Yury Chemerkin

This saying may come from a story about Dionysius of Syracuse (430-367 BC), who had an ear-shaped cave cut that connected the rooms of his palace so that he could hear what was being said from another room. Similar listening posts were installed in other palaces over the centuries, including the Louvre in Paris.

Media and the Boundaries of Disclosure:
                                Media, Morals, Public Shaming and Privacy Conference
                                                              February 2012

                    Conference organised by the Reuters Institute,     
University of Oxford

                                  Abstract

Media Rationales for Disclosure: Public Interest in the Age of Twitter & Blackberry.

From time immemorial, the media have striven to play their legitimate role as the Fourth Estate, i.e. the guardians of democracy and defenders of the public interest. Attempting to fulfil this role has inadvertently led to collision between the media, politicians and celebrities over disclosure of private information and behaviour. The advent and proliferation of digital technologies, particularly social media in recent years, has exacerbated the privacy battle, with the populace, enlisting as citizen Journalists, naming and shaming public figures at the click of a button. But what rationales does the media advance to explain some disclosures, some which have had landmark legal ramifications as in the Max Mosley vs. News of the World (2008) case? Quite often, the media have quoted, public interest, as a justification, for publishing or exposing what may be deemed an invasion and breach of privacy. This paper seeks to interrogate and probe media rationales for disclosure, drawing on a plethora of case studies, an interplay of theoretical frameworks, particularly critical discourse analysis, Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern consumer culture and textual analysis of discourses evoked by both the media and public figures in their defence. Equally, the paper will strive to question the notion of public interest: an oft-quoted media rationale. Important questions abound:  At what point does public interest start to border on invasion of privacy? Can there ever be privacy for those in the public eye? Do they deserve privacy, or they forfeit it once they assume public office? Is the public interest still a tenable defence for the media given the upsurge of Twitter and other social media, which have challenged and ‘undermined’ injunctions and super injunctions, in some instances through naming and shaming individuals?