1 of 1- Goose
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
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Privacy VS The Public Interest
Here we face a painful dilemma. The right of victims and families to be shielded from the pain of sensational reporting, vs the public interest in documenting the barbarity of terrorist crimes.
Photo of Paris Massacre Victim Sets Off Press Freedom Case
On Friday evening Nov. 13, Maya Vidon-White, like many Parisians, was dining with friends. But the moment she learned that Kalashnikov-wielding terrorists were attacking the Bataclan concert hall, she grabbed her camera, hopped on her scooter and sped to the scene.
Ms. Vidon-White, 48, a French war photographer who has spent more than a decade covering conflicts in Israel, Indonesia and Africa, instinctively began to look for victims. As the wounded began to pile up at a makeshift emergency center at a square near the concert hall, she recalled, she spotted a figure lying on the pavement.
The man, Cédric Gomet, 30, an employee of the French television channel TV5Monde, was an avid guitarist with a fondness for tattoos, and had been attending the concert when he was shot in the head. He was lying on his side in his underwear, his face caked with blood, in an agonizing pose. She aimed her camera. When a nearby fire engine opened its doors, and he was momentarily bathed in light, she clicked.
Now, Ms. Vidon-White has unwittingly found herself at the center of a court case in France that has pitted press freedom and the journalistic imperative to document an important news event against the moral and legal prerogative to protect the dignity and privacy of terrorism victims.
Her photograph of Mr. Gomet, who died in the 24 hours after the attacks, was published in VSD, a glossy weekly magazine known for its lurid celebrity stories. One month after she took it, Ms. Vidon-White, who was working as a freelancer for the Washington-based United Press International news agency, was informed by the Paris prosecutor’s office that she had broken the law.
The case stands as a vivid example of how, in this age of Islamic State terrorism, journalists across the world are grappling with ethical questions of how to cover attacks. They are balancing the requirements of covering breaking news and conveying reality, however disturbing, with the desire to avoid sensationalism and respect the boundaries of victims, survivors and their families.
It also shows the complex legal pitfalls and contradictions in an age of global communication. Images zoom across the borders of states and societies with widely varying laws and sensibilities regarding privacy, potentially opening journalists to prosecution in ways they can hardly anticipate.
American law does not have nearly as broad a conception of dignity as a protected legal interest as Europe does. It does allow lawsuits for invasion of privacy. But that is generally defined as public disclosure of private facts offensive to a reasonable person that are not newsworthy.
In Germany, which has a strong right-to-privacy culture, distributing or broadcasting the photographs of victims, with their faces visible, is illegal without their permission or, if the victims are dead, without the permission of their families.
But exceptions can be made if a photograph is deemed to be in the public interest. Comparatively looser media codes in Britain and Spain also call for journalists to get consent from those they are photographing, with the caveat that the public interest can trump the right to privacy.
The laws regarding privacy are particularly strict in France.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.