Truth laid bare?

"It is tempting to throw up one’s hands in exasperation. Risqué pictures of a celebrity appear in The Sun. What’s new? So the pictures apparently involve a member of the royal family—so the star quality of the celebrity is higher? We could quite easily add this to a fairly thick file entitled 'Here we go again' or 'Someone’s been a bit foolish and The Sun is up to its usual tricks', and move on. But…

We have all been under the impression that we are at the start of the great new era—the Leveson Era—in which we are finally going to curb the excesses of the media in invading privacy. Just as soon as we can agree on what is excessive and what is in the public interest. But just now it seems that we can’t.

There is an interesting statement by managing editor, David Dinsmore, quoted on the BBC News website: 'There is a public interest defence and part of that public interest defence is that if this thing has got so much publicity elsewhere that it would be perverse not to do it then that is acceptable and there is Press Complaints Commission (PCC) case law on that basis.'

It may be true that if most of the world can see these photos it is pointless to prohibit them in the UK, but you wouldn’t think that should be part of a public interest argument. But it is precisely that, crucially, in the PCC Code of Practice for Editors. That code does specifically say: 'It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent'. But allows for the public interest defence, under which 'the PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the public domain, or will become so'.

Moreover, The Sun relies on another clause of the code: 'There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself.' But beyond being sententious, this statement really doesn’t clarify anything...”

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