The Chorus - Privacy Laws

The news that the Government is shortly to introduce tough privacy laws which will recognise in Irish law the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the Princess Caroline of Monaco case will be welcomed by the vast majority of citizens. By John Waters.

It will also, I believe, and despite the hostile commentary that will greet the legislation in the coming weeks, be welcomed by the vast majority of journalists.
Most journalists, perhaps especially the ones who engage in the kinds of invasions of privacy which have become almost everyday occurrences in the Irish media, would prefer if the law spelt out the limits of what is permissible and what is not. A strong privacy law will enable reporters to say no.
The degeneration of the Irish media into voyeurism and scandal-mongering has been driven by an interesting combination of commercial competition and the peculiar command-system of newspapers.   
The late British Tory MP, Alan Clarke, in a piece published posthumously, entitled “Why Journalists Disgust Me” wrote that the engine of the modern newspaper is the ego of the editor, and the fuel is the craven energies of the scared and ambitious underlings who feed the editor's ego with their fawning, yessing spinelessness. I concur. Thus, what in public is perceived as media frenzy is driven by a chain of bullying command slithering up and down the hierarchical greasy pole: “reporters, the lowest form of pond life, are bullied, and their self-esteem reduced, by news editors. Editors are anxious about relations with their proprietors”. This process creates the energy by which truth is destroyed. As Alan Clarke put it, “it is impossible to overestimate the level of crude vindictiveness that reporters are encouraged to apply”.
Alan Clarke outlined and unmasked the true nature of societal bully-boy that is the modern newspaper: the centrality of audience and circulation figures, the obsession with “what the competition is doing”, the camouflaging of expedient prurience as high-minded pursuit of the public interest. Mainly, as he outlined, this means sex, which “by its combination of power simultaneously to arouse voyeuristic curiosity and puritanical indignation, is the mainspring”.
One of the staples of the newspaper industry is what is termed “celebrity”, the cast of characters with which the media pushers create the daily dramas to which the public's addiction has been carefully cultivated. Newspapers need scapegoats with which to feed the public hunger for voyeuristic self-satisfaction, so as in turn to justify the banality that is most people's lives. “Anyone who has sought, and received, publicity,” wrote Alan Clarke, “enters that long and vaulted corridor in the temple whose priesthood, waiting by the altar, are ready at their own choosing to practise and enjoy the ritual of human sacrifice”.
Anyone imagining that media are about publishing the truth needs to be committed to an institution for his own protection. What matters nowadays is not whether something is true, but whether it can be published with impunity. Whilst spouting virtuous rhetoric about media standards, editors and journalists are intent only upon vying with their competitors to present the most titillating material. Truth, or even basic facts, are of secondary importance.
Broadsheet newspapers like to pretend they are above the sewer that is the newspaper mainstream, but this is no longer sustainable. Such is the addiction of the reading public to the celebrity soap opera that there is a clear price to be paid, in circulation terms, by the newspaper which stands aloof.  This is why nearly all so-called “quality” newspapers simply don the condom of the “public interest”, or talk about the “media issues” pertaining to a particular story, in order to justify getting stuck right in. Apart from the obvious, the main difference between “tabloid” and “quality” is hypocrisy.
Benjamin Franklin famously said that you should never fall out with a man who buys his ink in barrels. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to be pursued in their personal life by journalists will know that there is no point seeking to intercede with journalists or editors in the hope of relief. Anyone who imagines they can negotiate with the media in order to adjust the public record to provide a more truthful version of publicised events involving themselves should know, from someone who has been on both sides of this fence, that by asking for mercy, you take your very existence in your hands.
Michael McDowell is to be congratulated for finally grasping the nettle of what our media have become.