Over stepping the limit

This, surely, was an image too far for any self-respecting newspaper. For a man who is seen as an honoured leader by millions of people to be depicted in this crass way pushes out the boundaries, not merely of press freedom, but of taste, decency and sound editorial judgment.

The only mitigation for the Star's 18 February "exclusive" page-one photograph of Bertie Ahern allegedly kissing his mot was also the simplest reason it should never have been published: this was surely the blurriest, most indistinct picture ever to grace the front of a newspaper, a disgrace to the people who work tirelessly to make papers look good and to the "citizen journalist" who presumably caught the snap on a camera-phone, never expecting it to be enlarged so far beyond decipherability.

Thus we saw a white-topped object that may have been a person in close proximity to a dark-topped object with a similarly human shape. The accompanying headlines and copy provided the necessary annotation, but certainly not any justification for regarding this apparently private moment as newsworthy. Perhaps private-versus-public is a difficult distinction for readers and journalists to make, when so many "celebrities" are famous, essentially, for doorstep kisses – and what these kisses suggest about their other activities. But is the Taoiseach really such a celebrity?

An uncomfortable aspect of our PR-driven media is that we can't be sure a shot like this was genuinely an unwanted invasion of privacy. In any case, politicians pleading for privacy about whom they kiss and why are not helped by cynical photo-ops such as the recent one of British Tory leader David Cameron laying his lips on a spotty, unsmiling boy too young to give his consent.

Yes, the child was Cameron's newborn son Arthur, but this fact alone scarcely rendered the image fit for the front pages. And yet there it was. Up-and down-market, the British papers were also all in a tizzy about the boy's ever-so-English heroic name. Bearing in mind Cherie Blair's "revelations" last year about the prime minister's skills as a lover, one half-expected to read that "Arthur" was a natural choice since Cameron already calls his equally heroic penis "Excalibur". (Note: this is a complete fiction that probably says more about Meejit than about the British media.)

Anyway, the tabloid conclusion is quite simple now: Arthur Elwen Cameron, having been employed as a humanising prop by his father when he could still scarcely focus his eyes on the man's face, is now public property, or at least his appearance is. All possible future Cameron complaints about press intrusions should be referred to this photograph.

Many of the same papers that deem such images fit for our happy consumption are quite a bit glummer about the pictures that interest media and viewers elsewhere. References to the latest Abu Ghraib photos, for example, were often accompanied with the news, reported tetchily, that the shots were "being shown on an hourly basis by Arab satellite-TV channels", those troublemakers. Lord knows, Sky News would never repeat what it regarded as a newsworthy image as, uh, infrequently as that.

For better or worse, images have been key to our reading of public events for most of the past century, and are arguably more dominant today than ever before. (On the other hand, Meejit reckons Sean Haughey's real political liability is his irretrievably pipsqueak voice.)

The ubiquitous image in Irish media over the past two months has shown the remnants of an automobile after a fatal accident. However, it's remarkable how "unread" such pictures are: journalists here rarely attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of particular accidents, leaving only generalised messages about speed and drink to trickle into public consciousness.

Nor do we read deeper. Our road carnage used to be blamed on bad roads and old cars. Now, surely, it is possible to connect it to poor (and corrupt) planning, and lack of public transport. We're making, and dying in, car journeys that need never have happened.