17 May 11 | Uncategorized
Sienna Miller’s decision to settle with News International in her phone hacking case, though not unexpected, certainly changes the picture in the phone hacking scandal. Not only does it set a precedent of a hacking victim accepting Rupert Murdoch’s pay-off in this phase of the affair, but the sum involved, of £100,000 (plus costs), may well prove a benchmark for other settlements. (more…)
06 May 11 | Uncategorized
So the Press Complaints Commission wants to regulate the tweets of newspapers and their reporters. It is a logical step, as the commission continues to track the old print titles in their march into electronic space. The editors’ code of practice it tries to enforce, after all, applies to journalists and does not restrict itself to one mode of delivery. (more…)
21 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
The Daily Mail are angry about injunctions issued by “amoral judges” to protect “celebrity secrets”. Developments in court have been reported on the Daily Mail’s front page on successive days, while inside the paper Stephen Glover has argued that a series of rulings have left Britain “not many steps away from a police state”.
The people behind these injunctions, who tend to be identified by letter codes, appear to be a banker, an actor, a couple of television personalities and several professional footballers. They have had affairs while married, or have paid prostitutes for sex, and I think in one case there is a child born out of wedlock. The injunctions are keeping these stories, and the identities of those involved, out of the Mail and other papers.
Here is a general observation: other people’s sex lives are not my business. I may find the stories interesting and I might gossip about them, but I don’t believe I have a right to know about them. On the contrary, I think people should be allowed to keep such things private.
The Mail calls these people “wrongdoers” and “miscreants” and says they are “shameless”. This is probably a minority view. Adultery and divorce are common and — even if it is only through television documentaries or dramas — most of us have some idea that these things are complex and painful. Name-calling and crude blame have fallen from favour. Paying for sex also seems common. Again, the Mail clearly thinks it is wrong, full stop, but the law has long taken the view that, as with adultery, it should generally be regarded as a matter between consenting adults.
The Mail is obviously entitled to express its distaste for adultery and prostitution, but disapproving of something doesn’t automatically confer a right to breach the privacy of people who do it. If the paper could show that exposure was in the public interest, then perhaps. Are any of these people engaged in public moral judgement, telling others how to behave? I don’t know, but that might be an argument. Can any of these people be shown to have failed in some public duty as a result of their relationships? That too might be an argument.
Glover tells us the footballers are role models. In other words, because they play football for high salaries, these people can have no privacy in the bedroom. By extension, then, they have no entitlement to privacy at all; their entire lives — money matters, friendships, families, pastimes, tastes, opinions, holidays — are public property, to be scrutinised at any time to ensure they always set a good example. That is a difficult case to sustain.
Other people are involved in these stories and it is clear that in some cases they don’t want privacy; they want to tell their stories. That certainly complicates matters and it is hard to see an alternative to involving judges, since no privacy law is ever going to lay down rules that cover every eventuality. If judges feel the need for elaborate rulings, as the Mail complains, my guess is that this is often because they know the elaborate lengths to which newspapers will go to subvert them.
Which brings us to what is in it for newspapers. Partly, of course, (mainly, I would suggest) they want these stories because sexual scandal sells. That is why they will devote page after page to the detail of activities they claim to deprecate.
But the Mail argues on a higher plane. It says the sex lives of errant footballers and television presenters need to be exposed as a warning to the rest of us. As Glover put it: “The point is that fear of shame or disgrace acts as a restraint on all sorts of wrongdoing.”
This is the newspaper wishing to act as a public pillory in matters of sexual morality. To put it another way, the Mail wants the right to hang the scarlet letter “A” around the necks of those it considers adulterers because, it says, this will deter others from straying.
Glover’s boss, editor Paul Dacre, made the same case more fully in a speech in 2008, mainly with reference to the Max Mosley case.
Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens — rich and poor –– adhere to them for the good of the greater community. For hundreds of years, the press has played a role in that process. It has the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency – the very standards its readers believe in – and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation. If their readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such huge numbers.
What do you think of that?
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and tweets at @BrianCathcart
20 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
The reporting of phone hacking victims tends to concentrate on celebrities such as Sienna Miller, Steve Coogan and Paul Gascoigne, which is inevitable in 2011 but which also serves the interests of the News of the World in a way that we should probably be concerned about.
Whether we like it or not, (again, this being 2011) if the public perceives this as a problem affecting the rich and famous they will feel less sympathy and outrage than they would otherwise, and that is surely what Rupert Murdoch’s paper must want as it seeks to buy its way out of trouble.
So it is worth remembering that already most of the victims we know of are not rich and famous by any definition, and that as the numbers continue to rise (it was once a handful, then it was 12, then 24, then 91 and now way beyond that the proportion of famous and/or rich people among them is certain to shrink to the point where it is a modest fraction.
Most of the known or suspected victims are family members, friends and colleagues of the newspaper’s principal targets — the collateral damage, if you like, of the newspaper’s bombing. They will include people such as Sienna Miller’s mother, Lesley Ash’s children, Jude Law’s personal assistant, colleagues of PR man Max Clifford, a legal adviser to Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
These are blameless members of the public whose right to privacy no responsible person would dispute, and yet they have grounds to believe that employees of a national newspaper have listened to voicemails they have received or left. And remember, the listening was inevitably indiscriminate — the eavesdroppers heard the personal with the trivial, the businesslike with the intimate. And it may have gone on for a year and a half.
One case in preparation, according to a legal source, involves a woman who was assistant to a famous personality. Because of damaging stories about that personality which appeared in the News of the World, she will allege, she was fired — her employer was convinced that only she could have been responsible. She had a nervous breakdown and struggled to find other work. Now she has grounds to believe the source was her hacked voicemails. She is not rich and not a celebrity.
Besides the collateral damage there is another non-celebrity category: the politicians. It may be fashionable to dislike them (and again, the News of the World is happy if you do), but they too are entitled to privacy. Just as important, though, are the anti-democratic character of what has been done, and the national security implications. The supposedly secure personal communications of democratically elected representatives have been illegally intercepted by an important private corporation with no conceivable public interest justification. Not just one but a least several and perhaps dozens of MPs; not just wacky backbenchers but the Cabinet minister in charge of media affairs and the deputy leader of the LibDems, not to mention, it seems likely, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Deputy Prime Minister too. And these are not, by and large, rich people, nor necessarily that well known.
And there is a third category, still small and possibly never to be fully revealed, represented by a young woman who aroused the interest of the News of the World because she told police she was raped by a professional footballer. On that basis, she has grounds to believe, her private communications were illegally intercepted. She has no connection to fame, therefore, except as a victim of alleged crime. How many people like her are entitled to compensation, an apology and a day in court will be very difficult to establish.
So it is not “just” about celebrities — though it should also be said, first, that celebrities too have rights to privacy and, second, that we are indebted to Miller, Coogan, Chris Tarrant, Andy Gray and others for forcing the scandal into the open over the past year — and forcing News International into its confession.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and Tweets at @BrianCathcart
