[user104658]

Originally Posted by Livia

Keeping someone's name out of the press until they are found guilty is not censorship. If they're going to name suspects because they're famous, then they should name everyone who is accused of anything. We are all supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law.

No, but like I was saying (...in the entirety of the rest of my post...) "the press" is a dying medium and "news" (gossip, hear say, whatever you might call it) now gets around by a multitude of other means... so whether or not people are named in the press, people know who it is anyway. Whether or not it's in the papers is sort of moot, if it's all over social networking and freely available with a quick google search. I used the example of the "un-named Helen Wood punter from a BBC drama", who can't be named but we all know who it is. Another would be Rolf Harris, who was identified online months before his name was released, in the press he was being listed as "a famous person of a certain age". Everyone knew it was Rolf.

My point is that this would be all over the internet whether or not it was "allowed" to be in the printed press, and that already, a large number of people get most of their knowledge of world events online. As the generations roll on (easily within the next two), the printed press will be all but obsolete anyway. And you can't keep this sort of thing out of the "online grape vine" without a huge and unprecedented effort to "censor the internet". Which would be fundamentally damaging, for everyone.