Hands up everyone who wants to see a telephoto slideshow of Lily Allen topless on the beach. What about a picture of Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse "locking lips"? I think I can speak for most of us here (which, given this is the first post, is probably just me and a few of my friends who I piss off enough to read it) when I say that none of us really care.
That is, perhaps, a bit elitist of me, and being the utter and complete hypocrite that I am, I still do read the londonpaper on the tube and derive a particularly indignant pleasure at reading about the antics of the C-listers. What I said above is, in all honesty, what I wish I could say. We all have the sneaking desire to see what these people are up to and that's what makes the papers do it. We all knows it's wrong but we still drool over the embarrassment of Amy and her comrades in (the Hawley) arms.
The question is, how can we stop this stuff without relying on the 'good nature' of such wonderful and altruistic men as Rupert Murdoch? A good start would be to enact the Calcutt Report's recommendations. Recommendations which were published in... 1993.
When David Mellor said in 1989 that the tabloids were drinking in the Last Chance Saloon, few would have thought that the editors and the journalists of the tabloid press would exercise powers that would shock everyone but a particularly cynical ex-agent of the KGB. Telephotography, phonetapping, bribery and blackmail of friends, radio scanners and e-mail intercepts are but a few of the invasive techniques that newspapers have used in the past years to get the big story. If the government were using these powers as routinely and for the petty reasons that the press use them for, there would be uproar. Imagine the protests and the riots if the police were spying on you and telling your wife that you were having an affair or telling your employer that when you were in university it wasn't unknown for you to have the odd spliff. So why do we allow the press to get away with this?
Generally, we don't really mind. If anything, it's a minor positive in our lives - these massive intrusions give us a few minutes of entertainment. For society though, it is negative. It gives the press licence to intrude into the lives of a few people who have been thrust into public prominence. Why do they have that right? They'd claim it's in the public interest, but how is it in the public interest to know what Lily Allen's nipples look like? A more relevant case might be that of David Mellor himself. He was having an affair with an actress and was a prominent member of Major's "Back to Basics" cabinet of the mid 90s. This campaign, viewed as a moral campaign, fell apart as scandal after scandal rocked the Tory Party. It cannot be denied that it is important if the political leaders of the country are preaching morality with their government hats on, but as soon as the hats are off are racing to commit their fair share of sins.
It is not so much the stated aims of the press which I disagree with. I agree that gross hypocrisy by politicians should be exposed. I also agree that it is not only a right but a duty of the press to investigate cases of corruption that the police would not otherwise investigate, such as the cash for questions scandal. It is not a right of the press, however, to harass the family members of politicians, to question their own personal relationships and to demand access into their lives that the journalists would, rightly, consider obscene should the politicians be demanding that access to theirs.
The question is the methods. The Privacy Bill supported by the 1993 Select Committee and the Calcutt Reports gives certain, key, recommendations. Amongst these are:
- Making it illegal to take pictures of private property.
- Making it illegal to bug telephones or publish intimate pictures without consent.
- Buy or sell pictures/tapes without consent.
- Bring back the crime of besetting, stopping the press from swarming around someone's house to demand a response.
- And, most importantly, allowing those subject to a story an automatic right to reply.
This last recommendation is the most important, and I believe, the most urgent one to implement. You can keep these frankly obscene rights of the press and let them take photos of people doing whatever they can invent a way to do, but if you give people a right to reply with as prominent a reply as the allegations made - it will stop the press from silly sensationalism and force them to approach stories reasonably. This law exists in countries all over the world and needs to exist in this country.
It will protect the public from the potential risks of the other recommendations but stop the frivolous stories that are all too often engaged in. Newspapers know that libel cases are expensive and rare and that even if they do lose them, they do not lose a massive amount. But if newspapers know that if they pursue a story just for profit that they know is either baseless or an invasion of privacy, they will lose valuable space in the next day's paper that will run a large risk of embarrassing them and hurting their circulation. And in cases which are not just for profit, stories that have merit and are in the public interest, the response of those involved will inform the debate and help people make up their mind on the issue.
I suppose that this is pie in the sky thinking though. The proposals were blocked in 1993 because the Tories couldn't afford to upset the tabloids who, according to the tabloids themselves, had won them the 1992 election. The tabloids are simply just too powerful for any one government to risk pissing off. And when a big chunk of their profits come from scoops that would suddenly become unprofitable or illegal under the new laws, you can guarantee that the owners will mobilise their papers to block the laws and subsequently punish those who voted for it should they actually ignore the wishes of the lords and masters of the press.
And can you really blame politicians? No-one wants to lose their job and in this world, being a politician is hardly the most reliable of livings...
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