Yes, but it’s our job to invade people’s privacy
ISN’T IT TIME journalists stopped appeasing the privacy lobby? When the enterprising company Connectivity went public with its 118 800 mobile phone number directory in June everybody followed the herd with the same story: “our privacy ... the intruders ... stop them ... before it’s too late!” But why?
The service doesn’t give out numbers; it contacts the party concerned and hooks you up. The recipient can see the number coming and doesn’t even have to take the call.
Considering how often you want to get hold of someone urgently and don’t have their mobile number, I would have thought it was such a useful public service — indeed, journalists will probably be the biggest users — that I don’t know why BT doesn’t do it.
What BT still does is produce printed directories of landline numbers, though you rarely see them now. Big fat books full of not just numbers but names and addresses. And I never heard anyone accuse BT of invading their privacy.
Surely it’s a bigger risk to have your address in print. People might come round and chuck bricks through your window, or take you hostage, but this never seemed to bother people.
If you have a real security concern, perhaps from fascists or a stalker, then you easily can go XD. In fact far too many people do this — especially journalists for some reason. I always had a hunch that this was less to do with real worry than with a delusion of self-importance: top people and celebrities are XD, so we should be too. It’s a kind of self-justification for the celebrity culture, for which of course journalists are largely responsible.
This constant obsession with privacy is not just preposterous, it’s dangerous. Powerful people and celebrities are using the law of privacy to stop us reporting them. People object on privacy grounds to being photographed or asked questions.
So why do we have to encourage them? Even the NUJ, I’m sorry to say, makes soothing noises about respecting privacy.
But the journalist’s job is to invade it. We have to go to people’s houses and demand that they speak to us. We have to find things out about them that they would rather keep private. We don’t do it at random but only when there is a genuine public interest — that’s a matter for our professional judgement — but we mustn’t accept that we are not entitled to.
“Go through their dustbins!” was the headline on a Journalist article in 1990 by Miles Barter, now a full-time NUJ campaigns officer. The union should be campaigning now to hold by this approach.
These people attacking our right to intrude ... stop them ... before it’s too late.
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