Can't write, won't write - how journalists can hit back at superinjunctions

There's been a lot of chatter over the past few days about what journalists can do to fight back against the blizzard of injunctions, superinjunctions, hyperinjunctions and other privacy rulings which seem to be coming our way at the moment.

Much of the talk is fanciful at best - for example, the idea that all the nationals should club together and simultaneously break the injunctions, hoping for safety in numbers. (As well as being impossible to organise, this does have the slight disadvantage of still breaking the law, whether or not the law's right.) But looking at the Independent's front page yesterday got us thinking: what if there was another way?

Flicking through the paper's list of other gagging orders, a bit of a theme emerges. 'Leading sportsman', 'prominent married actor', 'high-profile television presenter' - the one thing most of them have in common is that they all enjoy a high public profile, and indeed rely upon it to make money.

Andrew Marr, the one subject of a gagging order to be revealed so far, is no different. Since he took out his super-injunction in 2008 he's been the subject of numerous other newspaper articles which have raised his profile and helped him earn money both directly and indirectly - for instance through reviews of his book The Making of Modern Britain and his widely covered remarks about 'socially inadequate, pimpled and single' citizen journalists at last year's Cheltenham Literature Festival.

So, here's the idea. If someone takes out an injunction or super-injunction, for whatever reason, then journalists should just stop writing about them. Stop writing about them completely. 

No book reviews, no profiles, no interviews, no TV round-ups, no match reports, no celebrity gossip, no news, no nothing. Not in the nationals, not in local papers, not in magazines or on TV or on the radio. As far as the public is concerned, they will simply have dropped off the face of the earth. If someone takes court action to limit what a free press can write about them, it should become a point of honour amongst all journalists and their editors to just stop writing about them entirely.

Would it work? No, almost certainly not. Getting journalists to do anything together is like herding cats, and you'd have to be pretty ballsy to start filing match reports about football teams while refusing to mention key players (though if the Sun can rename Southampton as 'South Coast Team', it's not without precedent). But crucially it wouldn't be, as far as we know, illegal - you may be able to jail journalists for writing about someone but you surely can't jail them for not writing about someone, so long as they don't say why they're not writing about them. And if it was even half-successful, it might make anyone who relies on publicity to be successful - which is lots of them - think twice before taking out an injunction.

Like the idea? Let us know - and if we get enough support, FleetStreetBlues will go all out and launch a 'Can't write, won't write' campaign. Leave a comment below, email us at fleetstreetblues@hotmail.co.uk or Twitter at us @fleetstreetblue with the hashtag #cantwritewontwrite. Who's with us?