Snooping Sans Frontiers

BY Dasu Krishnamoorty| IN Media Practice | 24/05/2005

Dasu Krishnamoorty
 
Last week, The Sun in Britain and The New York Post in the US, two tabloids from Rupert Murdoch¿s media stable, carried pictures showing a pathetic looking Saddam Hussein clad only in white briefs and washing his own dirty linen. This came hot on the heels of the Newsweek controversy (Newsweek) confirming a major shift in media perceptions and behaviour.  The soaring empire-building ambitions of the media maharajas demand a renunciation of the old value systems that earned them prestige and popularity. The Saddam pictures are indication of the irrelevance of the concept of a free and responsible press. The ruling media motto is freedom without responsibility. The questions that the pictures immediately bring to mind are: were the pictures meant to humiliate the whole Arab world or embarrass the Bush administration, already under fire for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib abuses or were they a unilateral declaration of the primacy of mediacracy, government by media? First, it is clear that the western media regard Arab sensibilities as subordinate to the returns the first-to-print magic yields as we see later. The second possibility rules itself out because Murdoch media traditionally back the Bush administration. The third is struggling hard to become a reality.

Naturally, Hussein`s defence lawyers expressed outrage over the photographs. One of them, Ziad Khasawneh, told Reuters at Amman that the release of the pictures violated ?human dignity.? ?We must sue the people responsible and the providers of these pictures, because if you look closely you can see that they were taken from his prison cell.?  Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, said that the mere appearance of Hussein in underwear may be an affront to many Muslims who believe that the body is sacred.? There is also the issue of Geneva Conventions that seek to maintain dignity for prisoners of war by barring captors from exposing them to public curiosity. Do the Sun and the Post agree with Pentagon officials that they no longer consider the former leader a prisoner of war because he is technically in Iraqi custody? Steve Crawshaw of pressure group Human Rights Watch does not agree. He described the publication of the photos as an ?absolute basic breach?. ?However we describe his status, it`s absolutely clear that the Geneva Convention does apply to Saddam Hussein.?

Graham Dudman, managing editor of the Sun, has no regrets or remorse. ?They are a fantastic, iconic set of news pictures that I defy any newspaper, magazine or television station who were presented with them not to have published. He`s not been mistreated. He`s washing his trousers. This is the modern-day Adolf Hitler. Please don`t ask us to feel sorry for him,? he said. When the Guardian asked the Sun how it got hold of the pictures, the newspaper pompously cited its duty to protect its sources. According to the BBC, it also took the unusual step of writing to rival news organisations saying they owned the worldwide syndication rights. News International, the company that owns the newspaper, is said to be demanding ?20,000 a photo. The New York Times reported that a German newspaper Bild Zeitung had issued a media advisory stating that it had purchased exclusive rights to the photo from the Sun. The European Pressphoto News Agency, with thousands of subscribers all over the world, made a mockery of these rights by circulating a photo of someone reading the Sun showing Hussein¿s picture prominently.

Several newspapers discovered a subterfuge that justified their publication of these pictures. They argued that they were using the pictures to provide context to the report that the Pentagon had launched an investigation into how the pictures came to be released. A US defence spokesman said that they have been leaked without American permission. Those who believe consequences are an important component of reporting recall how last year soon after the CBS showed photos from Abu Ghraib prison, an Al Qaida-affiliated group beheaded Nick Berg, an American contractor. This, they maintain, was in response to the CBS photos and not in response to the prison abuse. We may now legitimately ask ourselves if the media are right in publishing no matter how offensive and no matter what the consequences. The Guardian editor commented: ?It is not patriotism; it is a sense of realism that you do not want to put the lives of your countrymen at risk.?

It is not as though every media outfit grabbed a gratuitous opportunity to use these questionable pictures. Some of them tried really hard to invent a tenable excuse to jump into the fray. ?The treatment of prisoners has been a big issue, and Saddam is the most significant prisoner of all. And it would be odd to write such a story and not show the picture,? said Dean Baquet, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. The use of photos acquired doubtful respectability when the New York Times also joined the media crowd of users. It is baffling how the Fox News, also owned by Murdoch, hesitated to use the pictures initially. Very soon it changed its mind and according to one of its senior vice-presidents, ?That decision had to be modified once the Pentagon began issuing its statements.? In London, newspapers considered the consequences of flouting copyright norms and went without pictures.

Indian media too, on the threshold of entering a competitive media world without frontiers, are becoming increasingly impatient with healthy conventions that have held center stage for decades. A lot of contemporary reporting has come to abjure the concept of responsibility and sanctity of privacy. Saddam Hussein has a contingent of lawyers defending him, however farcical the trial might be. But think of the hundreds of defenceless persons shown in TV and print media, covering their ignominy with a towel or whatever just to frustrate recognition. It has now become a tradition with the police to produce suspects before the media even before they appear before a magistrate. Worse is the media readiness to collaborate with the police in invading the rights of privacy of the hapless suspects, many of whom are too poor to challenge such intrusion. Any legal reporter in the media crowd would know that it makes the job of the police or the prosecution easier because it helps prosecution witnesses to identify the suspect and many a time this identification has a role to play in the conviction of the suspect. This is what the Best Bakery case is all about.

Read this Hindu report (22 May 05) from Bhubaneswar to understand the conflict between media rights and privacy rights of the citizenry: ?The Orissa High Court has indicted the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for ?faulty investigation? carried out in the case pertaining to the killing of the Australian missionary, Graham Stuart Staines, and his two sons. In its judgment pronounced on Thursday, a Division Bench, comprising Chief Justice Sujit Barman Roy and Justice Laxmikanta Mohapatra, said ?such lapses on the part of an elite investigating agency like the CBI cannot be excused.?

?With regard to the identification of Dara Singh, one of the witnesses could only identify the accused in the court on the basis of photographs shown to him by the Investigating Officer before start of the trial. The court wondered why the photographs were not placed before the Judicial Magistrate for conducting the test identification parade. Coming down heavily on the investigating officer for adopting improper methods to acquire evidence, the judges observed that ``no court of law, unless utterly over-credulous, can act upon such evidence on a most important question as to the identification of the offenders.

?It was absolutely unfair and unethical on the part of the overzealous CBI investigating officers to adopt such unheard of methods to procure tainted evidence to somehow procure convictions of the appellants,`` the court observed.

This is what the British Press Complaints Commission says on privacy:  The use of long lens photography to take pictures of people in private places without their consent is unacceptable. Private places are public or private property where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. According to the Swedish Press Council it is unethical to publish pictures that identify a suspect. According to the code of ethics adopted by the National Federation of the Italian Press in Italy: A journalist has not to publish images that present deliberately or artificially as offenders people that have not been judged as guilty persons in a process.

A majority of newspapers all over the world shy away from publishing not only the picture but also the name of a rape victim. But the New Indian Express (15 Dec. 04) not only identified a four-year-old rape victim by name but also published her picture. Except exposing the parents of the child to permanent ridicule and humiliation, the picture has no value as socially relevant information. It is appropriate here to quote Patrick Healy (The New York Times, 22 May 05): ?It would be hard for the media to pitch itself as innocent victim of its own shortcomings. And though journalists like to think themselves as guardians of the public trust, too, opinion polls for at least two decades have shown declining faith in print and television news.?

Contact: dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com