When Do We Press The Mute Button On Free Speech?

Benjamin Tawiah, London

Do we ever pause to think about why we breathe and who we owe the fresh air to? It is free, and we take it freely without hoping that we would ever be made to answer questions about the respiratory organ and the amount of air it requires. We usually would not think that there is anything like excess air. That is how free speech should work. When do we say that we have seen too much into somebody’s privacy or spoken too much about another person’s private matters? When beer drinkers take in too many pints, we use a breathalyzer to assess the limit they have gone. When those who make a living by speaking and writing pretend to see too much in too little, what barometer do we use to determine the harm they might have caused? These were the issues that the British press had to deal with for the whole of last week. Mr. Max Mosley, the brains behind Formula One, the richest motorsport that has made Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton worldwide brands, had been caught with five prostitutes in a sadomasochistic showpiece in the basement of his London flat. The News of The World newspaper had tracked him down, bugged and videotaped the sordid orgy, and reported the news for the world, as it were. The newspaper had to fork out nearly £1million in compensation and legal charges after a court ruling found that the paper’s brilliant work of investigative journalism was a bad example. The question in media circles in Britain has been: At what point should the need for privacy supplant the all important need for the public to know?

Civil society has expressed grave concern about the court’s ruling that the Formula One boss in entitled to a private sex life, however unusual, and that there was no sufficient indication that the information on his distasteful orgy is in the interest of the public. The clergy worries that scandalous behaviour no longer carries any consequences. A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has said that Max Mosley’s victory undermines free speech and public morality. “The first major victim is free speech”, he added. On their part, newspapers in the UK continue to assess the role of investigative journalism in the light of that historic ruling. And, perhaps, it is well that Justice Eady stated that the ruling is not a landmark decision. Well, it is a landmark ruling in a ‘journalistic’ sense, because it seeks to give a new definition to privacy and public accountability. Indeed, the papers had commented that a new set of privacy laws are being smuggled through the back door from the EU. There are no strict privacy laws per se in the British legal system.

So, when do we say we have seen what we shouldn’t have seen, or written what we shouldn’t have written? I was told a similar thing during my undergraduate studies at the English department of University of Ghana. I had gone to discuss my dissertation with my supervisor in her office, to see how I fared. As she popped out to attend to the head of department’s call, I picked up her private notes on my essay and looked at the mark she had awarded me. I crosschecked it with the grade at the back of the work and satisfied myself that I had made a first class in English. The grade was a very handsome ‘A’ and the comments underneath were also very encouraging. I quickly replaced the documents when I heard footsteps approaching and feigned my usual good boy, unassuming composure. When the results were officially published, my grade had traveled down to a B+. I confronted the lecturer, explaining that I had earlier seen that she had awarded me an A, so why should that change. “You shouldn’t have seen what you saw”, she established. “It is not your business to monitor how the marks are awarded; your business is to take what your work deserves”, she added. You can see the Head of department to demand a remarking of your essay if you wish. With that I left her office that afternoon.

In a sense, the Mosley case was a bit like this university affair. If a piece of information is deemed not appropriate for public consumption, then it means that we have no compulsion to fetch it. If the News of The World newspaper had not made that surreptitious move to record Mosley’s bizarre sex antics, a practice he has maintained for 27 years, the public wouldn’t have known what he does in the privacy of his bedroom, which, in fact, should be made to remain in the bedroom. The essence of the ruling, therefore, is that the paper shouldn’t have seen what they saw if they had respected Mosley’s privacy. There are a lot issues here: Isn’t the public entitled to know when public figures misconduct themselves, even if it is behind closed doors? Are public figures entitled to the same amount of privacy that the hermit commands? Is there anything as a private life when you are the face of the world?

In Ghana, the Crusading Guide’s Anas Aremeyaw Anas is known for his brilliant investigative journalism. He has over the years given life to the genre and made some important ‘discoveries.’ He recently investigated Accra’s commercial sex industry, securing a job as a cleaner in one of the brothels in the district. The ace managed to plant a secret camera in one of the rooms, which provided a window for Ghana to see how under-aged girls are wasting away. We would have had a bit of the Mosley scenario if the prostitutes were licensed to practice their trade in recognised premises, as it happens at the Amsterdam Red Light district. That would have been intrusion into their privacy. However, if Anas got wind that a minister of state, who is revered for his uncompromising stance on public morality patronises the services of the vice girls, and decided to track him down, then we are confronted with the all too familiar questions about the privacy public figures are entitled to, being private citizens, like all of us. There, we have a professional responsibility to expose the minister. And, it is primarily because public figures are usually role models who need to set good examples for the public. Apart from that, there is a moral story there. Whose moral story is it, anyway?

Of course, investigative journalism as a genre will not die; it has been tested too many times, and it has always survived. It enjoys a good reputation because it is always on the side of the people. However, even its most aggressive practitioners fear that it is getting moribund, because of the relatively ‘negotiable’ price the twenty-first century puts on morality. After the ruling on the Mosley case, a Japanese journalist who writes for an international news agency in London telephoned to ask me whether Mosley would have won if the deed had happened in Ghana. I couldn’t offer a readymade answer as I would if she had asked me who will win the December 08 elections, because these are issues of law and a particular society’s devotion to morality. Or, perhaps, I should have answered that we have never had a Mosley in Ghana. Fact is, our society only pretends to put a greater premium on public morality and ‘spirituality’ than the cosmopolitan west, but morality is generally low everywhere in this century. Haven’t we had our version of Mosley in Ghana in the last few years? That he lost to CHRAJ is a testament to our near-zero tolerance for moral corruption, but his reappointment, according to critics, rationalizes careless public conduct, just as the press in Britain deems Mosley’s £60,000 compensation against the News of The World a terrible spanking of free speech.

Mosley, a married public figure, is proceeding with libel charges against the British tabloid and another newspaper in Germany, which also published that his sex orgy had Nazi undertones. If he wins again, it will be a big blow to investigation journalism. Of course, journalists will continue to do their job in a world that is getting increasingly immoral. There are bad stories everywhere: a father enslaving his daughter for 24 years and having seven children by her, a billionaire who dines with the Clintons stooping so low to have sex with under-aged prostitutes, terrorists spraying venom on innocent citizens, fraudsters faking their own death to cash in on insurance money, thieves armed- robbing us with grave bravado in the watchful eyes of the law, and the poor getting poorer every day. These are not very good stories, are they? So, when a gentleman who appears to be following my writings with a pair of sinister eyes wrote to lambast that I preach doom and boom in my articles, I was quick to ask him whether he was aware of social surrogacy and paedophilia. The bad stories will continue to make the front pages until the forces behind extreme competition and wasteful cosmetic surgeries give way to a world where the poor can afford to share in the abundant resources on our planet.

But, then, whether the bad stories make our day or make us poor, we would always have to answer the most important question that the myth of Odysseus in ancient Greek literature seeks to ask: how should a man behave? That assumes that there is a certain moral code that we must all live by. And in a way, that is what investigative journalism is all about. Wouldn’t news be a bore without kiss and tell stories? Mr. A had sex with Mr. B, who is a married clergyman. Are we not interested in what the clergy do? Even as far back as 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth, who is credited with inventing the modern press, wrote in the Daily Mail that investigative journalism seeks to highlight the ‘talking points’, “stories designed to reflect readers’ concerns on a day-to-day basis and thus not driven by or dependent on routine news agendas.” With this comes the agenda setting tactic: bringing something to the fore and hammering on it until it gains currency. Then we hammer it more until something happens to please our publics. So, journalists wield so much power: they bring governments down and plant their favourites where they don’t belong. Soon, they bring those favourites down. It is a game of a sort, and we enjoy it as long as our readers do. And they always do, especially if we do our job very well.

So, who determines how well we should do our job? We are quick to talk about responsible journalism, but we hesitate to say who we should be responsible to. The vagueness hurts. Where do we set the limits in our efforts to bring out the truth? Is it sane enough to bribe a shadow minister to ask intimidating questions on the floor of the House, as it happened in the ‘Cash for Questions’ scandal in the UK? It was one of the things that brought down John Major’s government in 1997. If that wasn’t very bad in the eyes of the law, why should it be deemed inappropriate if a newspaper pays a prostitute to record the bizarre sex life of an important public figure, as the News of The World did? Perhaps, free speech isn’t that free after all. The public thirsts for the news, and we are more than able to supply it. So, where do we keep mute and just watch as it rots?

Benjamin Tawiah is a freelance journalist; he lives in London.

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