Stephen Fry linked to a post called “The Mail and Hugh Grant: flagrant intimidation.” It includes:
One of the most vivid insights into the culture of the old News of the World was a conversation from 2002 that happily was recorded for posterity. “That is what we do,” a news editor told a reporter, “we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
The Mail plays the same game, and its technique in this case is wilful distortion. Take three facts and from those facts derive a dozen assumptions, all of which fit your agenda. From those assumptions weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived, and then pile the outrage on top. Never mind that the same three facts could provide the foundation of five entirely different narratives, leading to entirely different perspectives on those involved.
The Mail piece, which I made myself read before posting this, does indeed seem to “weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived.” I despise these next bits so much that I actually sort of love them: “Pity his poor daughter, if she ever reads the lurid accounts of her father’s arrest for procuring a sex act in a car on Sunset Boulevard from a prostitute … Let’s hope she doesn’t discover too soon the truth about her father …”
Yes, let’s hope. I’m trying to remember whether insincerity is measured in milliliters or micrograms.
Really, though, it’s this section that makes the Mail writer’s motives plain:
This week’s news that (Grant) secretly fathered a child certainly puts into telling perspective his efforts to silence the Press by demanding privacy laws.
As Grant swanned round the party conferences – shaking hands with Labour leader Ed Miliband – his lover was preparing, alone, to give birth. Would those star-stuck politicians have fawned over the actor so much as he whined about the press if they had known this?
But then the longer I work as a journalist, the more I become convinced that it is people with rackety private lives who most complain about their privacy being invaded by the press.
It’s so much fun when the logic from that last paragraph goes to the family picnic and meets up with its cousins “If you’re innocent, why would you need a lawyer here while we question you?” and “Only a terrorist would oppose compulsory rectal searches at airport security.”
Finally, in the spirit of me Googling stuff like “rectal search” so you don’t have to, this 2004 ruling by Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals proved to be an interesting read:
… we are mystified as to how the fact that appellant had two drug arrests two years prior to the arrest in the instant case together with the fact that he is driving the truck of a drug user with the record silent as to whether the appellant even knew the drug user, somehow leads one to articulable suspicion that appellant had contraband on his person at the time of his arrest on January 22, 2002. The question is not was there articulable suspicion to search, but rather, was there articulable suspicion to strip search. Where is the reasonable suspicion that drugs or other contraband are concealed in the particular place they decide to search? There simply is none.
… We too are troubled by the fact that, any time an individual has a prior drug history, that history alone may be used to justify a strip search of the individual upon subsequent arrests for minor offenses. What if the arrests had occurred not two years ago but five years ago instead? Or ten years ago? Should a distinction be made between a prior drug arrest and a prior drug conviction?
