Gagging the press isn't always an act of hypocrisy | Deborah Orr | Comment is free | The Guardian
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Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, has made it clear that he reckons the BBC presenter Andrew Marr is a hypocrite. Hislop believes that "as a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist." Marr's injunction forbad the press from reporting his extramarital affair with another political journalist. It is not clear to me whether it was the having of the affair, the attempt to keep it private, or both, that constituted failure. In any case, I'm pretty certain that failure and hypocrisy are different things.
Anyway, Hislop's judgments are subjective. Not everybody subscribes to the idea that having an extramarital affair is always such a terrible failure in judgment or failure in private life. That's certainly the conventional view, and a useful starting point. But, for good or ill, it is a view that is not universally held, in theory or in practice. Even diehard anti-adultery moralists would find it hard to justify condemning all infidelity in all circumstances. Even if they did, handing down public exposure as a sentence is a collective punishment that harms the innocent as well as the guilty.
That's precisely why it is hard to scramble on to the tabloid-led bandwagon that says that all adultery is "wrongdoing" and all wrongdoing deserves to be exposed to public examination. That's absolute rubbish.
Many people will, at some point in their lives, have been party to information about someone's sexual indiscretions. Sometimes, a group of friends might know what's going on, and even discuss whether the "cuckold" should be informed. Occasionally, it may feel right to tell a person that they are being cheated on. Sometimes, it may seem right to challenge the cheater. Mostly, it's best to keep one's nose out, and be ready to offer succour if and when needed.
The media does the opposite to this. It tells all that it wants to for its own benefit, no matter who might get hurt or damaged, and offers no emotional support to any party at all. It has power without responsibility, spreading gossip to make money. (In recent years, it has suffered the further annoyance of watching gossip, once its profitable commodity, being traded for free on the internet.) It is human to gossip because humans are social animals, rightly interested in what effect one person's actions have upon another, and hopefully willing to learn from such situations. But mediated sexual gossip offers salacious details without genuine involvement in the complexities of the real, painful, human consequences. (Again, it's emotional distance that encourages people to be cruel on the web.)
Of course hypocrisy comes into the equation. Tiger Woods, for example, was a hypocrite because he projected a public image that was contrary to his private habits, and made a fortune for doing so.
Politicians always tend to look hypocritical when they are exposed as having affairs because the electorate votes for them according to the public image they present, and it is therefore reasonable to expect that image to be accurate. If the politician himself espouses "family values" then the hypocrisy is much worse. So, the exposure of hypocrisy can definitely be a public-interest defence.
It is often said that "the public interest" is too easily confused with "what interests the public". In truth, those in the public eye themselves seem very confused abut this. Of course it is annoying when a celebrity talks freely to the press about private matters which he or she believes will burnish an image, then gets all self-righteous about information that will damage that image. But it is easy to understand why celebrities might entangle themselves in such a way, when the hunger for detail about what they have for breakfast seems so insatiable, and the rewards of a high public profile so large.
In truth, it is not really reasonable or logical to expect people who are successful – at football, or finance, or acting, or journalism – also to be "role models", charged with conducting their lives as morality plays, and put in the tabloid stocks when they fail to live up to self-interested expectations. "Tall poppy syndrome" – the love of building someone up then knocking them down – is a hypocritical process in itself.
Hislop implies that the very fact that Marr is a journalist ought to mean that he should not have resorted to gagging the press. But there is not necessarily hypocrisy in this either. Journalists are not obliged always to defend the freedom of the press to print whatever it likes, however trivial or hurtful. Marr would be a hypocrite if he had insisted on revealing details of the extramarital affairs of others, while hiding his own. But he has never done this sort of journalism. His ability to secure his position, or to discharge his duties in a satisfactory way, has never depended on his image as a family man.
In fact, Marr is among a number of journalists who have argued that the press should be gagged in some circumstances. Writing in the Independent in 1996, as Hislop acknowledges, Marr offered an unequivocal opinion on sexual scandal in the press. "It is entertainment, sometimes with the willing connivance of greedy or stupid subjects, and at other times an emotional blood sport. It makes me a supporter, in principle, of privacy legislation that distinguishes sex from finance, and includes an overriding public-interest defence."
Hislop argues that it is not so easy to draw a line between sex and, say, finance. Quite so. A few of the super-injunctions that have been granted since the Human Rights Act enshrined a right to privacy are clearly misguided and dangerous. The right to personal privacy should certainly not imply privacy for companies or organisations – the opposite is true. Likewise, the right to privacy of one actor in an event – an affair – should not trump the right of another actor to self-expression, whatever their motivations. (If you want to keep your private life private, then choose confidantes you can trust, folks.)
There is plenty of reason to be alarmed at the way judges are sometimes interpreting the Human Rights Act, for versions of both of these highly questionable judgments have been made. But neither of those circumstances apply in this case. So what would the public-interest argument for exposing Marr's affair have been? No hypocritical presentations, for material gain, in terms of money, votes or admiration, were actively undertaken. Hislop's criticisms of superinjunctions are broadly correct. But his characterisation of Marr's particular action as "hypocritical" just doesn't seem quite right. If privacy judgments, or even legislation, are to hang on whether hypocrisy has taken place, there cannot be room for lazy or baggy accusations of hypocrisy.
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