Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Alan Rusbridger, Editor, The Guardian, Ian Hislop, Editor, Private Eye, John Witherow,
Editor, The Sunday Times, and Jonathan Grun, Editor of the Press Association—Oral
evidence (QQ 162–209)
furore that we have had about injunctions, when coupled with the phone-hacking scandal,
has tended to act as what you can describe as a distorting lens. When applied to the
activities of the British media as a whole, I think that it misrepresents the day-to-day
activities of hundreds of newsrooms across the country. You probably know from your
own experience with your local media that, in newsrooms across the country, day by day,
journalists take decisions beneath the radar. They are bound to be beneath the radar
because we do not know that they are being taken, but those decisions tend to guard the
privacy of what you would describe as ordinary people.
Ian Hislop: You say you are both observers, but a lot of these orders are contra
mundum, which means nobody at all, including both of you, is allowed to say anything about
anything, so you are included in all of them—all of the ones that have that status.
Q1458 Chair: Regarding the fact that there are fewer now, you referred to a
couple of spectacular own goals. Do you think that, therefore, people are going to be less
inclined to seek an injunction, or are the press now behaving better and less intrusive?
Ian Hislop: I do not think so. My guess is that of the people who took the
injunctions, one had a judgment that said, “You are doing this because of, at least partly, your
commercial interest”, which was not what most litigants want to hear, and I am sure that
concentrated the mind, and other people thought, “Why am I taking out an injunction when
the resultant publicity will make me look much more of a fool than if I had just stuck to the
phrase, ‘publish and be damned’?”—a phrase I keep repeating in front of these committees
and which used to be how we did it.
Q1459 Chair: How many stories are you currently prevented from writing as a
result of our standard injunctions?
Ian Hislop: I would think there are about 10 of them still out there; footballers,
actors—
Chair: Do not feel you need to list them all.
Ian Hislop: Those sorts of people.
Q1460 Chair: There are about 10 which Private Eye would like to write, but that it
currently cannot.
Ian Hislop: I am not even saying we would cover them. A lot of those stories, we
would probably never have done. My point has always been the principle of being told you
can’t; by who and why?
Q1461 Chair: How old are these injunctions now?
Ian Hislop: My most senior colleague says part of the problem is no one really
knows because you are not allowed to know anything. I am sure you are but we are not.
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