Celebrity Privacy – Gossip isn’t journalism…or is it?

Is Alison Mau a lesbian?

Who cares. Perhaps we just need to get over our obsession with the sex lives of television presenters.Watch this clip from Breakfast, Aly Mau gives a serve to the women’s mags, particularly Woman’s Day.

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I can’t see the public interest in this issue. But I can imagine Alison’s children being taunted at school – we all know how cruel kids can be.

They also take a lead from their parents and the media.

This has become a big issue for TVNZ, Close Up waded into the debate later in the day

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And this morning, Bill Ralston was interviewed on Morning Report. For once I think that Sean Plunkett got it right in his intro and his line of questioning.
This is an interesting spat between TVNZ and the gossip mags, but also perhaps indirectly, the Herald on Sunday, which on the weekend carried along piece by Matt Nippert justifying their outing of Mau in the previous week’s issue. It’s not online either, so I’ll dig my copy out of the recycling bin and take another look.
The debate seems to hinge on some sort of privacy laws and some commentators seem to be a little confused. There is no general right of privacy enshrined in privacy laws in New Zealand, or indeed in very few jurisdictions.
The general operating rules are that if you’re in a public place, your photo can be taken without your permission. The Privacy Act covers some types of information, but it doesn’t protect you from paparazzi (a swarm of annoying mosquitos in Italian).
The Privacy Commission’s top-ten-tips say nothing about how to protect yourself from unwanted media intrusion. I don’t think new and more laws are necessarily the fix we’re looking for. In the UK there are now restrictions on media coverage of the royal family, but not for the general public.
The recent John Terry case in the UK is also interesting. The way he tried to protect his privacy – actually his reputation and lucrative sponsorship deals – was by attempting to injunct publication of damaging details of his affair with the girlfriend of an England team mate.
And there’s a suggestion that Alison Mau also considered this approach to prevent publication of details about her new love life (if that’s what it is).
The Law Commission’s review of the Privacy Act is unlikely to bring any joy to those in the cross-hairs of the tabloids who want to limit their exposure to paid appearances and positive mentions.

A day in the life of Ashley Dupre: Celebrity callgirl to callgirl celebrity

It seems that 24 hours is a lifetime in the blogosphere. Just yesterday I was defending the right to privacy for sex workers caught up in scandals and media stories.
Now I find myself being amazed again at how quickly some people can turn adversity into a new adventure.

Prostitutes, privacy and media harrassment

Good things come in threes…but not it seems if you’re a sex worker caught up in a high profile media broo-ha-ha.
I recently mentioned a Herald on Sunday story that outed an Auckland businessman who frequented a brothel in the city. My point then was that the guy had done nothing illegal (at least as far as the paper could report), so why was the HoS harassing him?

I got a brief reply to an email I sent to the journalist. Basically her response was “I know a lot more, but can’t say anything for legal reasons.” Let’s see what next Sunday brings – perhaps another installment in that story.

The story also featured a photograph of a woman who, according to the caption, was a worker from the brothel in question. Her face was turned away from the camera, but she’d be identifiable to people who know her.

Now this week the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective has gone public with a complaint about an immigration department raid on another Auckland brothel in November last year when officials were accompanied by a television crew shooting for a reality TV series called Borderline which is produced by Auckland company Cream TV.

Celebrity picture wars – worth a mint

OK! wins Zeta Jones picture battle
A British magazine has won a House of Lords appeal against a rival publication that published photos as a way of ‘spoiling’ its exclusive deal with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones to print images from their wedding.
The judges’ ruling is interesting. They decided that OK! magazine had paid for the right to impose a confidentiality agreement on wedding guests, one of whom is presumed to have taken the secret photos and sold them to rival Hello magazine.
So let’s put this in perspective:
Two rich bums decide they want to make money by selling pictures of their celebrity-splashed wedding to a magazine. They sign an exclusive and then impose a confidentiality agreement on their guests (are you following this Aunty Beryl?). A court agrees that because money has changed hands, the guests are bound by this dubious contract.
It seems to me that the rights of the wedding guests to attend said celebration, get pissed and behave like idiots have been infringed here.
A word of warning. If you’re planning a wedding, make sure you sign a confidentiality agreement with the photographer and ban your guests from taking happy snaps. Your exclusive with the Woman’s Weekly could be at risk.
If the worst happens, you could always take the guest’s cameras and feed them to that big sloppy dog on television who seems to like chowing down on the odd Canon sure-shot.

media ethics, journalism

Social Networks making news

Press Gazette: How should journalists use social media material?

It’s interesting this discussion is starting now. I told my students in a lecture yesterday that there’s going to be more of this – using MySpace, Facebook, etc as news sources. Reporters are now routinely checking MySpace pages for personal information about people who are in the news.
I think we should all be careful about what kind of trails we leave in cyberspace, nothing is really private anymore.
Martin Stabe’s blog (above) gives more details on a recent British case and of course it has become a staple of the Virginia Tech coverage.

Meanwhile, MySpace is also launching a news aggregation service. Of course its links with the Murdoch empire – MySpace is owned by Fox Interactive – will mean it is never short of a good story, particularly if it favours Mr Murdoch’s viewpoints. Is this a sneaky way of turning young Americans into Republicans, and the rest of the world is just collateral damage?

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