Does being a celebrity mean you forfeit your right to privacy?

With the use of revolutionising technology the media have evolved in many ways regarding their distribution of information. 2011 has seen the decline of self-regulation along with a significant decrease in media ethics at the peak of intrusive media behaviour. The revelation of the phone hacking scandal which resulted in tabloid newspaper News of The World closing down was closely followed by the launch of the Leveson Inquiry.

Police had announced in 2011 that the newspaper had perhaps hacked almost 5,800 individual’s voicemails. With the vast majority of them being in the public eye, many celebrities have become victims of phone-hacking leading them to appeal for damages. This is where the case began to stimulate public interest. The dehumanising process where journalists cease to regard celebrities as real people has led to an array of celebrity’s voicemails being intercepted. Dominic Lawson (2011) suggests that celebrities exist in a strange half-life, apparently known to millions who in fact do not really know them at all. And thus suggests that this allows the public and journalists to treat celebrities as they please without any ethical consideration.

The scandal provides evidence that the key problem in exposing private information is that ‘the realism of what is considered to be private is blurred’ (Raburn, 2007). The UK Right to Privacy Article 8 of the HRA offers protection for a person’s private and family life. However people in the public eye do not receive this right as they are constantly under scrutiny as the public become increasingly interested in their private lives.

An ex News of the World reporter has attempted to justify the hacking of celebrity’s phones by stating ‘if you don’t like it, you’ve just got to ...

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...what the context, if that is besieged in some way, it feels unjust. It feels wrong’ (CNN, 2011). This raises an important question of where the limit is on how much information we should be allowed access to, when concerning public figures.

As Street (2007) comments, ‘Even though the exchange of information is now in a digital realm; the duty to do right and to treat others the way we would like to be treated is still present.’ This can be related to Immanuel Kant’s Duty Ethics, which is based on actions in contrast with Mill’s consequentialist view. Kant (1996) believes that, ‘the supreme principle of the doctrine of virtue is: act in accordance with a maxim of ends that it can be a universal law for everyone to have.’ In other words we should only base our actions on whether it is the right or wrong thing to do, without consideration of the outcome it may bring.