2009/9/21 Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>et>:
The distinction to be made is between information
about a person, and
popularly reported claims about the person. It needs to be made clear
that reporting about a controversy is not identical to reporting about
the person. It's disingenuous to pretend that a very public controversy
doesn't exist. Rather than suppressing anything about the controversy we
would do better to find the appropriate language for discussing it
neutrally.
It's much easier to permeate a community with a series of doctrinaire
rules than with a grasp of the underlying principles.
The key point with that, in general, is "undue weight" - it is easy to
give too much weight to a controversy. In this case, though, the
controversy is so high profile and it is pretty much the only thing
the public know about this person that the due weight is very high.