Children’s Commissioner hires lawyers as her feelings were
January 30, 2009
Children’s Commissioner hires lawyers as her feelings were hurt – and loses
Someone ought to find out how much the taxpayer paid Dr Cindy Kiro for her legal attack on Radio Live after Michael Laws hurt her feelings and was taken to the Broadcasting Standards Authority because Kiro can’t take criticism. The BSA decision is here and Kiro lost.
Radio Live programme director Mitch Harris said that the decision by the authority “raises real issues about the actions of this senior public servant”.
The Children’s Commissioner had employed a lawyer to pursue the complaint beyond the point of reasonableness, he said. Dr Kiro clearly had a problem with Michael Laws’ robust criticism of her office and her actions. “The complaint was a chilling attempt by a government agent to suppress freedom of speech. The BSA’s judgement is an important win for talk radio and talkback, in particular
Kiro actually counted how many times she was mentioned over a three hour period. She was mentioned 50 times. This was some of the offending comments:
Dr Kiro “wouldn’t have a clue what real poverty looked like/Dr Kiro doesn’t understand the problems/The problem “is not poverty of money, it’s poverty of mind”, and “it’s the cycle of uselessness, not the cycle of poverty”/This is the point that Cindy Kiro simply has refused to address: how are you going to try and change parents, or a parent, who has no aspiration for themselves, let alone their children, into a fully functioning member of the human race who advantages their child no matter that they are not rich?/For goodness’ sake, why doesn’t she just focus on what we need for children? They need a loving, kind adult, hopefully a parent, but not necessarily, in charge of the child and ensuring that they get three meals a day, that they are kept warm at night, that they get off to school and there’s somebody at home when they get home at night. It’s pretty basic stuff.”
Kiro complained that the remarks were unbalanced and unfair. Diddums. It’s obvious why she didn’t sue for defamation. Laws told the truth.
The battle for friends
Facebook is getting increasingly popular. So popular that last month it recorded almost double the number of global visitors in December than longtime leader MySpace. Facebook doubled the number of visitors in the past year alone – meaning more people had more friends – but really, does this mean that Facebook’s easy intimacy is replacing real friendships?
And when people meet up with friends they have on Facebook for a drink, guess what they talk about?
Facebook. While updating Facebook and Twitter pages via the mobile device.
And on that note, Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging and social media site begun by three bloggers in California in 2006, is out-digging the social media site Digg.Twitter is only two years old, and, in essence, very simple: like the status update function in Facebook, it asks the question “What are you doing?”, and then gives you a very small space in which to answer. And that’s all it does: no faffing about with profiles, photos, poking or sheep.
Twitter increased its popularity tenfold in the UK during the past year – and that’s not including stats around mobile usage.Whereas Digg gets a lot of its visitors from Google (almost 40 percent), Twitter acquires a lot of its users in other social networks like Facebook, through mobile devices. Twitter could go mainstream this year, just as Facebook did about two years ago, led by the 25-34 year old age band as seen here.
Yep, its the interactive world of web 2.0. But as marketing takes a greater hold within social networking we will be entering the world of web 3.0 – driven not just by content or interaction, but with a greater presence of advertising and marketing. In the meantime perhaps some of our relationships may be based solely on exchanges of 140 characters or less – via a gadget that has the name of a fruit.
Blackberry.
Technorati tag:Twitter,Facebook
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