News: Operation Elveden, Sun Journalist and two others to be charged over alleged £17,000 payments for information

The Crown Prosecution Service have today announced that the Sun Whitehall editor, Clodagh Hartley and two others are to be charged with conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office.  The information concerned details of unannounced spending and policy decisions relating to the 2010 Budget and the coalition government’s deficit reduction plans.

News: Four public officials plead guilty over leaks to the Sun

Two former police officers, an ex-prison officer and another public official have admitted selling information to the Sun.  These are the first accused to plead guilty in relation to the investigation into alleged illegal payments by journalists.

The Many Mythologies of Press Freedom, Part 2, Media Self-Censorship – Julian Petley

The Sun is far from alone in attacking other media organisations, but newspapers routinely calling for the censorship of other media is a paradoxical and extremely distasteful sight.  It is one which casts a good deal of doubt on the sincerity of their demands before the Leveson Inquiry that press freedom must be protected above all else. Press freedom is but one aspect of media freedom in general, and if newspapers cannot see that there is the starkest of contradictions in calling for their own freedom (self-circumscribed though it is) to be defended whilst bawling for the censorship of other media, then the clock really has struck thirteen.

The Many Mythologies of Press Freedom, Part 1, Free Speech and the “Sun” – Julian Petley

In the Sun, 13 February 2012, the paper’s  former political editor Trevor Kavanagh was given the best part of a page to protest that  ‘this witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’. The ‘witch-hunt’ in question was the arrest of five Sun journalists accused, as part of the seemingly endless fall-out from the phone hacking scandal, of bribing public officials, and the former eastern bloc countries were Poland, Estonia and Slovakia which, according to the World Press Freedom Index 2011-2012, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), all had better records on press freedom than the UK, which had dropped nine places to number 28 since the last such survey.

Kate’s boobs, Harry’s bum and the Sun’s daft logic – Brian Cathcart

‘Oh my God!’ yelps the French magazine Closer, announcing its topless duchess scoop with the warning: ‘The photos which will go around the world’. What can they make of this at the Sun? It’s just weeks since Rupert Murdoch’s daily published pictures of Prince Harry with his clothes off, telling us that in doing so it was performing a ‘vital’ public service.

The Sunday Times, bravery and press freedom – Brian Cathcart

The Sunday Times does not mince its words, with a leading article entitled ‘The Sun’s brave lone stand for press freedom’. Prince Harry, it declares, ‘has put the issue of press freedom squarely on the agenda’, and the Sun, by publishing pictures of him with his clothes off, had exposed the absurdity of a situation where ‘British newspaper readers have been deprived of information freely available to their counterparts overseas’. This, said the Sunday Times, recalled the abdication crisis and the Spycatcher case.

Public interest and the Prince – the Sun fails the responsibility test

So, finally, the “Sun” has come up with a public interest argument to justify writing about and publishing illegally taken photographs of a party in a private hotel room.  Under the headline “We fight for press freedom” the “Sun” bootstraps for Britain – justifying its publication of private photographs by reference to the “debate” which it, and the rest of the media have generated.  The public interest in publishing the photographs is, apparently, “in order for the debate about them to be fully informed“.