In the Public Interest: Public v Private

The Stott Report

Today Thomas Stott gave a presentation on privacy in journalism, focusing on celebrities and their rights to privacy in the media. Stott began the presentation by stating how controversial the topic of privacy is in society, especially due to often conflicting and blurry definitions. He concludes that public interest is news and information which the public is interest in, using the definition of well known author Rhonda Breit as evidence. According to Breit “there is public interest in revealing private information because it aids the formation of public opinion.” Stott goes on to state that public interest is heightened when people in the public eye are behaving badly and that traditional news values have shifted, with a strong emphasis on entertainment and private information about celebrities. According to Breit “public interest is often used to justify intrusions into the personal lives of people, particularly public figures.” Stott goes on to give examples of this change in news values, by using the example of “guru” of celebrity news, Harvey Levin, being asked to speak to students at the elite Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley University in the USA, rather than a more “serious” journalist. Levin was allegedly offended when asked if his site would be reporting on more “serious” news in the future, stating that “the world of celebrity has become news and people genuinely have an interest in them.” This brings the presentation to Stott’s main issue, of whether the public have the right to know about celebrities and their private lives just because they are in the public eye. According to Breit “If a person has attained a great deal of fame via the mass media, then that individual’s privacy boundary is thin.” Using a case study on the celebrity blogger Perez Hilton winning a lawsuit against public figure Samantha Ronson, with the result being that the issues surrounding the report was of the affecting the public, Stott agrees with Breit; when celebrities put themselves in the public eye, what they do becomes the public interest when it affects the public.