Overexposure to the Sun causes Hysteria

Yesterday, Britain's most ridiculous tabloid 'named and shamed' judges who it claimed had given overly lenient sentences, including one who imposed a minimum six-year term on the baby-rapist Alan Webster, reduced because he pleaded guilty after being caught red-handed. This was a woeful exercise in deliberately and manipulatively missing the point. It is not the role of judges to decide sentencing policy, but merely to follow the guidelines set down by the government, a point appreciated even by the Daily Mail, an unlikely voice of reason, albeit a no less hysterical one. By taking this stance, the Sun is promoting the idea that judges should act without reference to the wishes of the electorate, a policy with far more devastating consequences to the rule of law than any number of lenient sentencing decisions.

It is depressing news coverage like this which is slowly eating away at my increasingly precarious commitment to freedom of the press. While this would seem to be an incredibly important constitutional principle, it cannot be untrammelled so that the media can undermine and weaken even more fundamental aspects of the constitution, especially when core human rights (yes, ones even more necessary than free speech) are at stake. This has led me to propose a new criminal offence - incitement to idiocy. It should be possible to charge any newspaper that causes people to say or to do idiotic things. That should keep the Crown Prosecution Service busy for a while.