Privacy Laws and Investigative Journalism

 The diminution of investigative journalism as a result of reinforced privacy laws would be negligible. It is important to state this clearly in refutation of the conventional journalistic assertion that the strengthening of privacy provisions will result in wrongdoers and criminals acquiring increased immunity from detection.

For every instance in which the ability to invade the privacy of someone led to a journalist discovering things genuinely in the public interest, there are ten thousand instances of grotesque exploitation by the media of  the undoubted public appetite for titillating information.   

 
Invasions of privacy by the media have little or nothing to do with the public interest. They are about harvesting and marketing a commodity – salacious details or voyeuristic images, usually of “celebrities” – which the public can be persuaded to pay for. It is to be presumed that whatever form of privacy legislation the Government comes up with will restrict the publication of such details or images, and it is on this account that certain journalists, or perhaps more correctly their employers and editors, have become alarmed. That some Government politicians have proclaimed their support for privacy legislation has been taken by some journalists to signify that the purpose of the privacy bill is to protect politicians from journalistic inquiry. This, again, is self-serving nonsense. What journalist, by breaching the privacy of a politician, has obtained a story of pressing public importance? Many journalists, however, treating politicians as celebrities, have published unnecessarily intrusive details and images of the private lives of public representatives, without which the public interest would not have been in the slightest degree impoverished. On the contrary, the public interest is greatly damaged by trends which have the effect of dissuading all but the saintly or the stupid from seeking public office at all.

Another disingenuous argument used by journalists is that they have a “duty” to expose instances where the private behaviour of public figures is at odds with their public profiles or assertions. There is no such “duty”. If we were to expose the extent of the disjunction between what is said and done in private and what is said and done in public, nothing and nobody would be immune. Everyone is a hypocrite in one way or another, and journalists are at least as hypocritical as everyone else. Yet again, the “exposure of hypocrisy” argument is a figleaf to conceal a baser motive: smut sells.

Similarly, the idea that someone, because he or she may have sought publicity for one reason or another, has waived any right to a private existence is a convenient licence to justify a form of exploitation that meets none but the baser public needs.  To suggest that, because someone has published a book, released an album or appeared in a film, he or she is no longer permitted to have a life away from the prying eyes of the public is a monstrous idea. It is monstrous both because of what it does to the individual and also because it may contribute to a climate in which only those with masochistic appetites for abusive publicity will publish books, release albums or appear in films. This suggests that only by delineating and preserving a private realm can we ensure that the quality of our public life and culture is preserved.

It is claimed also that, when a “celebrity” ventures into public space, he or she becomes fair game – ie that private life is what happens behind closed doors only. This too is dubious and dangerous. A conversation between two people, regardless of where it takes place, is usually a private matter. Moreover, there must surely be a right, even of the most elevated “celebrities”, to enjoy public spaces in the same way as anonymous citizens. The idea that all claims to privacy are relinquished by a well-known person sunbathing on a beach is to distort both the individual's reality and the nature of the public context. Such a person may be surrounded by hundreds of people, some of whom may well be taking an undue interest in the presence or activities of the “celebrity”. This, you might indeed say, is part of the price of being famous. But it is a big step from here to justifying the mass-marketing of an image of this tableau obtained using advanced photographic technology – in which, for example, the momentary slip of a towel is capitalised upon to provide a voyeuristic close-up of the celebrity's split-second embarrassment. In reality, perhaps a handful of people have glimpsed the momentary state of undress, but in the cartoon city of the media, it is blown up on a million front pages and utterly transformed in a way that is disproportionate, demeaning and unjust.    

The truth is, then, that the way our media are going, privacy legislation is essential to the public interest. More and more, the breakdown of human considerations in modern media society demands in response not merely the protection of privacy in private, but the protection of public figures in public contexts unrelated to the individual public figure's public role.