Well, Paul Dacre (editor of the Daily Mail) has launched a vitriolic attack on a judge for advancing the cause of privacy! He argues that the powerful will hide behind a privacy law and I would agree if there was one but there isn’t. He is actually complaining about the Human Rights legislation which requires a balance between privacy and free speech.
A privacy law without the Freedom of Information Act and without the balancing clauses in the human rights legislation would be dodgy. In my view Paul Dacre has a vested interest here. He claims the right to invade privacy for the rich and powerful and most people who suffer this are in entertainment and sport.
The one rich and powerful group who very rarely suffer invasions of privacy are the owners and editors of the press. I can’t think why that is!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/10/pauldacre-dailymail
Lord Soley,
Much as I hate [and I do mean hate] to agree with the editor of the Daily Mail on anything – he does have a bit of a point here, and I think you are in danger of shooting the messenger.
Yes I agree his fatuous reference to ‘morals’ and his asinine campaigns to get rid of Russell Brand while invading the privacy of Georgina Baillie are awful, but…
If journalists on other papers think twice about running investigative reports on corporate malfeasance and government corruption [e.g. over arms deals ] then we are all the poorer.
I think of the hassle Private Eye continually get over bringing these things to our attention despite the best efforts of m’learned friends at Sch.. [you know who..] to frustrate them.
I think of Jeremy Paxman having to work very hard to get reports out about Policy Exchange when the threat of court action from the likes Carter-Ruck are playing out in the background.
Lawyers will exploit these for all they are worth and then, can you really say that the following scenarios are that implausible ??
* After the Max Moseley case, Bernie Ecclestone decides it would be rather inconvenient for his views on racism and Lewis Hamilton to be made public and goes to court to quash the reports
* The disclosure about Tony Blair, the big donation and tobacco sponsorship – released by FoI, but then not reported because of the threat of legal action by Formula One ??
* Caroline Spelman preventing investigation of her domestic staff arrangements in relation to payments by the taxpayer, due to her ‘right to a private life’ ?
This is getting serious, and the biggest threat here is censorship by media companies who just won’t spend the money on investigative reports, because they are not worth the candle when there is money at risk from court action – they will play safe with entertainment and ‘what dog for Obama’ stories.
Read ‘Flat Earth News’ by Nick Davies – this is already a big problem and getting much, much worse…
But Polly doesn’t seem to think it is much of a problem..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/11/paul-dacre-privacy-daily-mail
Now seeing those two ‘head-to-head’ ?
Don’t worry about Mr Calzaghe retiring – this I would pay to see..
If what Dacre said in that speech was true, we might as well hurl our society out of the window. The upshot of it all was that a free press might be designed to investigate the kinds of things Brad Gelert talked about above, but those things don’t sell papers so we need scurrilous gossip about which celebrities are going out without their underthings today. As another blogger has put it, a “shorter Paul Dacre” would read “nice free press you’ve got here, it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”
While it is hard to know exactly where the lines are to be drawn, I think it is becoming increasingly necessary for sensible grownups to draw a distinction between “things the public is interested in” and “things that are in the public interest”.
We are all the poorer if the tortuous mechanisms of government become more closed and less open to scrutiny, but we are considerably enriched if we no longer have to hear Paul Dacre whinny on about how poor, put upon newspaper editors can hardly camp outside a celebrity’s house and lie about their private life without people wagging their fingers and possibly getting sued for libel by the very richest of them. A right to a private life would benefit the people too poor to have access to the libel courts.
Mr Gelert’s concerns are valid and should be noted when it comes to policy, but we also need to be protected from bottom-dwelling tabloid scum like Mr Dacre. With that in mind, listening to someone who is only not the author and architect of the problem because he is too much of a cretin to do anything but tag along with the rest of the populists is like listening to the foxes discuss how best to guard the henhouse.
Apologies for misspelling Mr Gelert’s name above.
McDuff, No problem ! ‘Bedd’ means ‘tomb’ by the way..
I take your point about Mr Dacre, but the problem is that the ‘Fourth Estate’ is our best defence against the likes of Mr Auchi, referred to in this post from Iain Dale, and for whom other information is still, just about, available on the internet.
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2008/11/billionaire-threatens-new-statesman.html
Okay, he is using libel law, which is different from human rights/ privacy law. But it does show up our country very badly against the United States of America, where free speech is guaranteed under the constitution. It is about time we had something similar here, and didn’t subjugate our law in this area to EU law which was not voted for democratically.
McDuff please leave out the insults in your final paragraph – it devalues a good contribution.
One of your key points is about how we get the papers to distinguish between what is in the public interest and what is interesting to the public. If the Press Complaints Commission was more effective it could start a real debate about this but although it is an improvement on the old system it is still a creature of the press and rather too beholden to it.
The three examples given by Bedd Gelert would almost certainly be covered by a genuine public interest defence so could be investigated. If however an editor saw them as risky then s/he might decline to pursue it. This is a difficult area.
Apologies, but my opinions about Mr Dacre are quite toned down in this particular comment section. I forgot this was the Lords and not the Commons.
I think relying on the PCC is a mug’s game, for exactly the reasons you say. Any kind of self-regulation is a losing battle. My animus towards Mr Dacre has already been made clear, but I should point out that we will always have people like him with us and that they will, as is the tendency of their kind, float to the top. We cannot rely on people like that to reasonably police themselves because they have a moral blind spot when it comes to their own behaviour. And, to be fair, this is true when it comes to pretty much every industry – self-regulation is preferred by most industries mainly because it can be easily gamed and doesn’t work very well!
Our outdated libel laws are another problem, being at the same time too difficult to protect those who need them most and too easy for those who don’t. The media laws in this country seem to be structurally biased towards making gossip about minor celebrities and the Villains Du Jour easy and making the nobler role of the fourth estate more difficult. I do not think this is something we should necessarily just patch up, but rather it requires some kind of total bottom-up overhaul of the whole system of laws, starting with an analysis of what it is we want the press to be and constructing policy around achieving that.
It is difficult to convince governments to invite greater scrutiny onto themselves, as the temptation is always towards more privacy for them, and the distracting powers of tabloidism have not been unexploited by governments. But I think our parliamentarians should be proud that, despite America’s “freedom of speech”, they are already expected to hold their own under much tougher media scrutiny than our transatlantic cousins – and rightly so. It is not necessarily always pleasant for them, but public policy should be mercilessly scrutinised.
On the other hand, I do think that the scrutiny should be expected to stop, or at least decrease significantly, when the MP is not conducting the business of government. I do not care whether an MP or Lord is having an affair, whether they are gay, what they are drinking or where they go shopping, or even if they are attending an orgy while dressed as Pol Pot, any more than I care about it when Victoria Beckham does it. Unless their actions have an impact on the governance of the country (taking bribes while they are drinking or shopping, or having an affair with the head of the Bank of England, for example), it seems only reasonable that MPs should expect to be able to turn off the constant scrutiny that is an important part of their job when they sign off for the night. The right to be a private individual and to not be harassed needs to be considered, and balanced against both government transparency and necessary freedom of speech. We, the public, in our Fourth Estate costume, need to be sensible about what we can and should reasonably expect press access too. It is not unreasonable to come to a deal where we get more “freedom of speech” to investigate and publish things which have a genuine impact on the public good (and may I just say that I, personally, do not object to having such things decided by Europe, nor do I find much about Europe to be especially undemocratic) and, in return, agree to stop taking pictures of people with their bikini tops off from two miles away with huge telephoto lenses.
Of course, there will be grey areas where a badly crafted law could tilt the balance in the wrong direction, and my preference in this area would be (despite my obvious and unrepentant bias against the tabloids) to err on the side of the press in the tough cases, but if even the more obvious excesses of a flawed libel system and a prurient press can be curbed then that will be a significant improvement over the status quo.