Letterman blackmail case

Last week, the U.S. chat show host David Letterman shockingly informed his viewers of his affairs with women who work on his late night show.

He made the revelation during a filming of his late show because he said he was being blackmailed by a former colleague attempting to extort $2 million from him.

As the UK media history has shown us, Letterman had several options available to him once he knew that someone was in a position to expose his wrong doings.

As with the 'royal' blackmail case last year, Letterman could have applied for an injunction preventing the newspapers from reporting his name. Even though once the case went to court anyone with access to the Internet and even the remotest knowledge of how to operate a search engine could have found out the name of the 'celebrity' embroiled in the scandal.

More recently this inadequacy of media law was once again exposed in the UK as the papers were banned from revealing the identity of a TV journalist who was involved in an extra-marital affair which resulted in a child.

In order to make the area of media law relating to the press banning publication of names more airtight the Internet needs to closely regulated. This is a totally separate issue and many feel this would never be entirely possible because of the scale of in the World Wide Web.

More importantly the Letterman case demonstrates that some celebrities are willing to stand up tall and admit they made mistakes, even if it takes a blackmail case for them to finally come clean.

Maybe its time some UK celebrities started to face the music as well.