The model and novelist Naomi Campbell is suing the Daily Mirror for publishing photos of her going to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. The newsreader and celebrity Anna Ford has ridiculed Britain's Press Complaints Commission. It refused to uphold her gripe against the Daily Mail and OK! magazine for publishing holiday pictures of her on a beach. The actors and newlyweds, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones are suing Hello! magazine for publishing "unauthorised" snaps of their wedding.
Privacy and the press, an issue widely considered strangled to death by the hypocrisy, cynicism and opportunism unleashed by the death of Diana Spencer, is back in the news. It's still a moral minefield between the extremes of those who insist that fame is a Faustian pact - live by the sword, die by the sword - and those who maintain that famous people have precisely the same rights to privacy as unknown people. Although the arguments can be tiresome, the consequences of invasions of privacy, real or alleged, can be monumental.
Campbell the model, Ford the newsreader, Douglas and Zeta-Jones the actors seem, whether we admire or disapprove of them, to be legitimate individuals at the forefront of their crafts. Campbell the novelist ( Swan, remember?), Ford the celebrity (because of TV exposure) and Douglas and Zeta-Jones, the newlyweds (who sold the publicity rights to their wedding) have, to most people, rather less to recommend them. In such ancillary identities, which many famous people appear prepared to exploit, the famous tend to lack credibility when they complain.
How can we ever know which identity is complaining - whether a wound is wanton or warranted? Is it even possible to separate the model from the novelist, the newsreader from the celebrity and the actors from the newlyweds? It's long been a tenet in journalism (albeit not always observed) that different categories of people are considered to have different claims to privacy. Those who are created and sustained by publicity; those involuntarily catapulted into the public gaze; powerful people - politicians, holders of high public office, people influential in other ways - are considered fair game within different boundaries.
If, for instance, a judge pitches up at a Dublin nightclub and dances with great gusto, stripping to the waist (not to add unnecessary complications, say it's a male judge) should he, against his wishes, be photographed for the gossip columns ahead of those who crave the publicity? Might there be a "public interest" defence for showing us how a member of the judiciary spends some of his spare time? Or, it being his spare time, has the judge not got a right to enjoy himself as he sees fit, without media intrusion, so long as he doesn't break the law? Must judges be judges 24/7?
Sure, it's absurd. Funky judges have always been thin on the dance floor. But it poses a crucial question: who has the right to determine answers to such questions? As it is, editors generally have that right and that seems reasonable. But as a result of the Campbell, Ford and Douglas/Zeta-Jones cases, Britain could establish a draconian new privacy law. The law, not editors, may decide in future. This is not an encouraging prospect especially as Britain, like Ireland, already has an official culture of secrecy.
The upshot of it all could be that invasions of privacy - driven by the market demand to profit from feeding public prurience - could hamper more serious journalism. There's no point in being sniffy about this. There are any number of journalists, as there are readers, who might not want to write certain stories but would be prepared, perhaps even eager, to read them. As with even the most appallingly egregious "celebrities", even the most ethically scrupulous people are first and foremost human (I think!).
The problem is timeless but seems particularly acute nowadays - practically a fable of our times. Combining fame, market economics, shifting notions of what ought to be private or public and what it is, as the Spice Girls articulated, people really, really want, it's complex. There are numerous faultlines running through the issue. But the prospect of a British privacy law and the implications that could have for journalism in Ireland (hitting the valuable as hard as the trivial) amount to more than mere tremors. The press quake threatened in the wake of Diana Spencer's death could yet hit.
FAME has always been desired but, nowadays, it seems, more ferociously so than ever. Even leaving aside the wealth which usually, but not always, accompanies it, fame is hugely desired for its own sake. No doubt, it is self-affirming ("I'm known, therefore I am") even though sensible people can see clearly, not simply begrudgingly, that fame is often not a reward for talent. So what? It doesn't have to be. Mind you, it's got to be easier for famous people to see this aspect of other people's fame than their own.
Anyway, there is something terribly tedious (even "sad") in moralising about fame. Equally however, there's something terribly vacuous and crass in the attitude of "you've either got it or you haven't", as though agency and chance ought not be examined. Considering, as is the case with mega-money, that the relationship between fame and happiness is known to be anything but straightforward, it's astonishing how powerful the appeal of fame remains. It's the same, of course, with great wealth.
Andy Warhol exaggerated when he famously (or perhaps, infamously) said that one day everybody would enjoy their 15 minutes of fame. That's not going to happen but consider what people are prepared to trade about themselves for the 15 minutes of fame (or infamy) granted by appearing on the likes of The Jerry Springer Show. Again, it might be prudent not to be too sniffy about this. Springer's guests can also be legitimate voices from the less privileged side of the tracks in the United States.
But the disingenuity of Springer claiming to accommodate these voices, while simultaneously exploiting them, is breathtaking. He and his supporters can argue that it's a matter of free will whether people participate or not and it is. But it's a strain of free-will which middle-class Americans don't appear to have. It's also a free-will which has been formed within a society which, economically, socially and educationally tends not to favour the typical participants of Springer-like shows.
To that extent, claims that, in a "free society" (as Springer repeatedly said on the Late Late Show) all voices are equally facilitated, are deeply cynical. Sure, people have a right to make spectacles of themselves. But if that's what it takes for people to experience the rush of self-validation associated with fame, then fame is clearly toxic and probably ruinous. In a "free society", the crucial test for such 21st-century human circuses is to ask if the people who make the most money from them would be pleased to see their own families kicking the crap out of each other on TV over some bizarre sexual deception or other.
If Jerry Springer appears remote from the issue of the press and privacy, he's not. A similar dynamic obtains. Arguments that there is no "public interest" outside of what interests the public are the same in principle (or lack of) as those that espouse the "free will" aspect of appearing with Springer. Who, after all, can be morally entitled to decide what might constitute the "public interest"? Likewise, who is entitled to denounce Springer, facilitator of the free will of the oppressed?
Well, given that when there's no such thing as society, there can be no such thing as the public interest, the question doesn't even arise. In such a set-up, we are all individuals, free to exclude ourselves from communal concerns.
OF course, it doesn't work like that. The effects of invading people's privacy or encouraging them to hold themselves up to public ridicule are not just individual but communal. The high profile cases in Britain (the ethics of Campbell's NA case are especially entangled) which could usher in a privacy law, show how an erosion of the accountability of power might be the result of hacks playing Peeping Tom on well-known people. If so, then journalism will have cannibalised its "public interest" role to make money for people who are not always too keen on journalism's public interest role in the first place.
That might be the cost of prurience. Certainly, as with the growth of gated communities in the United States, there has to be a fear of powerful people being able to isolate themselves not just from society but from societal responsibilities. Physical gated communities are one thing. But gated communities of wealth, influence and power with little or no social accountability, evoke a deeply sinister world. How journalism ought to readjust to a world in which the private sector is becoming more powerful, while the state is shrinking is therefore a crucial question.
When you have twenty-somethings on RTE arguing that Sony PlayStation and Budweiser are much more relevant to their lives than Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, you'd have to wonder if, given the direction in which power is shifting, party politics are not excessively covered in the media. Still, that's another question, too large for this piece. But we know already that a combination of an official culture of secrecy and condescension, strongly backed up in law, inhibited journalism and this, in turn, allowed corruption to fester here for decades.
The danger is in believing "that was then but this is now" and that almost all the putrescence was lanced during the 1990s. Our culture had allowed rogue elements in the church, banks, politics and business, respect and space to exploit their positions. Then again, gated communities have a habit of being condescending towards people on the outside. And there's the clarion irony of it all: invading privacy to bring us "inside stories", the media (including Jerry Springer) can conspire, actively and passively, to leave us all on the outside of the important stuff.
It's often considered po-faced or over earnest to say as much. Get a grip - isn't it just entertainment? Well no, it's not just entertainment. (Remember, no such thing as a free lunch!). It might or might not be entertainment but it certainly has consequences. Investigative reporters have an axiom about "following the money trail". Consider the money trail in privacy-invading journalism or on Jerry Springer's circus. Proprietors and shareholders, often people who would go apoplectic if their privacy was invaded, make the money (along with the "celebrities") while Joe and Jane Soap feed their prurience. They get the bread and we get the circuses.
Fair enough - except that in that regard, "celebrity culture" is a conspiracy. Ultimately, we ought not ask for whom the lens shutter clicks. It clicks for all of us because celebrity culture, fun and entertaining as it can be, can only strengthen by weakening societal ties and promoting the nonsense that every ego can be gloriously validated if only it'll play the game.