An excellent piece today by Jesse Singal in The Dispatch; the whole thing is worth reading, but here are some excerpts (by the way, I much enjoy Singal's and Katie Herzog's work on Blocked and Reported; it's one of the few podcasts to which I have a paid subscription):
In the U.K., Labour MP Dawn Butler published a letter to the head of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, an independent regulatory body, arguing that "Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, to name a few," and calling for (unspecified) "decisive action" in response to his death. The British journalist and broadcaster Will Self took things even further, posting a lengthy open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a crackdown that sounds far more Moscow than London. Self argued that the Crown Prosecution Service "should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers" before claiming that "This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one." An open letter arguing that "Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed" was signed by a number of British academics and politicians, including Green Party leader Zack Polanski…..
[But] the call for more scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.'s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).
