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HL: Maybe children of famous people?
JW: So children of famous people and its revealed their parents have been up to something the public doesn't approve of, I don't think there's anything to do about that certainly if your father's a footballer and has been having an affair on the side and it's suddenly slapped across all the newspapers, your schoolmates are going to find out about it and I don't think it's viable to say well we should have a law which prohibits the publication of personal details of famous people I just don't think it's viable so I don't think there is much to be done in that case. It's very different if we're talking about a situation where you know someone's bank details have been stolen and released on the internet, those kind of things where it is a truly there's an actual crime involved, stealing information and causing harm with it.
HL: Relatives of... murder victims, how do you protect them?
JW: Relatives of....
HL: Murder victims...
JW: Murder victims, I'm not sure...protect them from what exactly?
HL: Well there's been a very big case here in Britain over the past week. The family of a young girl who was murdered Milly Dowler and the personal details of the family details, the father and so on who are completely innocent have appeared both in newspapers and on the internet causing enormous distress and a great deal of anger. How do you protect people like that who have no real experience of being in the public eye and no real need to be taken apart in the public eye.
JW: Well I don't think you can, I think that those are actually matters of legitimate public interest and so, you know as discomforting as that is to certain people you know the public has a right to know and I think that's very fundamental. I mean the one thing I would say is that I do think that as a matter of tradition and custom newspapers should give some thought to this kind of question to say rather than, than saying the persons name we should omit their name but even that you know it becomes, it becomes quite difficult because if we go down a path where we say actually you're not allowed to speak about certain things and certain crime cases we really cut off the avenue for the press and the public to investigate what's going on, to understand the legal system, to understand social problems because we end up with this censored view of the world that doesn't give us the full picture we need in order to make better decisions about policy, about how the law should be and things like that.
HL: So if someone's life is wrecked that's just tough luck?
JW: It might just be tough luck.....this is, it's a difficult thing but I also think that it's not actually wrecking people's lives. I mean I think the important thing is that the best answer to bad speech is more speech, that if in fact someone is an innocent victim in a situation we should have stories about that, say look this person here's how their life was impacted by this murder, they didn't do anything wrong but now these...this and that horrible thing has happened to them so that people can understand things.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/pm/pmprivacy-wales.shtml
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