First published on 17.07.2011.
All of us – including your faithful blogger – love a good celebrity scandal. Who can not feel some basic instinct of satisfaction or schadenfreude when a star crashes? Think Tiger Woods as prime example! Or Ryan Giggs of Manchester United! Or for that matter Paris Hilton on many occasions!
Yet, as the ongoing News Corp/News of the World (NOW) saga demonstrates there are dangers when there no limits placed on their investigations into the private lives of scandals.
The techniques of illegal hacking of voicemails/messages and buying stories that has come into the forefront with the targeting of politicians, soldiers killed in Afghanistan, victims of the 7/7 2005 terrorist attacks in London, and at least one murdered schoolgirl was initiated and perfected with respect to celebrities.
Some of the celebrities whose phones were hacked were part of one of the central focal points of the NOW– including most likely Princess Diana, her personal assistant and a lawyer connected to her.
But the range of celebrities who were followed not by old-fashioned private investigative tactics but illegal techniques of scrutiny stretched across the entire spectrum of celebrities from Sienna Miller to Hugh Grant. And this leaves aside undercover sting operations such as the one that implicated Sarah Ferguson in the well-known cash for royal access scandal.
To be sure, some of these behind these operations were caught out and punished as witnessed by the jailing of the NOW’s royal editor and (well-paid) private investigator in 2006.
But these corrections did not prevent the escalation of illegal activities. NOW was allowed to argue that the culprits were rogues disconnected from the overall media culture.
And confirming the impression that sensationalism sells the public continued to favor the results of this sort of investigation in connection to private wrongs over other sorts of scandal – such as those involving deficiencies in governance.
Instead of being ring-fenced, the success that NOW had in naming and shaming celebrities wetted the appetite of this type of media for other targets – targets that were looked upon with far greater sympathy when their rights to privacy were infringed.
Celebrities with some justification are often viewed as being exceptional. With the (now happily defunct) NOW this unique quality justified an open season for them to be targeted, a dropping in barriers of ethical standards that eventually took on a more comprehensive style.
