I guessed that the article by a former Sun reporter John Coles, Nineteen months on bail is an injustice, would engender plenty of anti-Sun (and anti-journalist) comments. And it did, of course.
The Sun's law-and-order agenda of the lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key variety, plus its often prejudicial vilification of arrested innocents (Christopher Jefferies, inter alia), is an unsympathetic starting point from which to call for public sympathy.
But that does not negate Coles's substantive argument against the use of police bail. Nor, in my view, are some of specific attacks on Sun journalists justified.
So, in considering some of the comments, let me begin by accepting the points made by richmanchester and RadioLeyton in which they delight in the irony of Sun journalists complaining about police high-handedness.
The former writes (I've corrected his typos):
"It would be easy to sneer at a Sun journo lamenting his treatment at the hands of the Met and ask if he was so concerned when others - miners, print workers, lefties, students, Irish people, Muslims etc - were the ones on the receiving end.
But no, we must be better than that, and ask if indeed he has a point and the process of law should not be concluded in a timely fashion."
And the latter takes a similar line:
"The police have been flagrantly abusing and misusing their power all my life, and nobody has covered for them more enthusiastically than the Sun."
Those are undeniable and inescapable truths. The Sun has been a right-wing newspaper since at least 1975 - when Margaret Thatcher became Tory party leader - and, with very odd exceptions, has failed to hold the police to account (hence the terrible error over Hillsborough).
But that does not mean that all Sun journalists have been committed right-wingers. They did not set the paper's political policy. Tabloid newspapers are not democracies: the owners and editors rule.
This has been a common situation across Fleet Street. In my days on the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, I discovered many staunch Tories; during my time on the Tory-supporting Daily Express I found several staff, indeed almost all the down-table subs in the 1970s, were staunchly Labour.
You may say that they shouldn't have worked for a reactionary paper but that's wholly unrealistic. In an ideal world journalists would work only for the papers that reflect their political views - if they have any - but that's never been possible.
With that in mind, this comment by HarryTheHorse (one of several by him), strikes me as unfair:
"What do you call a conservative who has been arrested, kept on bail for 18 months and then released without charge? A liberal? Or just a conservative who only gives a shit about the unfairly clunking fist of the law when it affects him personally. I'm trying to care, I really am."
By contrast, I think Coles and his colleagues would now identify with the complaint made by Hengist McStone:
"Six am knock on the door - you had a lie-in mate. When Thames Valley Police lifted me a couple of years ago it was 3.30am. Whilst I was in the cells police searched my home and took all computers, mobile phones DVD players etc. I was on bail for five months.
Harassment continued and some months later I was interviewed again and I asked why it had taken them five months to decide there were no charges. I was told that's how long it took to look at my electrical equipment which they had seized. That could have been done in a day but the police are so arrogant they just take as long as it pleases them."
On the basis of the talks I've had with bailed Sun journalists I would say that their experiences have been genuinely educative. If they had blind faith in the police and justice system before they were arrested, it has certainly dissipated now.
Similarly, many of their colleagues who were not arrested, and who remain on the paper's staff, feel the same way.
Of all the comments addressed to Coles, the one that really struck home with me came from mikedow:
"Your former employer sure screwed your life up for you. Any plans afoot for a reunion party?"
Police bail is iniquitous and its over-use against thousands of people, quite apart from Sun journalists, requires remedial action as soon as possible.
But they know, and we should not forget, that Rupert Murdoch's organisation provided the information to the police that revealed journalists' sources and resulted in their arrests. So he is the ultimate author of their misfortune.
