Thursday, June 12, 2008

Yet Another Voluntary 'Code'

From the home exemplar of cretinous suggestions - the European Parliament:
Suggests clarifying the status, legal or otherwise, of weblogs and encourages their voluntary labelling according to the professional and financial responsibilities and interests of their authors and publishers;

and
In this context the report points out that the undetermined and unindicated status of authors and publishers of weblogs causes uncertainties regarding impartiality, reliability, source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits.

Actually, the report is only 8 pages and full of Euro-shit, so its "pointing out" consists of this unevidenced statement:
whereas weblogs are an increasingly common medium for self-expression by media professionals as well as private persons, the status of their authors and publishers, including their legal status, is neither determined nor made clear to the readers of the weblogs, causing uncertainties regarding impartiality, reliability, source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits,

So, because some journos blog, then all the actual human beings who do so must wear a yellow star on their blogs (yes, sorry, Godwin)?  Would they just bugger off and die?

2 comments:

Brennig said...

The link doesn't work for me. Do you have another reference?

Surreptitious Evil said...

Brennig,

Thanks for that, I quote from the new page up:

"This article has been corrected to reflect amendments by Parliament's Culture Committee, which affected some of the positions in the draft report that we had previously reported."

The report itself seems to have disappeared (if you drop me an email to surreptitiousevil at google I can send you a copy). Open government in action, it seems.

 
HTTP Error 403: You are not authorised to access the file "\real_name_and_address.html" on this server.

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