Opinion

Tele is making it too easy for the privacy law campaigners to make a case

I did not, I must admit, feel a great deal of sympathy for former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s demand that privacy laws be rewritten before photographs of people can be published in newspapers.  

Particularly as it came just a day after the Sunday Telegraph wrote about what sounded like an entirely graceless incident involving Keating’s 27-year-old daughter apparently loudly objecting to having her picture taken while enjoying hospitality at an event being staged for the publicity.

The problem with any sort of law is that the powerful who deserve to be exposed will find any new press regulation just as useful as those who have a better case.

But for newspapers, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

And today’s Daily Telegraph in Sydney feels particularly intrusive.

On page 4 there’s a large image to illustrate a crackdown on drink driving. It features a photo of a woman standing with a policeman captioned “this driver was taken away for further blood alcohol testing”. But one assumption an average reader may make is that she is a drink driver. Regardless of what her initial reading was (which the story doesn’t make clear) she remains unconvicted, and indeed uncharged at the time the article was written. Having your picture appear on page four of a metro newspaper seems out of proportion to say the least.

Similarly, the “tired” female Flemington reveller with her eyes closed  featured on page five being helped along by a couple of men in suits won’t be delighted to wake up to that image today. A typical reader may well conclude from that image that she’d drunk too much, particularly as the article is focused around the Melbourne Cup drinking. But again, noone can know for sure whether she was unwell for another reason.

And then right on page seven are photos taken at a memorial service for a teenage girl killed in a car crash. The largest features  the “overwhelming grief” as the caption puts it in the face of one of the passengers in the car.

Individually, any one of those images may not have raised an eyebrow. But cumulatively, the paper feels particularly prurient today.

Deciding whether to intrude is part of many journos’ professional life.

I’ve done death knocks where the family doesn’t want to talk to me (sometimes I persuaded them and sometimes I didn’t), I’ve had to take decisions as a news eduitor on decide whether to stories that might well increase a family’s grief, so I do understand that papers have to make these sort of calls every day.

But the impression I get with the Tele – or at least this morning’s edition – is that unless the rules specifically disallow it, there’s no such thing as privacy. I don’t think that’s what readers want.

 

Tim Burrowes

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