The publication last week of the Law Reform Commission's report on privacy and surveillance, with its strong defence of the public's right to be protected from invasion and abuse by prying media interests, is greatly to be welcomed.
Notwithstanding the predictable whingeing from some self-interested quarters, it is especially to be welcomed from a journalistic point of view. If implemented, the commission's proposals would leave print and broadcast media open to prosecution or civil action if they published material, such as information or photographs, obtained through the use of covert surveillance which invaded the privacy of an individual.
This proposal is entirely sensible. The commission was quite right to reject the notion of self-regulation by media in this area. Media interests become anxious to introduce self-regulation only whenever there is a question of statutory controls on their activities. When such dangers recede, the enthusiasm for regulation disappears.
The Law Reform Commission is quite right to assert that citizens should be given legally enforceable rights to protect themselves from the abuse of media power. As its report points out, the idea of complaints in this area being investigated by the very interests who stand accused would be absurd. There has been much huffing and puffing about the alleged danger that the commission's proposals, if implemented, would place curbs on what is termed "investigative journalism". This is nonsense, since the commission has identified the investigation of serious crimes, the exposure of illegality or wrongdoing, the need to inform the public on matters of genuine importance, and the exposure of political hypocrisy as areas where an overriding consideration of the public interest would provide a full defence. This would give genuine journalists complete protection to do their jobs as at present. The kind of journalism that would suffer from the kind of legislation proposed is a kind we would all be well rid of. In recent years, we have witnessed the escalation of a new form of press "investigation", practised at first by the imported tabloid press but imitated with increasing assiduity by elements of the indigenous press.
This so-called journalism involves gross intrusion into the private lives of people who are neither criminals nor public figures in the sense of yielding political, economic or social power. Purely on the basis of their "celebrity", people are followed, spied upon, violated and invaded at the whim of media barons, editors and reporters.
This tendency is rapidly escalating to impinge on people who are scarcely known at all. Nothing other than public prurience is served by such alleged journalism, and yet media controllers and relevant professional bodies have made no attempt whatever to clean up this stain on their shopfront.
Notwithstanding protestations by the National Union of Journalists, there is very little in the commission's recommendations that is not stated or implied in the union's own guidelines.
If you want a good laugh sometime, I suggest you have a read of the NUJ's Code of Conduct, and compare it with the reality of much of what passes for journalism in this State today. According to this code, journalists are supposed to obtain information and photographs only by "straightforward means", to respect private grief and distress, to avoid falsification "by distortion, selection or misrepresentation", and to promptly rectify inaccuracies or issue apologies where appropriate.
The Law Reform Commission is suggesting that these injunctions be taken seriously, to the extent of being given legislative force. The only difference this would make is that it might lead to these principles being upheld and enforced.
To be a proper journalist, it sometimes seems, it is necessary always to be in favour of giving maximum freedom to the media. For my own part, while I agree that there is a need to streamline some aspects of our libel laws to facilitate the publication of material which is in the public interest but for which it is difficult to obtain the kind of judicially-acceptable proof that is sometimes required to fight a defamation action, these are issues which need to be approached with caution.
There are more important freedoms than the freedom of the press, including freedom from the press, and the right of people, including public figures, not to be lied about with impunity. It is for this same reason that all citizens who value true freedom - which presumably includes most journalists - should welcome the recent success by Mr Albert Reynolds in having rejected the defence of qualified privilege in his action against the Sunday Times. Qualified privilege would, in effect, extend the present privilege which applies to statements made in open court or in Dail Eireann to cover all reporting of events adjudged to be matters of public interest.
The justification for the concept of absolute privilege is that it enables those with a public duty to speak out to do so without fear of legal consequences. That it might occasionally provide protection for the utterance of malicious falsehoods is adjudged to be the lesser of two evils.
That this privilege is so rarely abused is a tribute to politicians and the judiciary, but the notion of extending it to a media sector subject to intense competition and falling standards would be disastrous for broader concepts of freedom.
Some journalists looked forward with no little glee to the prospect of Mr Reynolds unintentionally opening up opportunities for the media to attack politicians without fear of consequences. It is difficult to see how the extension of the "coward's cloak" of privilege to cover journalists reporting or commenting on public affairs would assist in the improvement of Irish journalism, for what it proposes is a licence for journalists to tell lies. Good journalism does not require this, any more than it requires the "right" to sneak around snooping on people.
Good journalists do not require special privilege to allow them to do their work. The human susceptibility to the odd mistake, and the occasional instance where this is unfairly punished by a large award for damages, does not merit extending sweeping powers and privileges to the media.
In his book Press Law, Robin Callender Smith quotes from the remarks to the 1975 Faulks Committee on defamation in Britain of the then chairman of the Newspaper Publishers Association, Lord Goodman: "A great newspaper, if it believes that some villainy ought to be exposed, should expose it without hesitation and without regard to the law of libel. If the editor, his reporters and advisers are men of judgment and sense, they are unlikely to go wrong; but if they do go wrong, the principle of publish and be damned is a valiant and sensible one for a newspaper and it should bear this responsibility. Publish and let someone else be damned, is a discreditable principle for a free press."