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
22 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
On Miller-McCune this week, I walk through a new US government proposal for what’s shaping up to be a kind of ID card for the internet. The government swears the idea is benevolent — that such a system wouldn’t track users, collect data or block content — but imaginations in the US privacy community are already running wild. In part, that’s thanks to one of the proposal’s primary authoring agencies: the Department of Homeland Security. Here’s an extract from the article, for the full piece, click here.
Last Friday, the U.S. government unveiled its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a blueprint for the private-industry development of voluntary tools that would authenticate and consolidate your identity online. We need such a thing, the government says — in a pamphlet titled, well, “Why We Need It” — because our proliferating online passwords are inconvenient and insecure, and because last year 8.1 million adults in the U.S. suffered identity theft or fraud, at a cost of $37 billion.
The idea seems like one mandated by the moment. Increasingly, important commerce, banking and government services have migrated online, demanding ever more accounts and passwords and logins to remember.
But Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, explains that this proposal has actually been years in the making. And the history of its development suggests the concept is equal parts promising and risky — a reality hardly captured in the government’s enthusiastic 45-page rollout, complete with “Envision it!” sidebar scenarios.
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
21 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
This article first appeared in the Guardian
Two cheers for Ed Miliband. In calling for an independent review of the way newspapers behave he is taking a big political risk, opening the door to concerted hostility from media magnates. He also happens to be right on the principle that freedom of expression and holding truth to power are not synonymous with dodgy journalistic practice. He might deserve a third cheer if it were not for the brazen opportunism he and his party are showing by taking on Rupert Murdoch only now that the love is lost.
Before the caveats and the cavilling, credit should be given where it is due. Miliband is seeking to take on the good work carried out two years ago by the cross-party Commons select committee on culture, media and sport. When the MPs issued their report they correctly identified and separated out three related strands: the need for libel reform; issues of privacy; and press standards.
Their inquiry looked at the media in the round, but also at some egregious cases of abuse. This included the hounding of Gerry and Kate McCann, and the bugging of telephones of politicians and celebrities by the News of the World – which News Corporation is only now, drip by drip, beginning to admit.
The MPs made a point that should be blindingly obvious to the media profession – that legitimate investigation is vital to keeping checks on the powerful, but that intrusion into people’s lives, particularly through subterfuge, is not.
Seen from one level, the British media are forced to operate under considerable constraint. Until now England and Wales have been global pariahs, sporting some of the most restrictive libel laws in the developed world. It is a tribute to all political parties, but mostly the coalition, that the Libel Reform Campaign led by Index on Censorship and its partners has produced draft legislation that goes some way to removing the chill on free expression and investigative journalism. Sure, the bill is not perfect, but the great should not be the enemy of the good. After all, this is the first serious attempt in 70 years to tackle the problem.
Privacy is the thorniest problem. Hypocrisy should be exposed. What about the celebrity who parades their private life in choreographed photoshoots for glossy magazines but then wishes to hide from public view when things go awry? That is a moot point. Assuming you are a public figure but you make no pronouncements on lifestyles or ethics and you do not parade your life in the glare of the cameras, surely you are entitled to privacy? You are, thanks to the Human Rights Act. But as ever, our suspicious judges are interpreting the legislation in a manner hostile to a free media.
Ranged against the long lens is the epidemic of the super-injunction. The master of the rolls (the second most senior judge in England and Wales) is due to report on an issue that serves as a perfect example of rich man’s justice. The very idea that the media should be gagged and that the public is prevented from knowing that such an order exists is more in keeping with a dictatorship.
This brings us back to media standards. One of the biggest hindrances to strong investigation is cost. Editors and the bean counters who oversee them are reluctant to invest in long-term projects that might prove fruitless. The democratic deficit in the demise of investigative journalism is immense. But gossip, spleen and prurience are no substitute, and no remedy for budget cuts and falling sales.
As for dodgy practice, this is where taste meets the law meets expediency. Chequebook journalism? Secret recordings? Fine, one might think, if properly authorised and if in the public interest. Where should the line be drawn?
To take a few famous recent examples: the Telegraph’s use of young and attractive female reporters to trap Vince Cable into making indiscreet remarks about Murdoch and other public figures (dubious but compelling); the same publisher’s use of a stolen computer disc to reveal MPs’ expenses (now seen as triggering a clear-out of parliamentary sleaze); or the Guardian’s publication of unauthorised US state department data, otherwise known as the WikiLeaks affair or Cablegate. Everyone has their own view about the ethics behind these incidents and more.
The News of the World phone-hacking scandal is of a different order. Allegations of illegal practices are being investigated. Its pond might be considerably murkier, but nobody’s is entirely free of weed. Nobody has come out of the Screws affair well – least of all the police or the Press Complaints Commission. The commission has still to apologise for, or learn from, its supine approach to the affair. As the last hope for self-regulation, for keeping politicians and meddling judges away from the Fourth Estate, the PCC is under scrutiny as never before.
The commission gives frequent assurances that it really doesn’t work as a shop steward for the industry but as a protector of free speech and of fairness, accuracy and standards. Its appointment of three senior and respected figures to its board bodes well, but there is a long way to go.
Miliband, in his interview in the Guardian, said he had no grand plan for a review into print media – while making clear it should be fully independent of government “and from those involved in the day to day running of newspapers”. He added: “I think that would help the industry. There has to be a sense that the future is not going to be like that past. Wider lessons have to be learned.”
He is entirely correct but selective in drawing his conclusions. For more than a decade New Labour was slavish to the Murdoch empire, and initially too to the Daily Mail and Associated Newspapers. Tony Blair did everything – including flying around the world to an Australian island – to ingratiate himself with Rupert Murdoch. It was only after the empire had dumped Gordon Brown in favour of David Cameron that Labour ministers such as Peter Mandelson began to bleat about media cross-ownership and assorted injustices.
Would Miliband now be making these same noises if he had not been left out in the cold by the omnipotent Antipodean? Of course not, but that does not make him wrong. Free speech is not threatened by good practice. It is defended.
