What people want, and what they will get, is all the news that's unfit to print

MATTHEW PARRIS

0 f the many knock-down arguments against Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss's attempt this week to provide lifelong anonymity for the killers of James Bulger, the overwhelming one is that on which even newspapermen who oppose the ban will be least likely to dwell.

It is that the ban is perfectly unimportant. It will not work. The argument in principle is hardly worth beginning, for the argument in practice will fail within a few years.

This is so for a more interesting reason than the obvious likelihood that sooner or later one of the boys will himself so court — or fail to shun — publicity that anyone seeking on the pair's behalf to have the ban upheld will be estopped from invoking it. No, the ban must fail because, even if it were never broken, this would not keep publicity about Robert Thompson and Jon Venablcs from the public domain.

The public domain isn't where Dame Butler-Sloss or most print and broadcast journalists think it is. Sensational though this case has seemed, the judgment and commentary are less interesting than the ignorance they unwittingly reveal about the dissemination of news in the 21st century This court order will prove potent only to encourage Fleet Street's accelerating slide from the centre of the attention of British news-seekers. As Mark Steyn has observed of the recent presidential election in America, a whole world of news and information now flies beneath the radar of print editors and national politicians. Low-altitude news as an airspace grows ever more crowded. Across it flit winged creatures of every kind, some of them with fearsomely sharp teeth.

To tell you in this, a British journal, that news and photographs of the two boys are available on the Internet will, the moment that happens, be unlawful; this is one of the side-effects of the court ruling. But it is not unlawful to tell you now that such material will be available. To tell you in a British journal that pictures and stories of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables are to be found in Scottish, Irish, Spanish or French periodicals will, the moment that becomes true, be an offence; but it is no offence now to make the prediction with confidence.

Nobody will stop the Internet telling you about the foreign journals. Nobody will stop foreign journals telling you about the Internet. And if you think a Customs & Excise unable to prevent millions of gallons of liquor, thousands of tons of tobacco, and more lorryloads of illegal immigrants than Jack Straw cares to contemplate, crossing our borders, then your hopes exceed sane expectation.

There may still be a few people in wigs who honestly believe that keeping publicity out of English and Welsh news agencies and off the BBC and ITV is tantamount to keeping something a secret. There may still be some who suppose that the Web needs to advertise its contents in newspapers if many potential site-visits are to be achieved — as though the life-cycle of a story, like some exotic bacterium, had to include a passage through the press, even if the ultimate host is not a newspaper. Such a belief can be easily tested, and is being tested every minute, not least by those with products or services to sell.

But people who, despite the evidence, believe you cannot reach a growing number of people except via newsprint need scarcely concern us, as they have simply made a mistake of fact, and time corrects mistakes of fact.

By a far greater number a more interesting mistake is being made. It interests me because it concerns a mistaken use of language, and, if a sufficient number of influential people agree to continue in a mistaken use of language, they can almost, and for a limited time, make its use correct. I refer to the use of the word 'publish'. There lingers still the curious persuasion that a story has not in the full sense 'happened' as a published phenomenon — is not in the full sense 'known' — unless it has been in the English newspapers or on our national radio or TV.

Now the day is fast approaching when the rites of passage whereby a known fact becomes a Known Fact no longer include a period of exposure in the Times or the Daily Telegraph. The village pump is where the village choose to dig the village well; the public domain is where the public choose to put it. The public's habits are changing.

Language, however, takes a while to catch up, and the words we use to describe things remain potent to influence how we see them. It can be the case that you know, and I know, and you and I know that I and you know, and the whole of Matlock knows that the whole of Matlock knows, that Miss Prudence Conningsby-Philpots was convicted in open court by the Chesterfield magistrates last week of cruelty to her guinea pig. We most of us know what Prudence looks like, too.

That's as may be. But when, alongside a photograph of the young lady, the Matlock Mercury reports on its front page, no less, that she has been found guilty of this offence, the shock and the shame are palpable and somehow new. It's been in the papers. As a former MP I recall the lengths to which constituents would go to try to keep out of the local papers what a greater number of people than ever read the local papers already knew.

Within a decade, perhaps, more homes than take a daily paper will have a computer terminal with Internet access and a printer attached. Envisage a morning in that time when rumour gets around that Robert Thompson's and Jon Venables's photographs, along with a comprehensive account of their recent lives, doings and whereabouts, are available on a certain website. Millions of people go there for a look. No serious doubt attaches to the accuracy of the information.

But still there is nothing in the newspapers or on TV. I find it counter-logical yet intuitively persuasive to suppose that, though every one of these citizens could print what they see on their screen, and thus hold in their own hands a piece of paper on which is printed a report which they knew was common knowledge and whose veracity they did not doubt, there could persist a feeling that this material had not, in the fullest sense, been 'published'.

It is in this sense that Dame Butler-Sloss has 'protected' the anonymity of these two boys. It will be no physical protection from those who seek to harm them: the official mystery about their whereabouts will only give edge to such appetites. But it will in some minds and to some degree mitigate the public shame of the pair. This will be achieved by exploiting — and in exploiting helping to diminish — the residual status accorded to the old village pump over the new.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.