Too much shimmering/pixellating faces on TV

Boulevardier

I'm sure other people besides me have noticed a big increase in the use of shimmering/clouding/pixellating of peoples faces on broadcast TV footage.

This is understandable in a lot of cases - concealing the faces of offenders in the act of committing a crime, or the faces of children, would both be reasonable examples of that for legal or safety reasons.

However, I think this practice has perhaps gone too far. I now regularly see TV footage in which the faces of people walking down a street, or having a smoke outside a pub, are being concealed, even though they could not possibly be guilty of anything beyond being on that street on that day.

Is this not an excessively tight interpretation of rights to privacy or anonymity?

I would be interested to know whether there has been any change in the law or in broadcasting policy in the last few years which has led to this arguably over-scrupulous practice.

Custardpi

I suppose many news organisations are so afraid of being sued nowadays that they err on the side of caution when it comes to people's identities, either getting a release form signed by everyone in shot or pixelating. Somebody might appear to be just on the street or having a smoke outside the pub to a casual observer but to someone who knew them it could tell a different story e.g. a man could be outside the pub in the company of his mistress, who he had promised never to see again. Result: wife divorces him & takes the kids, ruining his life. Such a man might very well take legal action against those responsible for the breach of his privacy.

Boulevardier

Yes, I think that may be why they are doing it, but that does not make them right!

If not unchecked, it will lead to viewers looking at a sea of clouded faces, which will destroy the visual integrity of TV footage of the modern streeet.

coylemj

In Ireland there was two cases that come to mind that would have lead to that practice among Irish TV stations....

1. There was a news program (similar to 'Prime Time') on RTE about some illegal practice like selling smuggled cigarettes and the program featured a clip of the city centre (might have been Henry St.) where there just happened to be an ex-Garda Commissioner strolling by. He successfully sued RTE and got damages on the basis that someone watching the program might have jumped to the conclusion that he was involved in the dodgy goings-on.

2. There was a clip on the news about a drink driving checkpoint on some main road in Dublin around Christmas one year. In the clip you could see a car and it's registration plate was clearly visible. Lo and behold wasn't the car being driven by a barrister lady who successfully sued RTE on the basis that her friends, colleagues and clients might have assumed that she had been stopped because she had drink on her.

In both cases the cynic in you might say that the perceived slight existed only in the fertile mind of a greedy lawyer but in both cases the broadcaster settled and paid up.

So that's why the faces of people and car registration plates will often be pixellated out of factual reports on TV.

Boulevardier

I think that those events are absolutely tragic. Those people should not have been able to sue. The result is that a public street can no longer be accurately shown on news television.

There needs in my view to be legislation protecting broadcasters from being sued in this way.

Then again, such legislation might well be struck down because of our ludicrous constititional "right to a good name" which has been used time and time again to suppress the truth in other areas of our national life.

IRE60

Here's an interesting one - there's a pic in p10 of the IT today in a report about the Belfast flag issue. Captioned 'police clash with loyalist protesters in Belfast' the rioters faces are all obscured - aka pikelated! WTF is that about - they are fighting wit the cops, and caught on camera!

coylemj

IRE60 wrote: »

Here's an interesting one - there's a pic in p10 of the IT today in a report about the Belfast flag issue. Captioned 'police clash with loyalist protesters in Belfast' the rioters faces are all obscured - aka pikelated! WTF is that about - they are fighting wit the cops, and caught on camera!

One of them could be there as part of his masters research into conflict studies