Graham Murtagh
Staff Writer
We’ve all been there. You. Me. All of us. We’ve all woken up after the night before and, in a kind of habitual dance that has become the hallmark of a generation and before bowing to any other human necessity, reached blearily for the laptop.
Gingerly now, with one eye open, an inspection of the precise nature of the damage caused the night before can begin. In many ways, this flit from photo to photo is a kind of electronic Chinese Water Torture. The tension mounts before each press of the mouse, and there is a release when you realise it’s nothing more incriminating than you being sick. Drip, there you are with your best friend. Drip, there you are with his girlfriend. Oh, and drip, there you are with… Oh indeed.
One can only assume that this is precisely how Prince Harry felt a couple of weeks ago. Groggily, he might have reached for his own laptop and recoiled in horror on discovering that the American online celebrity magazine TMZ had published photos of him, a ladyfriend, a game of billiards, a well-placed hand and, truthfully, not much else. Quickly, the photos went viral, as did puns surrounding future king and his crown jewels. I’m going to try to avoid any ill-advised use of language that results in the use of such poor quality humour in this piece – puns are the lowest form of wit – but the ubiquity of the stories appearance on news bulletins and online was not at all unexpected.
Shortly afterwards though, the story took an interesting twist. Clarance House, the official residence of the Prince of Wales, issued a statement saying it had been in touch with the self-regulating body for media in the UK, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), and reminded them that republication of the images would constitute an infringement of the boy Prince’s privacy.
Various creative methods and means were employed by media outlets to give the general public the gist of what had happened (including a re-enactment by one or two rather confident members of staff at The Sun) but the originals were not to be seen straddling (pun, sorry) newspaper stands across the UK before, on Friday, The Sun itself defied the PCC and the prince’s own solicitors and printed the images anyway.It can come as no shock that it was Rupert Murdoch’s own paper that elected to defy the directive and chose to print the images of the Prince well and truly trousered (sorry again) and performing in his very own version of The Emperor’s New Clothes in an LA suite. The 81 year old media tycoon, no stranger to controversy, has truly become a household name since his appearances before the inquiry into the practice of ‘phone hacking’ employed by journalists in the UK, and the Levenson Inquiry and its namesake, Lord Justice Levenson, has been critical of Murdoch and his role at News International.
In the days following the appearance of the images in The Sun, speculation was rife that Murdoch himself had ordered the publication of the pictures in a kind of opening salvo against the chilling effect that the Levenson Inquiry was perceived to be having on press freedom in the UK.
Eventually, Murdoch took to Twitter to say that while he had not personally ordered the images be published, he agreed with their appearance, and cited the first amendment as justification. Murdoch also noted that ‘[the] internet makes a mockery of these issues’.
Murdoch, it would appear, had a point. It’s difficult to conceive of HarryGate as anything but the first opportunity since the commencement of Levenson for the issue of press freedom and the right to privacy in the UK to truly be tested. The thrust of Murdoch’s argument (sorry, again) turns on the fact that the images were on the Internet anyway, and that on that basis, the attempt to stifle the UK press was a pointless one.
Clarence House’s concerns for the privacy of the Prince was the reason why they attempted to use the PCC to block the images from appearing on shop shelves, but arguably their concern for the Prince’s privacy should have manifested itself in the prevention of the pictures being taken in the first place, rather than their republication.
That same issue of republication has reared its head again this week, with the publication in the French edition of Closer magazine of images of a topless Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and wife of Prince William, sunning herself at a villa in Provence. On Sunday, calls were made for the winding-down of the Irish Star newspaper after it elected to print the pictures of the Duke and Duchess titillating (there we go again) by the pool. Justified by the French on the grounds that the pictures portrayed a couple very much in love (and with a classically French attitude to nudity, it would appear), the Royal family were much less impressed at the invasion of privacy, and branded the Irish Star’s decision as one based on ‘greed’.
Republication is the central issue here, and try as I might, I can think of no reason why the restriction on the republication of the pictures could or should have been prevented. While defamation law regards the republication of a defamatory statement to be as significant as the initial publication (barring certain extenuating circumstances), it’s difficult to square the idea of republishing something that is true (as opposed to something that is manifestly untrue or malicious, as is the case with defamation) with the notion of press freedom.
News International’s decision to print the images was not defamatory, and in the age of social media, the Internet and instant news, cannot and should not be perceived as a breach of the Prince’s privacy.
The same logic should be applied to case of the Catherine Middleton – while one cannot sanction the invasion of privacy perpetrated by the individual paparazzo that took the snaps, the reality is that the images were in public circulation by the time the couple took umbrage.
The pictures were the subject of the story, and in the absence of the newspaper publishing the pictures, one simply had to procure an Internet connection to avail of the illustrations. Some say that the first rule of mass media is to give the people what they want, and while that might lead to an abandonment of standards and the application of questionable morals (for full details, please contact Lord Levenson), that crime against morality seems somewhat less egregious to me where republication is the issue, and where the internet is serving that purpose anyway. It’s mocking us.
The royal family, like any family or individuals therein, should be entitled to live their lives at certain times out of the oppressive glare of the media spotlight. The question of the breach of privacy ought to turn on what would be said had it been you or I in those pictures. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter and a growing social media culture, there must a million pictures of people in compromising positions, having had a drink or two, all of which could contend to a breach of privacy despite being in the public domain.
The fact that it was a royal shouldn’t have mattered. The bigger societal issue is why every Peeping Tom on the interweb seems to give a damn.
