The News of the World?

"From my personal point of view this is fascinating because it confirms all sorts of things I have long suspected. For example, he cites two separate instances of couples who were exposed by the News of the World as swingers, that is, people who wanted to involve outsiders in their sex lives. They were perfectly ordinary people but in both cases the husband committed suicide because they found the embarrassment unbearable. It’s quite clear that this didn’t bother the paper in the slightest, and then on top of that he gives endless examples of where they’ve broken the law and done things they knew they shouldn’t do. There’s also a wonderful story about their chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck who went to expose a harmless couple who offered naturist massage. Thurlbeck went for a naturist massage and wrote the story on the usual basis of ‘I made my excuses and left’, but, unknown to him, the naturists had taken the precaution of videoing the entire procedure. As Burden puts it, it was in reality more a case of ‘I made my excuses and came’. And they had it all on video. Burden then christened Thurlbeck ‘Onan the Barbarian’ and, of course, pictures were available. So, in order to stop other newspapers printing them, the News of the World themselves printed the pictures of Thurlbeck in the altogether with his bits pixelated. The book is a really good read and describes how sinister the newspaper is and how they absolutely don’t care what sort of damage they do. He’s got a quote on the front from an assistant editor called Miskiw: ‘That is what we do. We go out and destroy other people’s lives.’ Obviously, there are one or two people around who think this should be stopped, myself included. No. They were complete nonentities. There was one little couple in France, for example, who were joined by four people from the News of the World who were not, apparently, connected, and the poor man who was doing it all, to try and get the party started, came down the stairs wearing nothing but a posing pouch and sort of gyrating. And of course, the poor man… Absolutely. And that’s what’s so awful about invasion of privacy. Other people’s lives, and particularly other people’s sex lives, are interesting, but you have to weigh the suffering you cause to the people you expose against the minor pleasure you give to the reader of the newspaper. The newspaper is selling the privacy of those people and it doesn’t belong to them. They are effectively stealing their privacy, stealing their reputation and selling it. Well, I don’t know about that but the law says it should be kept private and you should be entitled to your privacy. And you see what they did in both those cases was illegal, but once something is out in the open, once it’s been published it doesn’t matter what the judge wants to do – you can’t make it private again and take it out of people’s minds. The other thing is that if you want to sue you’ve got to be rich. In my case the News of the World paid £60,000 damages but the costs were approximately £1 million which, because they lost, the News of the World had to pay. But that still leaves you out of pocket because the bill you get from your solicitors is always bigger than the amount of costs the other side has to pay you. I was left about £30,000 out of pocket. This is the thing. First of all, if you sue, the whole thing is then gone through again in open court, so that which you wished to be private is published all over again, at the end of which, even if you win, you get a large bill. True! Well, I don’t care myself, but I care for her. She was obviously drunk at the time, just watching the video, and there’s somebody, drunk, desperate for money, not terribly street-wise and you lure her into a situation like that which causes her appalling embarrassment, pain, suffering and so on. It’s really no different from watching bear-baiting or going to watch people hanged at Tyburn. Except maybe in this case you hang people who haven’t done anything. Why should she be made to suffer just for the entertainment of a few people? The fact of the matter is that in a civilised society you don’t have bear-baiting. Or, put another way, it’s far worse to have your reputation shattered, your privacy stolen, than it is to have the furniture from your house stolen. You can replace the furniture but you can never replace your privacy. If it were not for the fact that things had developed differently, theft of a person’s privacy would be just as serious as theft of their goods. At the moment people think it doesn’t really matter, but for the individual it matters more than his furniture would matter. Well, if you sell or give away three of your sofas it doesn’t entitle someone to come in and take the others. The press have managed to create an atmosphere around this where it isn’t thought about in a rational way. The moment you see it as it really is, which is as the theft of something that belongs to someone else and is precious to them, namely their privacy, and then selling it for commercial gain, you quickly see it is actually worse from a moral point of view than stealing their goods. But it’s just not seen that way because it has become sort of customary. It’s only since the Human Rights Act of 1998 and a degree of recognition from the courts that this sort of thing might be stopped."