What better way to relax after a hard week’s sweating over an extended focus on libel and privacy law than listening to The Guardian‘s editor give a lecture on libel reform? A minor streak of obsession with the topic had set in by the time I sat down in the lecture theatre at City University on Tuesday to hear from Alan Rusbridger. As you’d expect, he put the position for libel reform, freedom of speech and concern over privacy law somewhat better than most of the self-serving fluff the media has served up in recent weeks.
Most strikingly, he made the case that laws governing libel, privacy, free speech and media regulation are fundamentally linked and cannot be addressed separately. Rusbridger went as far as to float the idea of a bargain between the media and Parliamentarians that any step towards tougher privacy laws should be explicitly balanced with measures to protect freedom of information and libel reform (it was a touch ambiguous whether that reflected a historical position or current thinking).
