There’s been quite a controversy over yesterday’s suggestion, by a House of Commons Committee, that there should be a law protecting individuals from over-intrusive media. Is there, or should there be, a right to privacy?
It’s an area that can give rise to strange situations. An American friend of mine was involved in such a case some years ago. He was a professor of theology who’d given an extremely highbrow lecture, part of which was shown, without his consent, in a Hollywood gangster film, in a way that made him look a bit ridiculous. Well, he took the film company to court, and apparently in American law, if you’re a public figure, you’re held to be fair game. The result was that the lawyers on the opposing side claimed that he was virtually a household name, whereas his own lawyers had to prove that no one had ever heard of him. There are times when you don’t know whether it’s better to win or lose.
And that’s what makes many privacy cases so paradoxical. How should we feel about someone who spends most of his or her life seeking publicity, and then complaining when they get it, but not on their own terms? And how should we balance concern for privacy against our no less genuine need for a free press, on which a free society depends?
The Hebrew Bible is quite clear. Yes, there is such a thing in Judaism as a duty to respect privacy – the rabbis said that one should rather throw oneself into a fiery furnace than shame someone else in public. But the Bible does not spare us from some quite intimate glimpses into the private lives of its heroes. The story of King David and Bathsheba, for example, is told with relentless honesty, and David offers no defence on the grounds that his private life was, if you’ll excuse the pun, his own affair.
What makes the Bible so powerful is that it holds no one above criticism; and the role of the press now, like that of the prophets then, is to expose the corruptions of power. The real difference is between public interest and prurience, what we need to know, and what we have a merely voyeuristic wish to see. A politician’s failings are one thing; a sunbathing superstar another. It should not be impossible to frame a code of conduct that is fair, protective of rich and poor alike, and draws the delicate but necessary line between our private right to be left alone and our collective right to be informed.
