When reading choices have an impact on the life of someone that one is reading voyeuristically about ...

Would you, for instance, think that those who read terrorist manuals or materials designed to encourage terrorist acts have no responsibility for what their reading choices are or the impact that the publication of those might have?

Different strokes, etc.

Personally, I have no comprehension of why anyone wants to spend money buying any of the trashy gossip rags that have grown up like weeds in recent years.

Why do people want to read the details of other's lives – whether those who do not parade their private lives or those like Katie Price who do?

Why? Someone explain it to me: why do you care? What right do you have to poke your nose into their lives? What do you get out of reading this trash that improves your life and how?

You talk of "treatment". What was different about the "treatment of the Dowlers that you say (rightly) was inexcusable and the treatment of the Watsons or the treatment of Mosley? Or yes, of Grant?

If the treatment was "inexcusable" in one case, why not in others?

I hardly think Al Qaeda are worried about circulation figures, at least no more than Nuts magazine are encouraging jihad.

A poor choice of comparison.

I'll say it again - the readership of NoTW, or its kind, should not be held responsible for the actions its owners and managers took (or turned a blind eye to) in order to obtain stories, particularly given that they weren't aware of the methods that were being used at the time to gather information.

You may as well criticize the Fritzls neighbours for not reporting to Social Services that two old folks were going through a wheelbarrow of food between them every week.

Rumours that James Murdoch has resigned.....

Edit - turns out it's just as director of the companies that publish The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun

Very good point ... defining precisely what is in the public interest is tricky.
We all "know" but would have difficulty defining it.

Nonetheless, we have had statutes before (About whistle-blowing) where the reasonable-ness of the person's belief in it being in the public interest was a key factor.

Comedy is subjective, I am not a great fan of his, but for the papers to tap his phone to get hold of 'tittle tattle' is simply wrong.

someone should start one call Twatter, just for the likes of him

A poor choice of comparison, one might say, Andy.



If nobody bought a publication – of any variety – then it would cease to publish. There has to be a market there. Now there's a history of salacious publications in the UK, so when loads more hit the shelves, it hardly came out of nowhere.

Now I'm not going to start with chicken and egg – because I wouldn't know where to start – but it is a fact that without the market for gossip and salacious, intimate details of people's lives (given voluntarily or otherwise) there would be no such publications.

While people might well have not suspected over the use of the so-called 'dark arts', it occurs to me that people were frequently paying to read about the details of the private lives of people who did not want those details revealed. Let's take the Mosely case as one example: did people really buy the Screws that weekend. and for the follow up, in the belief that Mosely had invited the cameras into that aspect of his private life?

So I return to the question of why people think they have a right to be entertained/titillated by such details and secondly, why they find that so entertaining?

Oddly, your mention of the Fritzel case suggests that people snoop (or twitch their curtains) or should do, and should actually pick up on something as ordinary as shopping – even when (presumably) amounts increased over a long time and were a regular factor. Indeed, what you seem to be suggesting is that all of us should snoop – that, in this context, we should all become obsessed with the private lives of others. The Stasi would have loved you.

I would add that the drugs comparison doesn't really work either (or at least not fully). Although it's fairly simplistic a view of a more complex case, most of those who grow or sell drugs do so in the knowledge of what they're doing and, for whatever reason, having presumably reached a conclusion that they will do that.

So that puts the consumer in a rather different relationship to the producer than it does where someone's private life is invaded, without their permission, and then sold for the entertainment of others. That is not to say that there is no ethical complexity to the relationship between drug producer, seller and consumer, but it is clearly not the same.

is he not invited to your next fancy dress party

Why would anyone want to tap their phones