It's Leveson Time!

You may remember that back in 2006 two journalists working for the News of the World (NOTW) newspaper were jailed for hacking the voicemail of Prince William. They went to prison, served their sentences and were released. Then in 2008 the NOTW revealed Formula 1 supremo Max Mosley - who despite being the son of wartime fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley is a respected Establishment figure - liked to engage in Nazi themed S&M sex parties with prostitutes. Apart from revealing that a serving MI5 officer's wife worked as a prostitute this caused huge problems with Britain's Gulf allies and forced Mosley to leave the world of F1. So in 2009 British police launched an absolutely massive investigation into phone hacking. This led to vast number of celebrities whose careers were on a bit of a downward spiral suing News International which owns the NOTW for damages and the NOTW being closed down. Then in July 2011 a Judge led Public Inquiry (the Leveson Inquiry) was launched to examine the issue putting immense pressure on the British news media and effectively wiping actual news off the agenda for about a year. The report of that Inquiry is to be published later today. There is genuine debate about what action this report will lead to but progressives in the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat are pushing for statutory regulation of the British print media. Effectively this means putting in place a government run censor to tell Britain's newspapers what stories they can or cannot publish putting Britain towards China/North Korea end of the spectrum.

In order to soften the public up for this the narrative Britain (and Rihanna) had been hoping for from the me and Rihanna saga was of a story of innocent young love cruelly torn apart by pressure of keeping a celebrity relationship out of the tabloid press. The problem is that having being born with an intelligence file and suffered years of surveillance, harassment and character assassination far above and beyond what the press go in for I know it's p*ss easy to avoid the press. The only problem was due to her own issues the celebrity in question didn't want to go along with it meaning I'm inclined to say the celebrities only have themselves to blame.

I suppose if we are trying to salvage something it could be spun to act as an allegory for this progressive/totalitarian mindset that is held by politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice which is giving government's across the developed world ever more power to bug, eavesdrop and spy on their citizens. You see Rihanna could continue to regulate those who disagree with her world view by cutting them off, isolating herself from them or trapping them on a Boeing 777 for hours on end. Alternatively she could just accept that maybe there is something wrong with her world view. For example Rihanna's current war with the NOTW's sister paper The Sun was the result of her posting a Twitter picture showing her on an IV drip effectively hospitalised after over doing it. The Sun re-published this picture and dared to suggest she might be working too hard. For that they were banished. I don't think they helped their cause by then publishing a photograph of her vomiting on a nightclub table in Las Vegas though because she really misinterpreted that.

00:15 on 29/11/12.