Media intrusion into private lives often confuses the public interest with what the public is interested in, writes Fintan O'Toole
Last week, Richard Lynam shared the front page of Ireland on Sunday with the Yorkshire Ripper. In the photograph, the north Dublin farmer, who happens to have sold his land to the Department of Justice as the site for a new prison complex, is standing behind a locked gate, wearing jeans and a fleece and looking warily at the camera. Inside, on page six, he is pictured in the same position, except that his face is now hidden by his right arm and two fingers are held aloft in a V-sign. The accompanying text suggests he is giving the fingers to his neighbours, whose "idyllic country way of life" he has destroyed. In fact, it is obvious that his gesture was intended for the photographer who was snatching his image without his permission, as he stood on his own property.
Richard Lynam's gesture stated in blunt but eloquent terms what better-known citizens, including U2's guitarist Dave Evans, (The Edge) and RTÉ's Chief News Correspondent Charlie Bird, might have liked to say about media intrusion into private life.
While The Edge went to the High Court to stop the Sunday World repeating details of a family illness, Charlie Bird took his case to the court of public opinion, presided over by Liveline's Joe Duffy. He complained that Ireland on Sunday had assigned a photographer to follow him for a number of days, and that last Saturday's Evening Herald carried a front page story with the headline Shock at Bird's Love Nest Probe. He was supported by the Kilkenny hurler D.J. Carey, who recalled his own experience, in the run-up to the 2003 All-Ireland final. When Charlie Bird challenged Ireland on Sunday, he said, he was told he was "basically fair game".
In fact, the increasing level of media intrusion into private life is actually worse than these complaints might suggest. Richard Lynam, The Edge and Charlie Bird have at least some connection to public events. The first is receiving €30 million of public money, and the other two often enter the public arena by choice. But a quick tour of last Sunday's Ireland on Sunday shows things have gone much farther than curiosity about the private lives of people in the public eye. On page five, there is a full page given to a story about the son of the convicted murderer Malcolm Macarthur. This man is pictured over a third of the page, cycling towards Trinity College Dublin, where he is a PhD student. He is a private citizen, going about his ordinary life. The only point of the story seems to be that he looks rather like his father, and that his tweed jacket and "Wildean hairstyle" (in fact the picture shows him with a perfectly ordinary, neat haircut) prove him to be "in many ways a chip off the dandyish Macarthur block". The sin of being his father's son is enough, apparently, to justify the breach of his privacy and the sly innuendo that he somehow shares the guilt of crimes that were committed when he was seven years old.
A two-page spread on pages 20 and 21 features large photographs of Ann and Suzanne Burke entering and leaving Arbour Hill prison. They are the wife and daughter of the corrupt former politician Ray Burke. The accompanying story makes it clear that the newspaper had them followed from the prison back to their family home. There is a half-hearted attempt to suggest a real news story - that the Burkes were treated a little more kindly than other visitors. But the overall impression is that being related to a criminal is reason enough to have your private anguish displayed to the public.
Turn the page, and there is a colour photograph of the footballer Damien Duff chastely kissing his girlfriend Eileen Flanagan. Again, Duff is someone who earns good money from being in the public eye and the picture (like one on another page of the broadcaster Eamon Dunphy singing along with a busker late at night) was taken in a public place: Dublin's Grafton Street. But Eileen Flanagan is a private citizen who has never sought publicity. And indeed, Ireland on Sunday makes a virtue of her desire not to be photographed. Alongside the picture of the kiss, there is another of her running from the camera and a description of how the couple were pursued by the photographer, through a shop, out the back and along South Anne Street. Images that the public has been taught to associate with the exposure of corruption and dodgy behaviour - intrepid reporter pursues slimy charlatan - are here applied to a young woman who has the gall to kiss her boyfriend and to want to keep out of the tabloids.
THUS, IN THE first 22 pages of this one issue of Ireland on Sunday, there were eight photographs of people going about their private lives. All of them were clearly taken without the consent of the subjects. None of them, or the stories that accompanied them, gave readers any new information at all on any public issue. Of the seven people pictured in this way, two (Eamon Dunphy and Damien Duff) are well-known denizens of the public realm. The other five (Richard Lynam, Macarthur's son, Ann and Suzanne Burke and Eileen Flanagan) have never sought, or benefited from, publicity. And Ireland on Sunday is just one paper in an increasingly competitive and aggressive media environment where private lives have become "basically fair game".
How has it got to be like this? Private lives have never been entirely off limits for public comment. The idea that there was a golden age in Ireland before the intrusion of the British tabloid press conveniently ignores the extent to which church and State refused to mind their own business. The title of Brinsley McNamara's 1918 novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows, is a reminder that the habit of poking one's nose into other people's affairs is neither alien nor modern. Homosexual men jailed for having sex with willing partners until the 1990s, or "loose" women denounced before the community from the pulpit might take the notion that we were traditionally respectful of private life with a tablespoon of salt. The Eileen Flynn case of the mid-1980s, in which the courts upheld the right of a school to sack a pregnant teacher purely because of her private life, is still a benchmark of Irish law.
Yet this context makes the new invasiveness of the tabloid papers even worse. The whole idea of a private life - the notion in particular that people's sexual behaviour is their own affair unless it has an obvious and immediate impact on their public roles - has been very hard-won in Ireland. It has only really become established in the last 15 years or so. All the more reprehensible, then, that it should be so cheaply abolished by media in search of a quick buck. Especially when one of the nicer aspects of post-Catholic Ireland is that it has been relatively free of prurience and hypocrisy in its attitude to public figures. The Taoiseach and Cabinet ministers have been able to go through marriage break-ups and second unions with relatively little public comment. The contrast between the treatment of the Labour TD Emmet Stagg here and that of the British Labour politician Ron Davies is instructive. Both men were subjected to media claims that they had gone "cruising" in public parks while they held ministerial office. The Irish public electorate decided that Stagg's private life was his own business and did not affect his ability to be a good public representative. Davies was forced to resign, and then hounded for years until he was eventually forced out of political life altogether.
The contrast suggests Irish people, who knew all about the cost of too much interference with private life, had developed a fairly balanced understanding of the line between public and private. The Tánaiste, Mary Harney, expressed that common understanding very well this week when she remarked: "I think everybody, including public figures, is entitled to a private life, provided that private life doesn't impact negatively on their public life." Privacy, inother words, is not an absolute value (it can and should be set aside in some circumstances) but it is an important one. Why, then, are the tabloids becoming more and more intrusive? The simple answer is that the stuff they're doing sells newspapers and makes money for their owners. But this in turn begs a more basic question. If the intrusive coverage sells papers, it can only be because there are many people who want to buy it. That desire is rooted in social and technological changes.
THE SOCIAL CHANGE that has the biggest impact is a paradoxical one: the growth of private life. The rise of an urban, materialistic culture has turned the private home into the centre of our lives. Most people have less to do with their neighbours and their communities than their parents did. People are more anonymous, more likely to find their sense of belonging through a small network of family and friends. This deprives us to an increasing extent of the means to satisfy our natural hunger for gossip, our curiosity about the trivia of other people's lives. The media provide surrogate gossip. Television gives us ersatz people - sometimes, as in soap operas, wholly invented; sometimes, as in manufactured celebrities, only partly so - to gossip about. Celebrities become proxy acquaintances. Large parts of the print media stop trying to compete with TV and decide to join it instead, plugging themselves in to this endless current of trivia and tattle.
This has nothing to do with the classic functions of the media in a democracy. It is not news. Try to imagine orthodox news headlines for Ireland on Sunday's paparazzi stories last week, for example, and the results would be patently ludicrous: Farmer Stands in Field, Man on Bicycle Has Father, Family Visit Prisoner in Jail, Young Man Has Girlfriend. But useful information is not the point. What is being sold is the illusion of some kind of intimacy in a society that is becoming in reality steadily less intimate.
From the newspaper's point of view, the attraction of this kind of coverage is not just that it appeals to some readers, but also that it is cheap. Proper journalism is time-consuming, labour-intensive and therefore costly. A story hung on a large picture by a freelance photographer who doesn't get paid unless the photo is used, fills space in a highly cost-effective manner. It is not news, but a substitute for news. It is not intended to create an engagement with the world, but to mirror a sense of disengagement in which real contact is replaced by a hollow illusion.
The purpose of journalism is, in the words of the American writer and editor Walter Lippmann, to present "a picture of the world upon which citizens can act". Media trivia, on the other hand, presents the opposite: a distorted picture of an unreal world which addresses its readers, not as citizens, but as consumers. This is why journalists should be first in line to resist the tide of junk news and invasive practices. Every time a tabloid editor, defending the indefensible, confuses "the public interest" with what the public is interested in, the idea of press freedom dies another death. The freedom of the press is rooted in the belief that the media have rights because they accept the serious responsibility of giving citizens the information they need to participate in a democracy.
With each abuse of freedom the media no longer seem a way of holding power to account, but become an unaccountable power themselves.