Most people scream at mention of the Daily Mail but today their columnist, Melanie Phillips (more screams), wrote exactly what I thought last night, that we seem to be losing our right to privacy. Carol Thatcher has been banned from working for the BBC for a remark she made in private and a nurse has been suspended for offering to pray for a patient.
Once it was considered unacceptable - even malicious - to go behind someone's back and report them for saying or doing something which not everyone agreed with, but which did no harm. Now it seems we are watched, recorded and reported like citizens in a totalitarian state. At the same time anyone in the public eye has intimate details of their private life literally broadcast to the nation. I was at the dentist's today where the radio is on in the surgery to sooth both patient and staff with gentle music interspersed by news. We were given clinical details of Jade Goody's illness. Because we have no TV I'd never heard of her till now when she has become for me the unfortunate young woman likely to die soon of cancer. Isn't this going too far?
Once it was considered unacceptable - even malicious - to go behind someone's back and report them for saying or doing something which not everyone agreed with, but which did no harm. Now it seems we are watched, recorded and reported like citizens in a totalitarian state. At the same time anyone in the public eye has intimate details of their private life literally broadcast to the nation. I was at the dentist's today where the radio is on in the surgery to sooth both patient and staff with gentle music interspersed by news. We were given clinical details of Jade Goody's illness. Because we have no TV I'd never heard of her till now when she has become for me the unfortunate young woman likely to die soon of cancer. Isn't this going too far?
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