Brendan O'Neill - quote for today

Excellent post on the hypocrisy of the Guardian and the New York Times over the material obtained from anti-American obsessive Assange. Oddly, Soothscribe O'Neill does not mention the more glaring hypocrisy, which was their refusal to print the Climategate material because it was "stolen".

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘the public interest’, as defined in these discussions, has very little to do with the living, breathing public. The higher valuation given to the highbrow tittle-tattle spouted by Wikileaks in contrast to the lowbrow tittle-tattle spouted by the News of the World is really a question of taste, of preference, even of snobbery (‘our gossip is worthier than yours!’), yet it gets dressed up in the pseudo-democratic lingo of the public interest. What these journalists and editors really mean when they talk about ‘the public interest’ is what they think is good for the public – what they have decreed, in their closed-off meetings using some narrow legalistic definitions, to be edifying and respectable enough for publication.