The blurring line between public interest and profitable voyeurism
In the last years media have drawn the attention to public personalities’ private lives with growing frequency worldwide. Especially in the last three decades, such interest appears focusing more intensively on public figures’ sexual habits.
Be it the now remote scandal of ex US President Bill Clinton or the one Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is currently facing, what stands out as unequivocal is the fragile and often conflicting connotation that ‘private life’ and ‘public interest’ have come to assume.
The fact is that not always we are able to tell when we are in front of Peeping-Tom-kind-of-media and when instead conscientious journalists are working in the interest of the public. This becomes an especially urgent matter seen the challenges that our celebrity obsessed culture alongside ubiquitous new media pose to the concept of ‘privacy’, with Facebook being a straightforward example of this.
In the attempt of giving this conundrum a solution, Stephen Whittle, journalist and former BBC Controller of Editorial Policy, and Glenda Cooper, consulting editor at the Daily Telegraph, tried to highlight the right to a private life in their study “Privacy, probity and public interest” published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford (RISJ) in July this year.
For a year Stephen Whittle and Glenda Copper spoke to lawyers, academics, journalists, bloggers, those who have found their privacy invaded by the media and those who have crossed the line themselves. Copy of the research can be downloaded here:
www.reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/.../Publications/Privacy__Probity_and_Public _Interest.pdf
Just after the publication of the research, The Leader World interviewed Stephen Whittle to understand his point of view on relevant current affairs where private sexual habits have been exposed in the name of ‘public interest’.
“I fundamentally believe everyone has a basic right to privacy”, says Stephen Whittle. ”With my research I wanted to stimulate a debate and for people to accept that we are not proposing a limitation of the freedom of press but just greater responsibility in the public interest.”
Asked to comment on Silvio Berlusconi’s latest sex escapades and his proposal of sending an escort as a candidate to the European Parliament, he explains how his opponents and the press in this case are just using the opportunity given by a scandal to accuse the Prime Minister:
“People are trying to find anything to attack Berlusconi and reduce his influence. Finally they have got some evidence, so this becomes the means by which they can attack him. The scandal is just being turned against him.
The racist comments that Berlusconi made (*with regards to Milan being an African city*) are not enough to remove him because such comments actually reflect a view that Italy holds. Added to this, the role of the Catholic Church in traditionally giving support to governments in Italy is well known so it’s simply unwise for a Prime Minister to behave like Berlusconi is doing.
The situation is made even more difficult by the fact that he owns most of the media. It’s a very compromised environment, and a corrupted one where the Prime Minister has passed laws for his own good.
We are also talking about possible misuse of state resources that is most relevant and we may be talking of people under the age of 18 involved.“
Moving away from the disgraceful and under several aspects anomalous Italian case, Whittle makes his opinion clear:
“I agree that the only case when something as private as sex should matter is if it can be shown that politicians are so distracted by a certain sexual practice that they cannot perform their role properly.
Kennedy allegedly confessed to a British Prime Minister that he wouldn’t be able to govern the country did he not have sex every day. But this came out only years after his presidency, and so did his use of drugs. Clearly today the attitude towards public figures is completely different, politicians are not on a pedestal anymore and there is a less reverential attitude altogether.“
If this may be for the good, however newspapers are using sex scandals not only to pursue their political goals but also to survive keeping their sales float in a market that has become insanely competitive with the risk of affecting the independence of the press.
“What I consider hypocritical is that newspapers are exposing these scandals but at the same time they are clearly celebrating and glamorizing them. People’s attention is just drawn to these behaviours that are made appear more attractive that they would normally be.
Paul Dacre, editor of The Daily Mail, says that newspapers have to features these attractive stories in order for them to survive and get on with the other important stories within their pages.
It’s also hypocritical the fact that newspapers purport family values and at the same time they report love tangles of celebrities and indeed pictures of undressed or anorexic women. Especially if you look at the website of The Daily Mail you will find this, an entire space where everything is about the body featuring paparazzi-type of pictures. However no newspaper is expected to be fair and impartial: they are free to pursue their opinion and they just have to be accurate.“
But there’s still a gap between what newspapers try to sell as morality and what actually happens out there in the real world, where certainly pornography and prostitution remain very profitable in Western society:
“If you go to the States media are different as it’s officially a pruder society where you are not even supposed to talk about sex in public. But the reality is that most child pornography comes from there. Hotels make their major revenues on their sales of adult movies too. You will not find much discussion about sex in media at all and even where you find it, maybe in the New York Post, it’s different from the British way.”
The case of Max Mosley, as pointed out in “Privacy, probity and public interest”, epitomizes the type of attitude that the British press is often prone to assume. But it also shows how journalists don’t always get it right and when this happens they have to pay the consequences.
Max Mosley is the president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile(FIA) that also is the governing body for Formula One. Son of former leader of the British Union of Fascists Sir Oswald, in March 2008 he sued the News of the World when they revealed that he had taken part in sado-masochist orgies with five prostitutes.
Because the FIA counts 125 million members and Mosley was elected five times since 1991, Mosley’s high-profile public figure was a justification enough for News Of The World to investigate on his sexual habits, with claims that the context of his sexual games included a Nazi element of role-playing. In July 2008 the High Court concluded that nothing pointed at the possibility of the participants mocking the Holocaust and Mosley won the case.
This makes a good point according to which at least lawful sexual practices conducted between consenting adults must remain a matter of privacy. Indeed they touch an intimate sphere that everyone has the right to withhold, no matter how unconventional or repulsing any of us might judge the above said practices. And no matter how important the public role of the characters involved may be.
It is up to the media, possibly helped by better regulations, to define when action is required and when intrusion is unnecessary therefore best avoided.
The frenzy focus of media on intimate relations of public figures, highlighted by pictures seen the world over in matter of minutes, rings the bell of ‘voyeurism’ rather than public interest.
As defined by Dr Robin Lenman, previously Senior Lecturer on Photography and Society in Europe at the University of Warwick, voyeurism “can be straightforwardly defined as the pleasurable, illicit observation of someone else's intimate acts, usually but not necessarily sexual”.
And the duplicity of the figure of the voyeur lies in the fact that it’s not only a person who gains pleasure from watching other’s activities, but also enjoys seeing the pain or distress of others.The press is cashing in on this, in the context of a culture where the “freakish” and the human-interest story make news (and money) while politics turn into the personalized stories of its increasingly telegenic and apparently sexually deviated protagonists.
“My conclusion is that being a journalist means that occasionally you are required to perform an intrusive action but still you must know how to do it, being proportionate and able, if required, to defend all you did along the way”, says Whittle.
And the debate is open.
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