Most cases we're learning about aren't shocking corporate coverups but dreary 'shag-and-tells'.
Photograph: BDG/Rex
In the line of fire . . . photographers swarm around a celebrity's car.
I've been in India of late, and spent most of my time not looking at the internet, not reading newspapers, and not watching television, on account of there being more interesting things to look at, ie India itself.
Two days into my trip, a major story broke when Osama bin Laden got an essential bit of his head shot off and decided to give up his career of international terrorising in favour of a nice lie down and a rot. It's odd when a massive news event occurs while you're abroad – because you don't learn about it through familiar channels, it somehow feels as though the event hasn't "properly" happened – a bit like you're reading the capsule synopsis of a movie rather than watching the movie itself. It's not real till Huw Edwards says its real. In fact, I bet even Edwards himself doesn't believe the news until he hears himself saying it, which possibly explains the perpetually surprised look on his face.
Anyway, a story that garnered rather less attention in India was the ongoing superinjunctions kerfuffle back home, which reached a head when an anonymous tweeter splurged some of the pertinent names and details, annoying Jemima Khan in the process by including a gruesome fictional claim about her featuring in a series of "intimate photos" with Jeremy Clarkson, a set of images that categorically have never existed in the real world, yet are now being published, enhanced and reprinted inside our own rich imaginations. I see a new one each time I blink. Often they move. Many are in 3D. All are unforgivably graphic. In the vast majority of them, Clarkson's wearing a look of tense concentration mixed with bewildered amazement. Occasionally he's weeping.
But I digress. The glaring problem with getting a superinjunction in 2011 is that they no longer guarantee superanonymity. In fact, they increasingly guarantee the opposite. As soon as the faintest whiff of the superinjunction's existence slips out, the gossip is magnified tenfold, and before long half of Twitter jokingly adopts your name as a mantra.
So. Getting a superinjunction isn't just draconian, but counterproductive. I can imagine a few instances where they might be justified (cases of blackmail, say) but on the whole: bad idea. I'm broadly against them, so it's fun seeing them circumnavigated. But what fun there is is also countered by sadness.
Because the majority of the cases we're illicitly learning about aren't shocking corporate coverups but dreary shag-and-tells where the "public interest" defence is virtually nonexistent. It's stuff I don't want to know about people I admire. Maybe I'm squeamish. The press defence for wanting to print this sort of thing consists of three main prongs:
Prong one: Anything a public figure does is, by default, a matter of public interest. That's not true. Take actors. I don't want to know what they get up to off-camera. I don't want that knowledge in my head, getting in the way of their performance. I rather enjoy the suspension of disbelief. They're public figures whose private lives I'd prefer not to hear about.
Prong two: Having "courted the limelight", celebrities shouldn't complain if the attention they desired turns negative. While there are certainly cases where that's fair comment, it 1) assumes all celebs are in it for nothing but adulation and attention and 2) sounds eerily similar to the argument that scantily dressed women are asking for it. Been on TV, like, ever? Then you've waived your right to privacy for life. I once read a Daily Mail article consisting of long-lens paparazzi photographs of the actor Richard O'Sullivan, long since retired from our screens, accompanied by text sneering about how old and frail he was looking these days. Serves him right for courting the limelight back in 1975. And for ageing, like every human being on Earth.
And what, precisely, constitutes "courting the limelight" anyway? There are countless journalists using Twitter accounts to broadcast their personal musings to as many followers as they can muster. Is that "courting the limelight" too? If one of them attracts 500,000 followers, can we justifiably follow them to the beach and take photographs of their hilarious sagging arse? How about 50,000 followers? How about 5,000? Let's say 50. More than 50, and it's in the public interest. Only just, but hey, it counts.
The final prong is the dumbest: celebrities "trade off their image" and therefore "owe it to their fans" to live up to their reputations.
Horseshit. If celebrities "owe" their fans anything at all, it's a bit of transitory entertainment. A few moments of distraction. Celebrities are buskers and their "fans" are passersby, and that's as far as the relationship goes.
If I've paid to see Keanu Reeves in a movie, he owes me 90 minutes of dialogue and wooden expressions, and that's that. He can spend the rest of his life masturbating to abattoir footage if he likes: it's none of my business. And if I approach him in the street for an autograph and he tells me to piss off, that's fair enough too. He probably wouldn't say it very convincingly, but that's Keanu Reeves for you.
So: superinjunctions bad. Prurience equally bad. In summary: everything is horrible.
©guardian.co.uk
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