26 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
Hugh Grant’s covertly recorded interview with the former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan, contained this interesting passage about the ethics of intrusive journalism:
Grant: But celebrities you would justify because they’re rich?
McMullan: Yeah. I mean, if you don’t like it, you’ve just got to get off the stage. It’ll do wonders.
Grant: So I should have given up acting?
McMullan: If you live off your image, you can’t really complain about someone . . .
Grant: I live off my acting. Which is different to living off your image.
McMullan: Yeah, but you’re still presenting yourself to the public.
The debate about injunctions and superinjunctions, now enlivened by Andrew Marr’s decision to reveal his injunction in the Daily Mail, keeps this idea in mind. Why do newspapers want to know about the private lives of famous people? Not — let us be sensible here — because they abhor adultery and fornication or because they are exercising freedom of expression. No, I suspect McMullan was articulating a view held in many newsrooms: if you live by “presenting yourself to the public” you can’t complain about loss of privacy, and if you don’t like it you should “get off the stage”.
Though editors would never dare publicly to claim that they have an absolute right to know or publish everything that well-known people do in their bedrooms, that is what this view amounts to.
Marr doesn’t “live off his image”. He lives off his wits — having political knowledge, insights and contacts, writing history books and so on. Nor do Premiership footballers live off their images. They have to play football to quite a high standard. And Grant is right, too, in saying that he is a successful actor.
It is inescapably true, though, that all these people “present themselves to the public”: they have jobs that put them in the public eye, and they are seen on television and in other mass media. And for McMullan that seems to be enough. The victims don’t even have to be rich and they don’t have to have made any claim to moral leadership, or indeed leadership of any kind.
The loss of privacy, on this view, is a kind of tax the famous must pay on the privileges and status which they enjoy and the rest of us don’t.
Imagine you are an actor, singer, dancer, model, weather presenter, athlete or journalist, or an expert on gardening, decorating, fashion, history, relationships or cooking, or a politician, business leader, campaigner, trade unionist or even an academic, and you begin to achieve the kind of prominence that gets people on television or in magazines. Given the news values currently adopted by many newspapers, you need to be very careful.
Whether you are single or married, straight or gay, young or old, you need to think about whether your current private life might be worth a story for the tabloids, and in particular how it might be portrayed by people determined to make it appear lurid and unsavoury to such a degree you probably would not recognise it yourself.
You don’t just need to think about today but also about any time in the future so long as you may be on the public stage (and for some time after that), and also about the past. You need to think not only about yourself but also about those close to you (have you got children?), because they will be affected. You need to think about new people you meet, because they might be part of a sting. You need to think about others you have known, who might tell stories for money. You need to think, yes, about your phones and emails.
It’s nasty, but those are the rules. Accept them or get off the stage.
Or there is a third option. You might consider you were entitled to some protection against the self-appointed people who threaten you in this way. You might go to a lawyer and point at Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, passed by Parliament in 1998, which says [pdf]:
“Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”
Yes, it says “everyone”. Rights are like that.
According to some, however, if you seek to protect yourself in this way you are invoking an infamous foreign-made law. You are appealing to “amoral” judges and lining the pockets of unscrupulous, freedom-hating lawyers. And, if you seek an injunction for any reason, you are resorting to the kind of gagging orders that make Britain almost a police state. Who says? The very papers that want to tell the world who you slept with last night and what exactly you did in bed.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
19 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
News that a group armed with hammers and an icepick defaced two photographs by artist and photographer Andres Serrano was as predictable as it was depressing.
Serrano’s career is littered with this kind of controversy: one of the works destroyed was a photograph of Piss Christ, a work that depicts a glowing crucifix suspended in a jar of the artist’s urine. It’s been notorious ever since its first appearance amidst the culture wars of the late 1980s, and has been physically attacked by gallery-goers on several previous occasions: this type of response is not entirely unprecedented.
Less expected, though, was the recent furore over another similar work: A Fire In My Belly is a 13-minute video piece by the less well-known artist David Wojnarowicz. It features three brief sequences (totalling 15 seconds) of ants crawling over another small plastic crucifix.
Originally made in 1987, an attempt by Washington DC’s National Portrait Gallery to include the film in an exhibition last autumn prompted outrage from cultural conservatives, including Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was removed from the gallery in December after threats of congressional investigation into the Smithsonian Institute, the taxpayer-funded body which administers the gallery.
In this faintly creepy TV appearance, a Catholic League spokesperson makes the rather debatable claim that they weren’t attempting to censor anyone — they were merely encouraging their friends and colleagues in government to effectively bankrupt the gallery, rather than directly asking for A Fire In My Belly to be removed. Other blithe assertions include the idea that all art “should be beautiful”: by lacking this kind of Catholic League-approved beauty, A Fire In My Belly is assumed to be the sole product of a deep-seated “anti-Christian animus”, as if art can have no other purpose but to exalt or profane.
This myopic approach is often seen when claims of religious offence are used to threaten artistic freedoms, from The Satanic Verses to The Last Temptation of Christ. The idea that the use of religious imagery affords no middle ground between worship and heresy belies either a fundamental misunderstanding of the complex, ambiguous nature of artistic expression, or outright contempt for it.
For example, Serrano is a self-professed Christian, albeit one estranged from the Catholic Church; the image in Piss Christ possesses a sense of gravitas and, yes, a kind of beauty, which is both clearly intended by the artist and far removed from the materials used to create it. Similarly, A Fire In My Belly is a harrowing elegy to Wojnarowicz’s friend Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS shortly before the film’s creation, and a scream of horror at America’s impassive non-response to the unfolding epidemic. As one critic puts it , the piece “rails against those who profess Christian compassion but refuse to enact it”.
Ultimately though, free expression shouldn’t have to justify itself against threats of physical violence and censorship by appealing to aesthetics in this way. Instead, those who claim offence should perhaps be expected to offer responses which go beyond trying to censor pieces of contentious art, constrict the means of their production, or attack them with hammers.
11 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has some interesting thoughts on free expression in this morning’s paper.
Inspired by a discussion at Oxford Literary Festival with Index chief executive John Kampfner, Times writer David Aaronovitch and Guido Fawkes blogger Paul Staines, Albhai-Brown questions whether free speech should be seen as an absolute right.
She starts well enough:
Too many states use brute force to quell and gag their people. In our western democracies, governments withhold information, stop legitimate protest, control speech and even thought. All wrong, must be resisted, agreed.
And then comes the “but” that will forever plague arguments for and about restrictions on speech:
Most of us, though, will not speak with one voice on the burning of the Koran by Sion Owens, a BNP candidate for the Welsh assembly. And what about the website that sells cheeky Jihadi, al-Qa’ida baby T-shirts and maternity clothes? Tory MP Robert Halfon is apoplectic and wants the site closed down. Are you with or against him? Do we teach children that words can wound or that their entitlement to speak trumps everything else?
That last sentence is a false dichotomy. Words are powerful: words are important. Otherwise there would be little point in defending free expression. As soon as one feels comfortable placing proscriptions on speech, one leads inevitably to a position where certain speech is favoured. Moreover, there is no contradiction between free speech being a right and free speech being used responsibly.
We continue:
Some in the real world, too, are enviable absolutists who believe the slightest tremor of concern is a concession and invitation to authoritarianism. Their God is Voltaire, who decreed that even when one hates what is being said by somebody, one must “fight to the death” for the right of that person to hold forth.
Voltaire never said that. It comes from a 1906 book entitled “Friends of Voltaire”. Minor point, but something one should know if you’re writing about free expression. But lets go on.
We come to Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney, banned for two matches for swearing at a Sky Sports camera (exacts words “What? Fucking what? What? Fucking Hell!”) after scoring a hat trick against West Ham.
The FA is deciding what to do with Wayne Rooney, who swore horridly on TV. The footballer – who has apologised – must be crying into his champagne. I hope he gets his comeuppance.
See? He’s rich, therefore all other arguments about his rights and liberties are obscured.
Rooney had just scored a hat trick. As The Streets’ Mike Skinner once put it, “geezers need excitement”. Moreover, Rooney’s job is not to be presentable on TV, or (shudder) to be a “role model”. His job is to score goals for Manchester United, and he was having a very, very good day at the office.
Next up:
In 1919, the US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decreed that the only limits to freedom of speech were words that activate immediate danger, like a man shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. But what about when individuals set out calculatedly to provoke unrest and anger, which then happens? Like the burning of the Koran. Of course the offended should not rage and die for it – but that was the intention. The inciters are surely as culpable as the man in the theatre. They raise hatred, which eventually leads to violence.
The “eventually” is key here. Who is responsible for the incitement that lead to the murders of UN workers in Afghanistan? The Floridan pastors who burned the holy book? Or the imams who preached to the faithful about this insult to Islam? Alibhai-Brown does not seem to count these as the inciters. But they were the ones with the power to incite the mob in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Nearly finished:
Another thing to consider is that most of us are biased. We want some words to be free, and others not. Will the Koran burner be backed by libertarians, atheists and Muslim bashers? Or will he face the same opprobrium as those Muslims who burnt Salman Rushdie’s book? I await Fay Weldon and Ian McEwan’s beautifully expressed outrage
Two problems here: Earlier we were asked to criticise absolutists. Now we must condemn relativism.
More insidiously, there is the implication that Fay Weldon and Ian McEwan are being hypocritical and possibly even Islamophobic. But Weldon and McEwan and others, in their stand in support of Rushdie, did not attack the right of Muslims to protest against the Satanic Verses, or even to burn it. They defended a fellow novelist against a death sentence from a foreign tyrant. Not the same thing, is it?
08 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
Respected US Senator Lindsey Graham said a remarkable thing last Sunday morning on one of the weekly political round-up shows that are popular with Washington insiders.
“I wish we could find some way to hold people accountable,” the senator from South Carolina said, responding to the Koran-burning stunt by a fringe Florida pastor that prompted deadly riots in Afghanistan. “Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy.”
Americans don’t typically harken back to World War II as a model of right-headed civil liberties restraint; kitschy propaganda posters from that era are a popular attraction in the Smithsonian museum today as a quaint reminder that the US government once threatened civilians that their slightest blabber could cost entire submarines of allied lives.
Sixty years after World War II, Americans more sceptical of their government should be wary of any sentence from a powerful politician that starts, “Free speech is a great idea, but…”
Last Sunday morning, though, Lindsey Graham suggested the country might need to consider pushing back against “actions like this that put our troops at risk” – and then Bob Schieffer, the host of the CBS program “Face the Nation,” pivoted right to a question about arming rebels in Libya.
There was no follow-up on Graham’s deeply controversial suggestion. The New York Times made no mention of the comments. It garnered three paragraphs on Politico.
The oddly muted response capped a strange run for the entire Terry Jones saga. When the Florida pastor threatened last summer, around the anniversary of 11 September, to burn a Koran, hordes of media descended on his small central-Florida church, interfaith religious leaders put the pastor on speed-dial and even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called to personally plead the military’s case.
Jones finally demurred, a prime example of the theory that the best antidote to hate speech is more speech. An odd thing happened, though, when he changed his mind.
Jones caused an international stir just by threatening to burn the Koran, but when he finally went through with it on 20 March – “It’s like people forgot about us,” he whined to the Washington Post – hardly anyone in America noticed. The lone outsider present for the spectacle appears to have been an unlucky fire department official called to supervise. It took two weeks for the story to ricochet all the way to Afghanistan and back again in the form of dead UN workers before it finally made the front page.
Had no one died — had Muslims overseas not been streaming Jones’ Internet production when his own neighbours were not looking — it’s easy to imagine the incident may have gotten no attention at all.
So why was everyone so riled by the man in September and not in March? And why did the equally provocative suggestion that America curtail wartime free expression as a result go largely undiscussed?
The simplest answer is: We’ve been busy. A more patient and media-savy Jones would have known to wait for a lull in the news cycle. Right now, though, everyone from the president to TV pundits is pretty occupied trying to figure out if we’ve just entered a third war or not. And then there’s the whole issue of the federal government shutting down for the first time in 15 years amid an intractable budget dispute on Capitol Hill.
No one should be faulted for ignoring Jones this time around – in fact, ignoring hate speech before the Internet age was another good way to dilute its power. But Americans need to make time to worry about politicians hedging on the rights of free expression regardless of what else is going on. Forgetting about Terry Jones is one thing; letting Lindsey Graham off the hook is another.
After all, past wars tell the story that free speech is easiest to erode when no one’s paying attention.
