- Those that involve people who are voluntarily in the public eye, such as celebrities and politicians.
- People who are or might be involuntarily public (We could use the Clinton/Lewinsky affair as an example as Lewinsky, an intern was involuntarily placed in the public eye though her affair with the US President)
- People who for any number of reasons remain private (ordinary people like you and I)
Celebrities, performers and those who according to Gordon “use the media to achieve fame, make money or exercise leadership”, (Controversies in Media Ethics 1999 pg. 153) often find they cannot “shield areas of their lives that the media may deem appropriate for coverage.” It is this benefit that celebrities receive from media exposure, which makes establishing the line between their right to privacy and the public’s right to know, such a controversial issue.
The media must therefore distinguish between what is in the public’s interest from what the public is interested in, if they are to make fair or objective decisions about an individuals’ right to privacy and the public’s right to know.
The public has a healthy appetite for gossip, a fact which the media sometimes exploit in the name of public interest. So where does the professional life of a public figure end and privacy begin? Does the media have a right to subject public individuals to such constant scrutiny?
The media base their decision on the following rule, which has three components:
- The media has a right to report about public figures in their role as public servants therefore whatever they do affects the public and justifies the public’s right to know about such actions.
- Whatever public servants do that is likely to affect their conduct as public servants; the public has a right to know. For example if a politician is an alcoholic or drug addict, it may affect the public’s decision to vote for such a person.
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Private conduct of public figures, probably the most controversial aspect of this rule, calls for the media to report the issue if it is in the public’s interest, regardless of whether it is deemed private by the individual.
The latter is quite controversial because the media often uses the first two sub-arguments to justify it. This is probably one of the reasons some argue that the media should not be the sole judges of the boundary between appropriate and excessive coverage. Therefore ethical questions arise when the media are allowed to use the public’s right to know as an excuse for their own selfish gain, such as higher ratings and profit.
Gordon argues that this decision of “news worthiness” opens the door to media abuse of an individual’s right to privacy. This happens when the media fail to exercise their ethical obligation to discretion in deciding how far to go in reporting about an individual’s private life.
Lambeth’s criticism of the media’s use of the utilitarian approach actually supports Gordon’s point. Lambeth thinks the media apply this view for their own [financial] gain at the expense of the public right to know.
It is therefore clear, (from these arguments,) that the media’s use of public right to know, to justify their decisions, sometimes present serious ethical problems for society on a whole.
To determine if there is an easy balance between privacy and the public’s right to know, one has to assess the rules the media apply to public figures and their right to privacy as well as how the media treats each category of people outlined by Reuss.
The latter category i.e. ordinary people, those with nothing bizarre happening in their lives, are rarely considered newsworthy. In this case, the media would find it more difficult to justify the public’s right to know, as the public do not have a right to know about their private lives. Neither does the media have the right to invade their private space. But, should this ordinary individual commit an act which for e.g., threatens national security, the situation could quickly change as the media could claim its in the public’s interest based on the concept of consequentialism and therefore justify the public’s right to know about such a person’s private life.
It is much more difficult for the media to balance the issue of privacy and the public’ right to know in the case of public figures and celebrities. Naomi Campbell believed The Mirror crossed the line between her personal and professional life when it published that photo of her leaving the Narcotics anonymous meeting. The Mirror defended its actions on consequential grounds that the positives of exposing Ms. Campbell’s hypocrisy (she had previously maintained she had never used drugs) outweighed the negatives. Therefore as, a role model to many, the public had a right to know about her actions.
Situations like these indicate the difficulty celebrities face in trying to keep the media out of their private lives. But it is argued that celebrities like Campbell are not entitled to the same level of privacy as ordinary individuals because they use the media to further their career and sometimes to discuss their private life. They are therefore constantly in the public eye and have little justification to defend their privacy.
However, it is possible more balance could be achieved if the media were to adopt a more ethical approach to the issue of privacy and the public‘s right to know. W.A Parent suggest that the media practitioner ask the following questions to help him/her arrive at an ethical decision:
- What is the purpose of the information?
- Is the purpose legitimate and important?
- Is the information relevant to the purpose?
- Is the invasion of an individual’s privacy the only way to obtain the information?
- Would the means of obtaining the information cause indiscriminate invasion of an individual’s privacy?
- Are there safeguards to ensure that the information would be used for the purpose for which it had been obtained?
There are no easy answers to these questions but firstly:
They provide a principled guide to protecting individual privacy and ensuring the media use discretion.
Secondly— they ensure the media base their decisions on the public interest rather than what the public is interested in.
Close examination of the different approaches taken by the media indicate that the right to privacy and the public’s right to know is highly dependent on the status of the individual concerned as the media’s rules place public figures and celebrities at a disadvantage. I am therefore of the view that any category of people can truly benefit from the right to privacy if the media were to desist from making decisions based on what the public is interested in and concentrate on what is really in the public interest.
As such I think it’s fair to conclude that there is no easy balance between individual right to privacy and the public right to know.
