Is there really no such thing as privacy anymore?

Date Published: {J}

Is the end of privacy the price we have pay for this new era of easy access to information and internet – an acknowledgement that, in effect, nothing is private anymore?

The thought police are everywhere, monitoring events that used to be off limits or off the record or a private conversation – however sexist or chauvinistic – between two people.

It’s not to defend Sky’s Richard Keys or Andy Gray, because they were clearly an accident waiting to happen – and once their first indiscretion came out, the floodgates opened to indicate that more than one female colleague was waiting in the long grass for revenge, armed with their own segment of video tape from the cutting room floor.

It’s not even to feel sorry for Gordon Brown who was still wearing his radio mic as he left a canvass in Rochdale during the last election campaign – and then called a 66 year old Labour supporter a bigot because she questioned him on emigration policy.

And there’s no point lamenting the departure from the UK Government of Vince Cable, one of the few Lib Dems to make sense, after his unfortunate analysis of his party’s Tory partners – little realising he was talking to someone who actually worked for the Daily Telegraph in what might, in a tabloid world, be seen as entrapment.But it is about Fox News, where incitement is the order of the evening and the station’s right-wing poster boy Glenn Beck is given free rein to espouse his conspiracy theories and use his emotive rhetoric to stir emotions among the easily led.

And it is most certainly about WikiLeaks, a non-profit media phenomenon which has brought seismic change to reporting as we know it – and much of it for the better.

However its publication of tens of thousands of classified documents from US Embassies around the world was a step too far – not because a sizable part of it wasn’t in the public interest because it was, but because some of it was little more than tittle tattle which would nonetheless have enormous ramifications on the diplomatic front.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.