Privacy and Censorship.

There are a couple of interesting new stories on Index on Censorship online - and a moral dilemma or two.

The new information commissioner Christopher Graham has told MPs that privacy breaches are not being taken seriously enough. He cites the case of the former BNP member who was fined £200 after leaking membership details. It's hard to have sympathy for BNP members who have their membership revealed and you could say that if people are in the BNP we need to know about it but then you could say the same about communists etc.

Graham wants people banged up. He accuses MPs of being “seduced by the siren song of Fleet Street” into not pushing for a tougher approach to privacy breaches. On this point, he's probably right. The tabloid press have made it very hard for politicians to take action on breaches of privacy and if they try they will no doubt be accused of self-interest.

Index also has a piece by Lal Wickrematunge on the horrific 20 year sentence with hard labour handed out to fellow Sri Lankan journalist JS Tissainayagam for writing the wrong kind of article. He says this has not sunk in with the journalistic fraternity yet. But, he says " the message to the journalistic fraternity in Sri Lanka is loud and clear."

Lloyd nearly right shock

I usually disagree strongly with John Lloyd, formerly of the New Statesman, particularly his thesis that journalists should be more trusting of politicians. But I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he says in a post last night on Comment is Free - up to a point.

Essentially, Lloyd picks up on what Max Mosley and Gerry McCann said to the to the culture media and sport select committee - that media invasions of their privacy and fabricated stories had been deeply damaging. He shoots down Mail editor Paul Dacre's view that sexual exposes are necessary to enforce sexual morality and - worse - to fund tabloid political coverage.

But Lloyd loses the plot towards the end of the piece, agreeing with McCann:

that the press had to have tighter regulation if harm to reputations, families and private lives were to be avoided.

I would insert the qualification unnecessary in front of "harm". People cannot always be protected from damage to reputations etc and should not be so protected when a genuine public interest in exposing something rotten outweighs the harm.

As Lloyd puts it himself, shortly after setting morality above truth:

Journalism finds its calling in trying to ascertain the truth, and in providing a platform for diverse views. The rest is for the law, religion and conscience.

Is Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre deliberately confusing ethics with sexual morality, corruption with sexual misconduct? He has said that the "imposition" of a privacy law by High Court judges:

apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds is, I would argue, undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market,"

Dacre's slightly more sophisticated argument is that tabloid papers need to include sexual scandals to get people to buy papers that "devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs".

Is the Daily Mail really relying on a public interest case for its existence, based on its analysis of public affairs?

Ken shows me up

I think I made a mistake last week when I suggested that Ken Livingstone was entitled to his privacy, no matter how many children he has fathered, and that we don’t need to know about public figures’ private lives. My mistake was saying it about Ken, who today dragged some of his children into a dispute about his late appearance on a radio debate. His excuse, like the right to privacy, cuts both ways.

According to the BBC, Ken’s aides had originally attributed his late (30 minutes) arrival for the Asian Network debate to “hold ups on the tube”. But when mayoral rival Boris Johnson pointed out that there was a good service on Ken’s line, he admitted that he had left the house late:

"Yeah I left the house late. The kids were just... they don't understand why daddy spendsmore time with Boris than with them."

Very clever, very funny. It might even be true. It’s probably better than blaming the London Underground, for which you are responsible. But once you start citing minor family issues for your failure to do what people expect of you, don’t you step over the same line that adulterous ministers cross when they drag their wives (invariably) and children out for photocalls?

Need to know a secret?

I've got a new piece on Comment is Free about the difference between secret and private and between what we want to know and need to know.