John McGuirk

Above all else, one thing strikes me about the media commentary and analysis of the TV3 report about Brian Lenihan’s illness.  Statements like these:

“Oh, well, obviously there was a rumour doing the rounds”….

“It was understood that the Minister would make a statement in January”

“Most newsrooms had the story, but decided not to run it out of respect”…..

Presumably, then, this was whispered about in pub corners by politicians, handlers, and journalists? No?

How, exactly, is it worse – on a purely ethical level – to spread a rumour to five people, than it is to five hundred thousand? Does spreading it to one person not risk precisely what transpired?

Also, in a society so information-conscious, did none of these rumour-mongers have the courage to tell the Minister that the information was doing the rounds? If they did, then the Minister knew the risk in not telling his family. If they did not, then all of those people are equally as culpable as Ursula Halligan. And if he did know it was out there, and decided he could trust hundreds of people to keep it quiet, then he was extremely naive, with all due respect.

Journalists – like Ursula Halligan – have a role to play in a democratic society. Their role is to provide the rest of us with information, news, and analysis. When they provide inaccurate, misleading, or damaging stories about an individual, that individual has the right to seek vindication in the courts. The threat of this keeps journalists in line. Our system works, on paper. Indeed, no laws were broken by TV3. No lies were told. And yet, there is outrage. Why?

We are told that the Minister had a right to privacy. A right to silence. A right to his own timeframe for breaking the news. We are told that what TV3 did – and I speak here about the fact of their report, and not its style – was beyond the pale. Just wrong.

But hang on a second – where were these same journalists, and editors, and moralists, when the story was about, say, Bryan McFadden’s divorce? Or the strange sex life of Martin Cahill? Or Ben Dunne’s adventures in Miami? Or Katie French’s recreational habits? – and indeed the manner of her death? Or the facebook page of Rosanna Davison’s ex-boyfriend? Or the relationship between Rosanna’s dad and her nanny?

Those examples are all stories that in the last two decades have received acres of print coverage. None of them are in the public interest. All of them embarrassed and damaged the people they were written about. Some of them destroyed family relationships. None of them provoked as much as a smidgen of criticism from the same people who are now decrying Ursula Halligan (who, for the sake of intellectual honesty, I should note that I have known – and liked – for several years).

The reason nobody raised an eyebrow about the media’s treatment of those people is that nobody considered them worthy of privacy. They weren’t important people, just well known people. They certainly don’t hang out with Dublin’s trendy media set, and discuss the future of the world. So it doesn’t matter what happens to them. But by God, Brian Lenihan is one of us. We know him.

This is not, nor should it be, about TV3’s decision. It is about professional jealously, tinged with a resentment that comes from knowing and respecting the subject of the report. There’s a club in Dublin, and Ursula just broke the rules. It’s the same club that tolerated the humiliation of Charles Haughey’s wife. And the same club that never lifted a finger to investigate the Bishops until the cultural ground shifted from beneath the church’s feet. And the same club that failed utterly to investigate the bankers and builders and developers until it was too late.

A “privacy” law would presumably prevent this kind of report in the future. But it would also prevent the stories about people like French and Davison and Dunne, assuming (and it’s a big assumption) that it were implemented fairly and with an equal hand. Now, while those stories do not and did not interest me, I do not see how or why reporting them should be against the law. News is what society finds interesting. The media can only work when it is free to seek out and make public the stories that interest us. Laws which prevent it from doing that for the sake of an imagined standard of decency take the power to judge the media away from the public, and place it in the hands of Government.

I don’t think TV3’s report was a good one. I think the script, tone, and content were pretty disgraceful. TV3 will bear the consequences of that, both in terms of the ongoing backlash, and in terms of how it is seen by the people its reporters rely on for co-operation. What we are seeing is media regulation in action. We saw a similar event happen in Britain, on a much larger scale, after the death of Princess Diana. As a result, her children now enjoy much greater privacy than she ever did.

Those calling for a privacy law are typical leftist social engineers. Outraged by a wrong, they see the solution in a new law to restrict our freedom in order to protect our privacy. The consequences of such a law would be to take away our ability to engage with and judge the world around us and the society we inhabit. It is wrong, and if this story is allowed to drive momentum in that direction, it will be a grave day for the Press in Ireland.

The title of this post, by the way, is rhetorical. We know why we care about Brian Lenihan’s privacy. It’s because it has been violated. The real question is why we care about his so much, when we have accepted those invasions of other people’s privacy that made reporting a story like this possible. That horse bolted a while back.