A man has indulged in sexual activity without telling his wife about it. She has found out. He is embarrassed. So far no story to interest even the prurient British media one might think.
But one would be wrong when the man is Max Mosley. His surname is a bit of a giveaway for a start, and though nobody ever quite says it in polite company, the son is a fine target on which to visit the sins of the father.
In this vein, the Independent gets itself into a fine old puritan froth (my emphasis):
The fact is that, as president of the International Automobile Federation, Mr Mosley is a public figure. The fact is also that, as a personality with a high profile, his actions, private as public, were bound to come under press scrutiny. “I had being doing this for 45 years and there had never been a hint and nobody knew,” he protested to the committee adding: “My closest friends didn’t know. My wife didn’t know.” … To proclaim the absolute right of privacy, as Mr Mosley does, is to misunderstand both the role of the press and the obligations of those in public life. The press’s job is to sniff out hypocrisy and bad behaviour, private or public. It may not always be for the worthiest of reasons or with the most honourable of aims. But it is what keeps the body politic in the widest sense accountable. The rules of privacy and libel are there to protect people from liars and vindictiveness, not errant men from public ridicule.
Mosley doesn’t come out of this smelling of roses (though why his private life should be of interest to anyone but his close circle is not clear), but here we have a seriously begged question: just what is a public figure? And why should the private actions of a ‘public figure’ be of public interest? I have no interest in F1, but even so I can’t see how the businessman who runs an international sporting event is a ‘public figure’. By what process is ‘public figurehood’ conferred? The honours system for all its ludicrousness is at least open to some kind of public scrutiny and control; but it is the British media themselves that decide which people whose influence on public affairs is minimal shall become ‘public figures’ to feed the carnivorous desires of those very media. And anyway, why should we respect those who openly admit that they act for reasons of dubious worth or with less than intact honour?
Now let us consider someone who really is a public figure, whose opinions resonate through the land and influence millions of people, the editor or owner of a national newspaper, say:
The fact is that, as editor of the Country, Mr Buggins is a public figure. The fact is also that, as a personality with a high profile, his actions, private as public, were bound to come under press scrutiny. “I had being doing this for 45 years and there had never been a hint and nobody knew,” he protested to the committee adding: “My closest friends didn’t know. My wife didn’t know.” … To proclaim the absolute right of privacy, as Mr Buggins does, is to misunderstand both the role of the press and the obligations of those in public life. The press’s job is to sniff out hypocrisy and bad behaviour, private or public. It may not always be for the worthiest of reasons or with the most honourable of aims. But it is what keeps the body politic in the widest sense accountable. The rules of privacy and libel are there to protect people from liars and vindictiveness, not errant men from public ridicule.
Did the Independent publish that? No it didn’t. Does the editor of the Independent know of marital indiscretions committed by his peers and close colleagues? I would be astonished if he didn’t. Has the editor of the Independent investigated the private affairs of his own editorial staff so as to assure his readers that his own house is squeaky clean? I think not. Is the editor of the Independent a hypocrite of the first water? Absolutely.
In 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. It is a book that should be read by anyone who is tempted to believe what he is told by the powers that be about morality.
PS
Research on the Independent’s site into a well-known sex scandal produces this:
Despite leaving Washington under a cloud of impeachment (and the ridicule of the finer points of the Monica Lewinsky scandal), Bill Clinton reinvented himself with his book
and this
[The Whitewater scandal] helped keep in business a string of special prosecutors, the last and most notorious of them Kenneth Starr, whose probe into Whitewater gradually expanded to Clinton's private life – and ultimately led to the exposure of his trysts with Monica Lewinsky. It was hard to disagree with Hillary Clinton when she complained of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, orchestrated by political enemies, funded by a few conservative multi-millionaires, and propagated by hostile media outlets – in Britain as well as the US.
So just where does the Independent stand on the private lives of those whom it chooses to describe as public figures? The answer appears to be deep in the moral quagmire (if indeed one can stand in such a position) between supporting someone it likes and opposing someone whose father it doesn’t like. Or perhaps it takes its moral stance on the very clear and traditional position of the British media: What will make its owner most money?
As Humbert Wolfe so rightly said: “You cannot hope to bribe or twist thank God! The British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.”
Recent Comments