Anti-Journalism Hacked Off’s Crusade Against Investigation of Huw Edwards Scandal
As Huw Edwards pleads guilty to child sex charges, the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the well-paid liberal podcastariat has already been well noted. The well-heeled and right-on steamed in to defend their centrist buddy – but Edwards has today admitted to three counts of making indecent images of children…
Anti-press Hacked Off, which describes itself as a ‘campaign for a free and accountable press‘, also played a key role mixing the cards and sending up chaff on the Huw Edwards scandal – it ran a relentless campaign criticising the original reports which appeared in The Sun, seeking to discredit the story. In July last year Hacked Off released a statement from its director Nathan Sparkes which read:
“A man has been hospitalised, his family has been destroyed, a young person has seen their drug addiction issue and family estrangement splashed across the newspapers for the world to pick over. Whatever further emerges in this story, and if The Sun has further public interest justifications or evidence of genuine wrongdoing they are hiding it very well, this episode demonstrates the extraordinary power the press has inflict harm against people, and underlines the urgent need for an independent system of regulation as recommended in the Leveson Report”.
Hacked Off went onto say elsewhere that The Sun:
“Failed to follow very basic journalistic standards in pursuit of this story”.
The group prayed in aid the support of Peter Tatchell, who chimed in:
“The presumption of innocence until proven guilty has been thrown out the window… Unless a criminal offence has been committed or the young person has complained, it is a private matter and no one else’s business… [The Sun] is aghast that a BBC presenter allegedly paid a young man thousands of pounds for allegedly sexually explicit photos. But for decades that newspaper made millions in profits publishing sexually explicit photos of young women on page three.”
The BBC then quoted Hacked Off in a piece critical of The Sun‘s reporting:
“Jacqui Hames, a board member of press campaign group Hacked Off, said a “suggestion of criminality… screamed out” at readers day after day.”
Set that against Edwards’s own admissions in court. With the luvvie-backed group lobbying Starmer’s government hard for Leveson 2, this should weaken their argument. Press regulation campaigners are so often really just anti-press…