Press Complaints Commission complaint against the Sun

I've missed most of the furore about Professor David Nutt being sacked, as I've been concentrating on (a) getting and (b) understanding my new job, and also on our attempts to move house, but let me see if I've got this right...

A scientist who is engaged by the Government to advise them on drugs policy does so, whilst at the same time continuing to do what he's previously done - indeed the things which led the Government to appoint him as an advisor in the first place - namely give lectures and write articles on the science related to drugs and drug policy. The Government, having refused to take his advice, then sacks him on the spurious grounds that he has undermined their policy, presumably by not changing his evidence-based policy proposals to bring them into line with the opinion-poll-based ones being put forward by the Government, and when he and his colleagues (actually mostly his colleagues, so far as I can tell, Prof Nutt has mostly maintained a dignified silence on this issue, except when being pressed by journalists, unlike the Home Secretary) object to such treatment, the tabloid newspapers, with the Sun in the front rank, break off from celebrating and fantasising over famous drug-abusing celebrities of all kinds to hunt out some pictures and text suggesting that Professor Nutt's own children are somehow drug-fuelled lunatics, and use those to suggest that Professor Nutt isn't an appropriate person to be advising the Government on drugs.

Well, that's just bollocks. For one thing, having four grown-up children probably makes Professor Nutt even more qualified to advise the Government on how badly their criminalisation approach to cannabis is not working. It also seems to illustrate that Professor Nutt's advocation of an evidence-based approach to drugs policy isn't just something he cooks up for public consumption: it fits in with how he's brought up his children, who sound like interesting, but relatively well-adjusted, young people.

The Sun's hypocrisy in all of this has finally tipped me over the edge, and I've done something today I've never bothered with before, and submitted a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission over the Sun's failure to follow the Code of Practice. My complaint reads:

The code says editors must not use the fame, notoriety or position of a parent as sole justification for publishing details of a child's private life - this is exactly what the Sun has done in this article. Exactly. You could have written the code specifically to deal with this article. This is a gratuitous invasion of privacy, and an abuse of facebook.

At least some of the material referenced in the Sun artice is restricted. The Sun even admits as much ("it can be seen freely by anyone in what is called 'the Bristol network'...", i.e. not by anyone else, and yet they've got access to it, in order to determine that it is "too offensive to print in a family newspaper").

There can be no public interest defence for what the Sun has done in this article, since public interest exists to prevent the public being misled, yet the Sun article, if it demonstrates anything at all about Professor Nutt, actually demonstrates that he is being entirely consistent - the views he expounds within his family appear to be consistent with the public policy approach he advocates for Government. Conversely, the behaviour of several Sun journalists and executives (as documented widely on the internet and the pages of Private Eye, among other places) appears to be vastly at odds with their public policy pronouncements of being anti-drugs. Newspapers cannot be themselves hypocrites while seeking to demonstrate the perceived hypocrisy of others.

You may believe that this is not directly relevant to me. However, I have two children, both of whom use facebook to communicate with their friends and relatives. I don't wish to police their facebook activity, and indeed, I don't have a facebook account myself, but they are free to post pictures on their facebook pages if they wish. I don't believe the Sun, or any other newspaper, should have the right to use such pictures, or messages posted on their personal facebook pages, in order to wage a campaign against me for something I may say or do in future which they disagree with. This is precisely what they have done to Professor Nutt's children, and it must be stopped.

 Update: The PCC refused to investigate my complaint, on the grounds that I wasn't directly involved in the story. However, I note that they did uphold the complaint they received from Stephen Nutt, and the Sun was forced to remove the story and print a pretty detailed "clarification" written by Stephen which includes the explanation that "innocuous photographs were taken out of context in an attempt to discredit my father’s work". Good. But they should have been made to pay some compensation, which Professor Nutt could have used to fund his new Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.