Abstract
Different views on privacy suggest that for the public the Channel is wider than it looks, while for journalism is may just be narrowing
The view from France:
What is it with you French? Why won't you ask President François Hollande about his alleged affair? Why can't you report what all other media around the world are reporting? British colleagues have bombarded me with such questions ever since Hollande's alleged affair with film actress Julie Gayet hit the headlines early in the new year.
The now famous January presidential press conference from the Elysée Palace which followed original press coverage of what is now called “Gayetgate” was beamed live round the world, and it brought the sort of global attention that is the stuff of communications directors’ dreams. But it also brought widespread criticism of the French press, their overseas counterparts accusing them of being supine and obsequious in not pursuing the president for what everyone wanted to know: more information on what was going on in his personal life and whether Valérie Trierweiler was still First Lady or not.
That is not how the French press see it: for them the conference was an occasion to deal with the serious economic problems facing the French nation and what reforms the president was planning, not to find out where he spent his time outside office hours and where his affections lay. In this, press and people in France are as one. Polls of public opinion in the wake of the conference showed approval of the press's stance in not prying into the president's private life and continued to indicate that, for the French, private life is private life. And that applies to presidents too.
Two weeks later at the UK-France summit press conference on 31 January there were still no questions from French reporters on the issue. Just one journalist, a reporter from The Daily Telegraph, broached the subject, only to be put down by Hollande's presumably well-premeditated brush-off reply: “I decline to answer that question.”
The fact is, it is in the DNA of not just the press, but of most French people not to ask public questions about the personal life of anyone: it is a no-go area. And that is exactly what the French Constitution demands. Publication of an individual's private details is a criminal offence unless and until the individual concerned has granted prior permission. Article 9 of the Civil Code, which dates back to 1970, states clearly and unequivocally: “Everyone has the right to privacy.”
That law has been of particular benefit in France to those in the public eye, giving them total protection, if only contemporaneously, from all sorts of rumours whether ill- or well-founded. It made certain public figures believe they could behave with total impunity. The position was watertight, with the great and powerful being able to rely not only on the law but also on the deference and long-standing complicity between French media and the political class to maintain utter secrecy about themselves. Certainly, although everyone in journalistic circles was well aware of the situation, President Francois Mitterrand's second family was kept secret until just before the end of his 14 years in office. No one dared write about it.
Under pressure to change
But things in France are beginning to change and that position is now under pressure. Some commentators are saying that total privacy belongs to a bygone era and, moreover, that it is neither possible nor practicable in the 21st century where media coverage is constant, ubiquitous, instantaneous and global, via an endless stream of television channels, smartphones, tablets, tweeting and social media.
French law hasn't changed but the reality has. Some outlets are prepared to break the law quite blatantly, even be sued, taking a calculated risk in view of the paltry fines imposed by judges on offenders and the massive commercial success on offer, as instanced by Closer, the magazine which revealed the alleged affair of the president.
Many in France deplore such an attitude and what they regard as a free-for-all, identifying this development as an Anglo-Saxonisation of the press. That does not stop the French from having their own version of what the British call the tabloid press. In France it is called “la presse people”, with Closer being just one example of magazines providing salacious and sexy tales about the rich and famous. The truth is sex and gossip sell, in France too. The now world-famous issue of Closer of 10 January which covered the alleged Hollande affair sold out within a few hours — all 600,000 copies — as did two re-runs on the same subject. The president may deplore this but he certainly cannot ignore it.
Previous presidents under the Fifth Republic have had colourful love lives while in office. Messrs Sarkozy, Chirac, Mitterrand, Giscard d'Estaing — all are alleged to have had affairs while at the helm of the State. Meanwhile, it is interesting to look back to May 2011, to the public downfall and infamous “perp walk” in New York of the former IMF boss, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. His publicly exposed saga began on American soil, way beyond the jurisdiction of the French courts where there were no French-type privacy laws to stop it being reported. Nor, once it appeared in the international press, did the French press hold back about reporting it too. Many commentators now feel that was a major turning point in French political and public life. They argue that had it not been for American freedom of the press in reporting on his private life Strauss-Kahn might well be the president of France today. A “lucky escape”, say some.
For the future, it remains to be seen how France's journalists will adapt to the pressure of 21st century technology and ethical standards, and whether France's current privacy law will be able to continue providing the blanket protection it has afforded so far. A lot of eyes will be watching what happens, not least British ones with their love of freedom of the press and with a sword, not of Damocles but of Leveson-inspired reform, hanging over their own heads.
There is an irony that whereas Monsieur Hollande insists that his private life is a no-go area, it is his private life and not his management of the economy that continues to keep him on the front pages of the world's press. He may never comment on his alleged relationship with Gayet. But will Valérie Trierweiler, the ex-First Lady write a tell-all book with interviews to promote it? Stand by for the next watershed in “la vie privée” of a French president.
BP
The view from the UK:
If David Cameron were found to have donned a motorbike helmet and had himself conveyed through the streets of London on a scooter in order to spend the night with an actress, the British press would fall with joy on the story. Some of us would advance high-minded justifications for printing it: Cameron has often stressed his support for marriage, and would now stand exposed as a hypocrite. But the real reason for publishing it would be that we would know millions of readers would find it not just interesting but enjoyable. The commercial case for publication would be overwhelming.
This is not an elevated point to make in a discussion of privacy and the press. It makes us sound like a nation of shopkeepers, which as a matter of fact we are. It also illustrates a love of bawdy, found in English literature since Chaucer. Let other nations take the more mature and civilised view that a leader's love affairs are none of anyone else's business: in this country we prefer to have a good laugh. And our relish for the story would be increased by the embarrassment it caused to someone who, as prime minister, is more important than we are. The right to be rude to those in authority over us has always been at the heart of our understanding of freedom.
There is no outrage committed by the British press in recent years which cannot be matched by equally brazen misbehaviour in the past. Tony Blair showed an inadequate grasp of history when he claimed, at the end of his prime ministership, that the “feral beasts” of the media had somehow become worse. We had just become worse as far as his own record was concerned.
So it is absurd to discuss the behaviour of the press, and in particular the question of how far journalists may intrude on the privacy of politicians, as if some perfect means of regulating this relationship were attainable. Part of the point of the press is that it is imperfect. Sometimes it gets things wrong, uses unscrupulous methods to get stories and bullies people who turn out to be innocent.
All this is bad, but is no worse than what politicians sometimes do. To check corruption in politics, business, sport and every other field of life, a free, vigorous and disrespectful press is indispensible. Politicians hate this. Here is the Duke of Wellington as prime minister in 1828 giving his view of journalists, who to him were mere propagators of falsehood: “What can we do with these sort of fellows? We have no power over them, and, for my part, I will have no communication with any of them.” And here is Stanley Baldwin as prime minister in 1924, commenting on two press proprietors, Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who he reckoned had it in for him: “I care not what they say or think. They are both men I would not have in my house.”
In 1931, Baldwin turned the hostility of the proprietors of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail to his own advantage with his famous retort: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” The press had over-reached itself. Sometimes it does. But who can say that in 2014 the press is in danger of over-reaching itself? Large parts of it are in acute danger of going out of business. Traditional newspapers are collapsing, and know they must adapt themselves to electronic publishing or perish.
The internet enables anyone to publish a wild allegation or a blatant lie without an editor intervening to say, as would usually happen on a traditional newspaper: “Hey, you can't say that.” I recently wrote a piece for ConservativeHome ( www.ConservativeHome.com ) about why a disproportionate number of the Tory Party's women MPs first elected in 2010 intend to stand down in 2015. None of them mentioned newspapers as a problem. Social media are far worse, for as I reported: “Women MPs get a particular kind of unpleasantness directed at them via social media by bullying men who indulge with vicious relish in every kind of obscenity. One woman told me that in her previous, high-level career, she at least felt when she went home she could switch off. She now finds she can never switch off.”
Laws will gradually be applied to social media
The reader may at this point exclaim: “So you admit that some restrictions on what can be published are needed.” Yes I do, and I would point out that we already have laws regulating obscenity, official secrets, libel and defamation, bugging, phone hacking, theft and the bribery of public officials. We also possess some elements of a privacy law: this will need to be watched carefully in order to prevent it becoming a means for the powerful to escape scrutiny. These laws will gradually come to be applied to social media, just as they apply to print.
But what one needs most, whether in print or on the internet, is a good editor: a person who knows what the readers want, and is able to provide it. A good letters editor will fill the letters page with, say, the 16 most interesting and enjoyable responses to what was in the previous day's paper: a mixture of serious and light-hearted points, but with anything that is merely crass, obscene, illiterate or dull excluded. In an unregulated comments section on the internet, one is instead liable to find hundreds of contributions, many or most of which are crass, obscene, illiterate and dull. No one but a maniac can be bothered to read these many thousands of words, and in the end no one but a maniac wants to contribute to such a forum.
The editor turns out to be the crucial figure. He or she decides what appears in a certain publication, and renders it delightful to a certain kind of reader. Those readers who do not wish to read about politicians’ love affairs can opt for a publication which devotes little or no space to these. When The Independent was launched, it printed almost no news about the royal family, and this at first was a delightful change from its main rivals, which were devoting wearisome amounts of space to royal stories.
Editors can from the best of motives make terrible misjudgments: one thinks of Geoffrey Dawson at The Times in the late 1930s, striving night after night to keep out of the paper anything which might upset Hitler. But as long as no publication has a monopoly, competition will usually ensure that flagrant errors are in time corrected. Dawson, who was close to the prime minister of the day, Neville Chamberlain, serves as a warning that in journalism, high-mindedness is not enough.
The British press is rightly suspicious of the Royal Charter which the politicians are commending as an element in a new system of press regulation. The press is sometimes accused of wanting to mark its own homework, but this is surely less pernicious than letting the politicians get anywhere near marking it.
AG