Some thoughts on super-injunctions

Super-injunctions, don't you love them. No privacy order in sight for ages, then 80 - apparently - come along at once. Not that we know that for sure of course, or else they wouldn't be quite so super.

And we mustn't divulge anything that we might know about them. Now really, for a journalist that's too much. A faint whiff of reporting restrictions and we're ready for action, summoning up as much indignation as necessary.

Yes, there's something about censorship that really seems to exercise us and being told to put something at the back of our minds has us programmed to do the very opposite.

In the town where I used to work local councillors had the power to ban the local cinema from screening films of which they disapproved. One was the satirical movie "Life of Brian". However, the storm their decision caused generated enormous publicity and ensured that many who wouldn't otherwise have been bothered made a beeline for other cinemas in nearby cities to watch the film.

Super-injunctions potentially fan the flames of curiosity even more, with their draconian restrictions that prevent anyone even knowing that legal action is being pursued. But the social media networks Facebook and Twitter are changing the landscape. These global leviathans of the digital age are roaming across legal borders and challenging the status quo.

I've no problem with privacy injunctions. The celebrities can afford it and if they want to spend their money that way, let them. They are only doing on a personal level what a large company and its well-staffed public relations office engages in - furthering the flow of information that portrays their organisation in a good light and minimising that which shows them in a less favourable light. If corporations do this and pay for it, let individuals do so too.

The fact celebrities may be involved doesn't matter one way or the other and public interest doesn't demand that we know.

Yet as I raise my glass to injunctions, I have that nagging feeling that in championing the cause I can't write about, I'm neglecting the one that, on the face of it, I am completely free to report on and express opinions about, from any standpoint I choose.

The fact is, privacy injunctions may have the catchy tune, but day by day we work to the drum-beat of a media subject to powerful controls. It is a constant battle to wrest information from the hands of those who make decisions on our behalf, and put it into the public domain.

Of course, you never know how your information gathering is going to go. Reporting a small bank robbery seemed to be proceeding more smoothly than usual until the eyewitness I was interviewing realised I was not the policeman but the local journalist.

There are plenty of obstacles. We may be barred from meetings, prevented from speaking to someone, stalled, stone-walled. We work for employers with limited resources, facing organisations with deeper pockets. We have to make choices and, as far as possible, avoid upsetting advertisers, readers, listeners and viewers, not to mention courts and regulators. But we do not lose heart - naturally.

So as I'm preparing to toast the right of people to take out injunctions, amid the hubbub of celebrity bonhomie the clinking sound reminds me that it is to those battling against the less visible chains of censorship that I must drink instead.


Tim Verney is a journalist and sector connector for MediaNet, a network of Christians working in the media