How’s your private life? Think about it. Is there anything potentially embarrassing there? Is there anything — maybe just one little thing about your sexual tastes or your internet habits or your relations with, or thoughts about, other people — that you would rather your partner didn’t know? Or the kids? Or your mother? Or the people at work?
This — forgive the primary school approach, but it seems to be necessary — is called privacy.
There is nobody in this country, not one person of any age, who could not be made to appear shameful or wicked in the tabloid press if they get hold of this sort of information. No special effort of distortion would be needed. The machine exists and is primed, and absolutely anybody could be fed into it and made to look utterly horrible — including you, whoever you are.
As you read about that professional footballer and his increasingly desperate attempts to protect his privacy, think about that. It could be you. Indeed without a shadow of doubt it will be you, if ever, by whatever little accident of fate, you attract the interest of the tabloid press. Remember the words of Greg Miskiw, when he was a news executive at the News of the World: “That is what we do: we go out and destroy other people’s lives.” They know how to do it, and your smallest weakness will be exploited to the point where millions of normal people, their readers at first and second hand (you in other words), go around declaring you are a disgrace to humanity.
What did the footballer do? I don’t know and neither do you. You don’t know anything about his personal life. You don’t really know anything about Imogen Thomas either. You are being fed a Punch-and-Judy version of a human relationship which may well be complex, or pathetically simple, or utterly exploitative, or even tragic. And just remember this if you are tempted to judge that footballer: behind everything that Imogen Thomas has done in this case is the Sun, the sister paper of the one that has been caught hacking telephones on an industrial scale, the one that employed and promoted Greg Miskiw. These people are professional life destroyers and they are just going about their business.
This is not a story about “freedom of speech”. That is just what they want you to think. It is a story about whether any of us has any privacy.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
