A recent clarification of the legal status of photgraphy, from the Metropolitan Police, via The Register. I quote:
Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.
I am obliged, as I suppose most photographers will be, to the Met for this, and can only hope that their officers (and those of other Forces) take it on board.
What is disagreeable is that the wretched closed-shop artists of the NUJ are clearly still trying to establish a legal difference between the photographic activities of NUJ members and those of everyone else, and that the Met appear to have taken this on board:
Genuine members of the media carry identification, for instance the UK Press Card, which they will present on request.
and
…where it is clear that the person being searched is a journalist, officers should exercise caution before viewing images as images acquired or created for the purposes of journalism may constitute journalistic material and should not be viewed without a Court Order.
Why should there be any legal difference between a professional journalist, an amateur journalist, and a member of the public who happens to own a camera?
I have suggested before that the NUJ would find it rather convenient if the police were to enforce their closed shop for them, and this does nothing to alter that view.
nice blog.
First off, you’re got a whopping factual inaccuracy in your story – the NUJ doesn’t control the Press Card nor is it the only distributor or “gatekeeper” – http://www.ukpresscardauthority.co.uk/ .
Thus, there is no “closed shop” for the NUJ. There is, however, a distinction between professional journalists – people with a job to do – and non-professionals.
Do you accept the difference between a police officer and a vigilante? An ambulance driver and someone who might like driving fast with sick people in the car? Between a GP and a Chinese herbs enthusiast? Do I need to go on?
Professionals have a job to do and the police have a particular responsibility to allow them do it. Furthermore, the freedom of the press is a core element of human rights embedded in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The NUJ is has been engaged in a longterm process with the police to ensure they do their job properly. The recent issue with the Met is just one small part of that process and your hysterical overreaction is completely out of context.
There are Data Protection Act special protections for certain professions (or, at least, purposes connected with them). However, there is nothing in “he purposes of journalism” which states that you must be permanently employed as such nor that you must be a member of the NUJ to claim s3(a) protection.
There are also HRA s12(4) and ECHR case law protection specifically for journalism – on the grounds that a free press is a public good inimical to tyrants and their lackeys. Clearly written by people with a good knowledge of the 18th Century and none of the late 20th.
So, I would suggest, that the Met instructions are correct (although it is unreasonable that they need to be giving them at all) and the NUJ are just employing the usual special pleading we expect from trade organisations.
DDL: I didn’t actually say that the NUJ controlled the press card. I did say that they would like to have a closed shop; all trade unions want that.
Taking your examples: it is, I believe, the duty of every citizen to uphold the law; a police officer is (or should be) no more than a citizen in uniform.
I have myself driven very fast indeed, with a seriously injured person in my car, to an hospital, in the hope and expectation that were the police to have enountered me so doing they would have followed their usual procedure and provided me with an escort.
The licensing of medical practitioners, who can easily kill with a mistake, ought not, at least not in anything calling itself a free society, be held to justify the ‘licensing’ of journalists.
I am sick and tired of being browbeaten with the word ‘professionals’. It is being increasingly used to mean ‘people paid by the state to nanny or bully you’. I was until recently myself a ‘professional’; all the word means is that one is paid to do it, whatever it is. It is also possible to be ’semi-professional’, as any musician or photographer will tell you.
For myself I have never seen the point of trades unions at all; they are, like the political philosophy they support, relics of the earliest phases of the industrial revolution. I have never been a member of one; nor ever seen the need to.
My belief is that the NUJ is as doomed as the dead-tree press upon which it is parasitic, and that it will in due course expire upon the demise of its host.
SE: With your last paragraph I would entirely concur.
If one even merits the ambiguous sobriquet of ‘journalist’ whilst spewing on-line any more than in ink-on-paper, all I may say is that I, for one, simply stay home and make it all up, even though as they say one ‘just couldn’t'!
Donnach DeLong key-boards:
‘Do you accept the difference between a police officer and a vigilante? An ambulance driver and someone who might like driving fast with sick people in the car? Between a GP and a Chinese herbs enthusiast? Do I need to go on?’
The component of interest is self-evident, and the loaded terms.
So is the self-adorative cant implicit in these same false binarisms.
It follows that the job of The Public then — ‘non-professionals’, eg — /is/ to inhibit and interfere with all of these non-wealth-creating gentry at any and every occasion when they are not directly involved in tasks of actual life-saving, or at least an equivalent amount of actual public enhancement.
The dishonest resort to ad hominem ‘argument’ and name-calling about ‘hysterical overreaction…completely out of context’, as well as being embarrasingly self-revelatory, is objectively completely irrelevant.
In other words:
The professionalist & self-credentialled (NB) non-productive classes all get to gouge and suck only per consensus omnium, and then /only/ to the extent that they produce (instead of tangible wealth) some at least of this vaunted ‘value’ and /integrity/ of which they prate when in their better moods — and not just the display of snarling piss-infantile touchiness, here.
Finally, pray, whenever did a load of scriveners in any media get elevated to the real /professional/ status of medical doctors, lawyers and the better class of dons?
Hungarian-American historian-emeritus John Lukacs is particularly scathing about this whole load of bullshit, and the historical problem — it is acute — not only of /inflation/ of money, but of the /inflation of language/ in the public discourse.
It results, precisely, in the ludicrous display of hysterical (sic) vanity (sic) we have just been treated to read.
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