Category: Media Trends
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Grave doubts about whether data protection authorities in Britain and across the European Union can ever deliver on a “right to be forgotten” were expressed at seminar organised by the Westminster eForum.
Both the Ministry of Justice and the UK Information Commissioner believe the newly-published European data protection framework review is in danger of raising “false expectations” on the part of the public about the possibility of individuals deleting personal information.
There was criticism at the seminar (8.3.2012) of what one speaker described as the “political gesturing” of the EU’s Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding.
Lord McNally, Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, urged the EU to offer the twenty seven member states a workable solution. The right to erase data would not be possible if it related to health care, crime or a free press, nor could it apply to credit rating.
“Businesses should have rights too...we must not undermine responsible lending or financial agreements. We may set the standard so high we don’t get a model which can work in practice.”
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Secretly-filmed images of injured and apparently tortured dissenters lying shackled to their beds in a Syrian military hospital are another graphic reminder of the way devices such as mobile phone cameras have revolutionised the reporting of protests and uprisings.
Hardly a day goes by when television news bulletins do not feature dramatic pictures – either from the Arab spring or perhaps a demonstration on the streets of London – and their influence on public opinion cannot be under-estimated.
If thirty years ago there had been the kind of footage which activists can upload now on to the internet via video sharing sites like YouTube, there might well have been a different outcome to historic British struggles like the 1984-5 pit strike.
Photographers and camera crews were regularly corralled and held back behind Police lines during the violent industrial confrontations of the 1980s. As a result there were very few of the graphic images which feature so prominently in today’s newspapers and television news bulletins and which show almost as-live footage of the conditions facing protestors as they are being driven back by police or security forces..
One striking image from the notorious 1984 Battle of Orgreave at the height of the pit strike – showing a mounted policeman raising his baton against a woman protestor – came to symbolise, especially for the left, the doomed struggle by mining communities to protect their jobs.
A photograph captured by chance illustrated the one-sided nature of the conflict and the mineworkers’ vulnerability in the face of the massive superiority of the massed ranks of mounted police officers. But one fleeting image, reproduced by a few newspapers, had nothing like the impact of the sustained output of today’s citizen journalists.
Just think what the response might have been if strikers who took on Margaret Thatcher’s government had been able to upload their own footage of a picket’s eye view of being charged by mounted police or the often unrecorded violence and brutality which they say occurred in the mining villages.
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Vince Cable was heading for a fall once the party’s President Tim Farron MP began boasting (Any Questions, Radio 4 10.12.2010) that only the Liberal Democrats had the courage to “drag Rupert Murdoch in front of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.”
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The promise by Sir Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust, to speed up the Corporation’s internal inquiry into how far the BBC needs to be reshaped to meet the digital age is a welcome dose of reality. More is the pity that the management left it so late -- until the combined forces of James Murdoch and the Conservative Party were on the war path, breathing down the BBC’s neck.