions? Companies like Dutch oil trader Trafigura which dumped toxic waste in Ivory Coast; and sport stars like John Terry and Ryan Giggs who fearws that the reporting of an extra-marital affair might hit their endorsement money.

But, as Garman says:

“In the globalized digital age, attempting to suppress a faintly titillating story is tantamount to launching a multi-pronged campaign to publicize it, only more humiliating.”

And attempts to muzzle the press to only publish only vague general details without names only results with “swift inevitability to everyone’s favorite Twitter game: Name That Celebrity”!

America, of course, loves its late night comedians who lampoon politicians and celebrities. Germany, on the other hand, won’t even allow its own citizens to criticize a foreign head of state! That came out recently when Germany decided to prosecute a German satirist who insulted Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on television.

George W. Bush’s pal, Donald Rumsfeld may have been wrong on many, many, many fronts, but one can’t help feeling that he right in referring to the continent of UK and Germany as “Old Europe”.