Tue, Jul 12, 2011 page9

• Recent scandals serve to redefine rules for the press in Europe

  The role and responsibilities of journalism are being called into question as the French and the British reassess exactly who it is that deserves the right to privacy

  • By Alan Cowell / NY Times News Service, PARIS
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  A widening telephone-hacking scandal is prompting a broad reassessment of the balance between press freedom and privacy in Britain, even as France grapples with the consequences of its tradition of protecting the powerful.

  If former managing director of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn walks free now that the sexual assault case against him in New York seems to be weakening, will the French public have a right, or indeed an appetite, to know more than what emerged in US courts? And if less-exalted people in Britain feel that their secrets should be protected too, how should they shield themselves from unscrupulous journalists hacking into their most intimate voicemails?

  The questions underscore the contrasts between cultures that, in the past, have made Britain a temple to strident disclosure and France a whispered haven of discretion. In both countries, the debate has reached what might, at first, seem like a tipping point.

  In London, the News of the World, a tabloid newspaper, was accused of eavesdropping on the cellphones of a kidnapped and murdered schoolgirl, the relatives of people who died in the 2005 London transit bombings and possibly the families of British war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Such was the public revulsion that embattled British Prime Minister David Cameron was forced on Friday to order two separate inquiries — one into the telephone-hacking scandal itself and the other into the behavior of the freewheeling British press. In a news conference, Cameron insisted that the British press tradition of self-regulation had failed.

  “I believe we need a new system entirely,” he said, prompting an outcry on Saturday from British journalists who have long resisted statutory restrictions on their freedoms, arguing that the press is able to police its own affairs.

  “As a politician, Mr Cameron can perhaps be forgiven for trying to shift the blame,” columnist Stephen Glover said in the conservative Daily Mail. “He can’t be allowed to shackle a free press.”

  Yet, the broad rules remain freighted with ambiguity, governed by two apparently conflicting clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights: One endorses the right to privacy, another the right to free expression.

  In recent months, that legal chasm has been filled by judges’ rulings in favor of high-profile clients seeking to keep their private lives under wraps. However, Cameron has voiced unease.

  “It is an odd situation if the judges are making the law rather than parliament,” he said this year.

  On Friday, Cameron went much further, calling not only for a new form of press regulation, but also for an end to the cozy relationships between news organizations that are seen as wielding huge influence and politicians who are desperate to harness the support of the press for electoral advantage.

  “Of course it is vital that our press is free,” Cameron said. “That is an essential component of our democracy and our way of life. But press freedom does not mean that the press should be above the law.”

  “While it’s vital that a free press can tell truth to power, it is equally important that those in power can tell truth to the press,” he said.

  France — like much of Continental Europe — has long chosen a different, less swashbuckling attitude toward matters of privacy, offering the powerful a degree of protection that would be unthinkable in Britain or the US. French politicians have been able to hide behind some of Europe’s tightest privacy laws, protected by what amounted to a code of silence about the transgressions of the mighty. Indeed, sexual activity among male politicians is still seen as a sign of vigor rather than a cause for moral concern.

  The sexual reputation of Strauss-Kahn, for instance, was known to many journalists, but rarely publicized. The extent of that knowledge emerged only when he was arrested in New York in May and charged with trying to rape a hotel housekeeper at the Sofitel in Manhattan.

  Then, just last week in France, a novelist, Tristane Banon, 32, filed a criminal complaint in which she claimed that Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her eight years ago — an accusation that Strauss-Kahn has dismissed as “imaginary.”

  In France and Britain, the past days and weeks have shown both models of reporting to be strained to the point of failure, leaving journalists in both countries to define the role they ought to play. The epiphany, said Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian in London, which has taken a lead in exposing the telephone-hacking scandal, represents “the most severe crisis in the past two or three generations.”

  As the author Christophe Deloire put it in Paris: “If tomorrow the French people, readers or voters, accuse us again of having kept a secret among ourselves, of accepting different standards for the powerful than for the humble, what will we tell them?”

  “It should be our ambition to say nothing but the truth — but the whole truth,” he concluded.

  In a way, the malaise in both countries represents the logical conclusion to longstanding and contrasting definitions of tolerance. Only when the News of the World stood accused in Britain of hacking the telephones of ordinary people in their moments of pain did public rage ignite. In France, the spectacle of a single powerful man brought low provoked an equally passionate debate.

  However, as prosecutors revealed doubts about the credibility of Strauss-Kahn’s accuser in New York, many of his allies in the Parisian elite — particularly men — began to talk of a political comeback.

  Before the episode at the Sofitel, Strauss-Kahn was widely viewed as the most likely Socialist Party challenger in France’s presidential election next year.

  So the question arises: Is France still so magnanimous toward the sexual adventures of the powerful that Strauss-Kahn would be permitted to re-enter public life without an accounting of events that his lawyers say did not involve force or criminal behavior?

  Some journalists say the affair will — or at least should — break the mold of silence.

  “More than ever, the rule of journalism should be to speak out,” wrote the blogger Jean Quatremer, “and the exception should be to remain silent.”

  There is some skepticism about whether the culture will change in France to the extent that Cameron is seeking in Britain.

  “Journalists will pay a bit more attention to private lives” of powerful figures, said Lucas Delattre, an author and a former Le Monde correspondent, “but not much.”

  In Britain, journalists might well conclude that those who claim a right to call the elite to account could soon face much the same scrutiny themselves.
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