Monday, May 23, 2011

Promise Not To Tell?

The married footballer named on Twitter as having taken out an injunction over an alleged affair with the reality TV contestant Imogen Thomas has been named in Parliament by an MP as Manchester United and Wales veteran Ryan Giggs according to the Guardian.
And BBC News.
And the Daily Telegraph.
And the Sun.
And the Daily Mirror.
And the Daily Mail.
And Sky News (where you can even watch it happen).
And Hello magazine.
And the Financial Times.
And ... just about every other media outlet - print and online - in England. And far, far beyond.
The Liberal Democrat MP John Hemmings named Giggs during an urgent question in the House of Commons on privacy orders. Using parliamentary privilege to break the court order, he said that it would 'not be practical' to imprison the seventy five thousand Twitter users who had also named the player. He said: 'Mr Speaker, with about seventy five thousand people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter it is impractical to imprison them all and with reports that Giles Coren is facing imprisonment...' The speaker, John Bercow, interrupted after Hemming had named Ryan Giggs. 'Let me just say to the honourable gentleman, I know he's already done it, but occasions such as this are occasions for raising the issues of principle involved, not seeking to flout for whatever purpose. If the honourable gentleman wants to finish his question in an orderly way he can do so.' Coren, The Times columnist, it would seem, is the journalist whom several newspapers had stated yesterday was supposedly threatened with contempt of court proceedings in relation to a separate privacy injunction involving another Premiership footballer and comments that he had made on Twitter. Earlier the High Court had again ruled that the injunction should not be lifted, although that all seems a bit academic now. Mr Justice Eady rejected a fresh application by the Sun and its publisher News Group Newspapers to discharge the privacy injunction. The judge said: 'The court's duty remains to try and protect the claimant, and particularly his family, from intrusion and harassment so long as it can.' On Sunday, a Scottish paper - the Sunday Herald - had published an easily recognisable photograph of Giggs who had previously been identified on Twitter as having taken out a privacy injunction. So, now that all of those members of the media have reported what's been said in parliament, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Interestingly, earlier there had been speculation that if the player - previously only identified by the initials CTB - has been successful in his threatened action against Twitter, that the company would have had to delete several hundred thousand tweets. A massive amount of bandwidth. Forty gigs, at least. I'm here all week.

And the Register.
And Metro.
And The Drum.
And Business Insider
And Reuters.
And ITN.
And BBC Wales.
And, even the BBC's Newsround!

So to yer actual Keith Telly Topping's 45 of the Day. Which seems vastly appropriate.