The Irish Media and Privacy Rights

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Sunday February 06, 2005 23:40 by Michael Hennigan - Finfacts.com

Media intrusion into individuals' private lives has been a big focus of media attention this week. Attacking the tabloid press is not new for the mainstream media but sometimes, the camel does not see his own hump.

The issue of media intrusion into people’s private lives received significant coverage in the weekend newspapers following RTE’s correspondent Charlie Bird’s appearance on Joe Duffy’s Liveline radio programme earlier in the week to complain that the Ireland on Sunday newspaper had assigned a photographer to fish for a shot of the separated Bird with a woman. A week before, Charlie Bird had spoken about the break-up of his marriage on RTE’s Ryan Turbridy Show.

Ireland on Sunday is owned by Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail and its latest editor Ted Verity is unlikely to change his attitude to treating the private lives of public individuals as fair game. The 38 eight-year-old Verity is unlikely to have been displeased with the publicity generated from the raising of the issue on the radio programme of one of his paid columnists. Verity had charge of the Femail section of the Daily Mail before moving to his current position in a former colonial outpost and success in Dublin will bring greater rewards. His boss Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Mail newspapers and the UK’s most successful editor of the past decade, said in a 2002 interview with the British Journalism Review: “I’m zealous in selling newspapers – nothing comes between that and me.”

While the issue of what’s in the public interest and what the public may be interested in, is a relevant point. For most individuals who are not public figures, do not court media attention and there is not any issue about them that is in the public interest to disclose, then their right to privacy should be respected. However, this is a grey area. For example amateur sports players should not be viewed as fair game but does Kilkenny hurler DJ Carey, infringe his absolute right to privacy by appearing in paid advertisements with his family?

Before moving onto the media coverage of the issue of media intrusion and the lack of any reference to individual media organisations’ own house rules on the matter, my own view is that if I heard that a newspaper had assigned a photographer to me, I would give an individual like Verity a taste of his own medicine.

A decade ago when the Charles and Diana soap opera was in full swing in the UK, the BBC and so-called quality press rode on the tabloids’ exposures. So caution is required when the quality media sniffs at the carry-on of the tabloids as a ‘juicy’ story inevitably gets an airing on other newspapers and outlets like the Gerry Ryan Show and Liveline. The Biblical line- Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone – should be kept in mind.

In the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole quotes American writer Walter Lippmann that the purpose of journalism is to present a “ picture of the world upon which citizens can act.” Media trivia, on the other hand, presents the opposite according to O’Toole: a distorted picture of an unreal world, which addresses its readers, not as citizens but as consumers.

Anne Harris, deputy editor of the Sunday Independent writes that :”Charlie Bird would probably be deeply discomfited if he thought that he had ever behaved unethically. Charlie, the Doorstepper Supreme, is the man who gets a camera crew to the house of that judge, that politician or that businessman under a cloud and confronts them with their alleged misdemeanours. All in the public interest. Except that that judge, politician or businessman has a wife and children who live on the other side of the doorstep and who are totally innocent of misdemeanour. Which is not to say that Charlie is wrong to do so. Not at all. But to pretend that journalism in a democracy never enters the private domain is just plain nonsense. Good journalism isn't always pain-free.”

To pretend that newspapers can (or should) avoid the personal is more than disingenuous, it is ridiculous. Newspapers are as much a part of our culture as the entertainment industry. To appeal to the public imagination, they must reflect society with stories rich in human interest and they stimulate thought with a variety of opinion, Harris writes.

In the Sunday Business Post, an article by Roy Greenslade has the heading: ‘The British disease has infected Irish journalism’. Greenslade is referred to as a professor of journalism and Guardian media commentator.

“Dublin newspapers are now employing the sordid tricks of a trade pioneered so cynically by London tabloids.” Greenslade wrote.

Curiously, there is no mention of the pertinent fact that Greenslade is a former tabloid editor.

Last summer, Dublin “celebrity” solicitor Gerald Kean appeared not for the first time in the Sunday Independent, in a magazine feature on the Irish mafia who had been at Elton John’s annual party bash.

The Sunday Times writes: “When Gerald Kean, the celebrity lawyer, spotted a photographer outside his house on Ailesbury Mews one day last autumn, he snapped and called the gardai.
Kean, Ireland’s most high-profile lawyer whose clients include the footballer Robbie Keane and the singer Ronan Keating, has long been a fixture in the social diaries of Irish newspapers. Being photographed has been a weekly routine since the 1980s. So why the change of heart? Last September, newspapers confronted Kean with allegations that he had fathered a child outside his marriage to his wife, Clodagh. The claim was untrue and he denied it accordingly, but overnight Kean found himself beset by paparazzi, determined to get a picture of him with “the other woman.”


‘I had photographers following me for three weeks,” he said. “They wanted to catch me out in a lie, by getting a picture of me with a girl. They followed me to lunch with my sister, I had to explain what was happening . . . They were at my house at 2am. I was followed into town on a bike.’

The Sunday Times says that “Public sympathy for Kean over this media ordeal will be nil. He has long courted the press, both for his high-profile clients and himself. For him to argue that he has a private life as distinct from his public persona would seem impossible, given how many intimate details of his life Kean has shared with journalists. Isn’t he just another celebrity who wants publicity on his own terms, who wants to control media coverage like a tap? ‘No, I am not complaining,” said Kean. ‘My wife and I have always been in the public eye and I am not one to say that the media can’t do this or that when things go wrong. I am not anti-freedom of the press, and I don’t want coverage turned off when it’s not in my favour.’”

Justice Minister Michael McDowell is working on plans to establish a press council. If it is modelled on the UK one, it will be a paper tiger. However, following decades when the Irish media rolled over and used the libel laws as an excuse for not publishing much material that would have been in the public interest, any proposal to introduce a privacy law should be viewed with great caution.
The four principal Irish media organisations- Independent News and Media, RTE, Thomas Crosbie Holdings (Irish Examiner, Sunday Business Post and provincial newspapers) and the Irish Times are significant businesses. They are no more transparent about their businesses than any other business. Independent News and Media as a public limited company, provides more information about its operations than the other three. The Irish Times for example does not publish its financial results on Ireland.com.

Why wait for a press council to discover whether a media organisation has its own written rules/policy on media intrusion? What internal news, which is in the public interest to disclose, should be published? Why hasn’t the Irish Times, which enjoys a tax exempt status to protect itself from commercial pressures, appointed a public ombudsman/Public Editor who would represent both readers and journalists?

In his interview with the British Journalism Review, Mail newspapers’ editor-in-chief said: “I think that Britain has a tremendously vibrant, diverse and creative newspaper industry. It has its faults – it is sometimes vulgar and intrusive, often inaccurate and frequently unfair – but it possesses a plurality of opinion and an irreverence that acts as a great counterfoil to the pompous and corrupt. Our biggest fault is our compulsion to shit on our own [kind]. The way British newspapers – and the so-called quality papers are the worst offenders – so venomously slag each other off never ceases to depress me. We have a dismal enough image with the public as it is without fouling our own nest.”

The Irish media market is a small one and news on what’s happening in media organisations, is also only generally published by competitors. Vincent Browne says that the Irish media operates a “cosy consensus.” He should know, as he currently works for three of the four principal Irish media organisations while also operating his own publication.