I thought watching the man behind Guido Fawkes give evidence to a parliamentary committee would be like watching a dog suddenly get up and start walking on its hind legs: bizarre, eye-catching, but ultimately trivial.
If I’d watched it without the sound on, that’s exactly what it would have been like. Since this was the joint committee on privacy and injunctions before which Paul Staines and three of his fellow bloggers were summoned, it included a fair number of Lords and even a bishop (full membership list here). The idea of these peers and their Commons colleagues locking horns with the likes of Paul Staines and David Allen Green over the potential regulation of ‘the interweb’ and ‘the Twitter’ (as lords and bishops call these things in my imagination) was pretty bizarre.
Once you turned the sound on, though, it was a completely different story. The committee members were, by and large, well-informed, and where there were gaps in their knowledge, they asked questions rather than just trying to bluff their way through, and the bloggers were patient with their lack of technical knowledge but still strongly opinionated.
For their part, the bloggers seemed keen to help rather than just get one up on the mainstream media. Paul Staines and Jamie East had some interesting insights into how the two work together, the latter telling the committee that “it happens less now, but there was a time when bloggers would take stories from journalists their publication won’t do, with the blogs used as a testing ground for a story. Then they can write about it as the ‘nasty internet people have already done it’.”
Their evidence on superinjunctions and the mechanisms by which they can be broken online were certainly relevant, as was the discussion about the ethics and responsibility of online journalism as opposed to print or broadcast.
Paul Staines had the last word on privacy and injunctions: “when you’re talking about privacy, what we’re really talking about is censorship and whether we want judges to be censors”. It was admitted that ‘there might be sympathy here with that view’ by a member of the committee, but they chose not to go any further.
Staines made an attempt to use the parliamentary privilege enjoyed by the hearing to raise the matter of Tom Watson and his allegation that he and other committee members were ‘targeted’ by private investigators working for News International, but committee chair John Whittingdale refused to allow the comment to stand, saying “I don’t want to use this committee to air allegations that you wouldn’t repeat outside”.
Ironic, perhaps, that in a hearing primarily about openness and transparency that someone was silenced.
Many would argue that it happened years ago, but if ever there was a moment when bloggers proved that they are now a mainstream force in the media, this was it. David Allen Green, author of the Jack of Kent blog and legal correspondent at the New Statesman, sitting before a committee of Parliament, emphasised over and over again that bloggers are subject to the same libel and defamation laws as anyone else, and are by and large as responsible as anyone else in the way they use information.
As Richard Wilson, author of the ‘Don’t Get Fooled’ blog, pointed out: “I can be sued for libel, I can be sued for defamation. There’s a perception that we exist in a legal black hole, and that’s not the case.”
I’m still not quite sure how much this evidence session will have contributed to the committee’s eventual findings or the way blogging is regulated, but it did most certainly demonstrate the extent to which bloggers now sit at the heart of our media machine.
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