Mariella Frostrup, writing in the Guardian today, feels that laws (bizarrely headlined ‘draconian’) proposed to protect personal privacy are a threat to public interest. The idea that papers should be required to forewarn victims of the intended publication of intimate details of their private lives was put forward by Max Mosley in his evidence to the ongoing CMS Committee Inquiry. Ms Frostrup and most other commentators on the subject are journalists who persistently show a knee-jerk aversion to any suggestion that their sacred right to reveal whatever they like should be restrained. Most readers of serious papers wouldn’t argue with the importance of wholly truthful reportage when it concerns matters of genuine public interest (a politician’s lies, a criminal’s crimes or a bishop’s hypocrisy) but Mariella Frostrup and many of her colleagues continue to ignore the fact that any breaches of privacy or transgressions of the Data Protection Act are (and would remain) clearly defensible in law on public interest grounds.

Most flagrant and gratuitous invasions of privacy are committed by tabloids who have an entirely different agenda from their distant cousins in the grown-up press, and yet in a bizarre alliance, incomprehensible to most outsiders, serious journalists continue to trumpet the rights of ShagRags to abuse this journalistic privilege.

La Frostrup goes on to say: “..only the likes of Max Mosley can afford to protect their ‘dignity’.” She should know that Conditional Fee Arrangements (CFAs), by which lawyers will act on no-win/no-fee bases, were made legal precisely to allow the non-rich to pursue otherwise prohibitively expensive libel suits.

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