Last week, The New York Times’s not-quite forgotten lady lobbyist story resurfaced in the news when the paper issued a brief, not-quite apology after reaching a settlement in the defamation suit brought by Vicki Iseman, the lobbyist in question.
In the follow-up statement from Iseman’s lawyers, and in the note from executive editor Bill Keller, both sides emphasized that the central question of the now-settled suit was whether or not Iseman should have been considered a public figure by the Times: Lawyers: No; Times: Yes.
We want to take the conversation one step further. Given the proliferation of personal blogs, reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and myriad other social networks and personal technologies, as well as the ease of electronic access to public-records databases, is it time to rethink the concept of a public figure? In the realities of the digital age, is anyone still considered a private figure? At what point do claims of being a private individual no longer ring true?
This news meeting is way too hard, but here's my thinking anyhow. I'm quite sure it's unoriginal.
In the future, there will be more information about everyone publicly available. Let's assume that some of it for many people will be embarrassing. Let's further assume that, for a given person, it will be quite hard to keep embarrassing information from being publicly available. So, in the future, if we were to research someone thoroughly and find nothing embarrassing, we would conclude either that they've said or done nothing embarrassing or that they've kept it from being publicly available. Let's assume that we're researching someone whom we take to be normal--such that they're likely to have said or done ordinarily embarrassing things. If so, we'd conclude that the person we're researching likely tried quite hard to keep embarrassing information from being publicly available.
That might strike us as normal, since very few of us enjoy embarrassing information about us to be public. Or that might strike us as strange or obsessive or excessive, since very few of us enjoy trying quite hard to keep embarrassing information about us from being public. (We've got better things to do!) Of course, it depends on how embarrassing the information is: the more embarrassing, the more likely we are to try hard to keep it from being public.
My sense is that we're more likely, as a culture, to rethink this balance. The result will be twofold. First, as individuals, we will be more accepting of embarrassing information as it becomes increasingly difficult to keep it from being public. Second, as a culture comprising individuals who are more accepting of embarrassing public information, we will redefine what it means to be embarrassing. The acts of folly, stupidity, or momentary ignorance or bias will have to be more severe to cause us shame. If everyone's been dropped off at school without their pants on once, then no one has the grounds to laugh.
Call it embarrassment inflation maybe. I like the metaphor because it suggests how embarrassment might be measured more usefully in real terms rather than nominal terms, like income is. So just as there will always be *something* expensive, no matter the inflation, there will always be *something* embarrassing.[1] And just as it's quaint that you're mother talks about the long-ago time when she received only a nickel from the tooth fairy, there will be occasions in the future when we'll look back to currently embarrassing facts and realize that, back then, none of us was perfect either and laugh at ourselves for caring so much about our isolated transgressions.
Embarrassment is a relative thing. We must compare our potentially embarrassing acts to the relevant alternative potentially embarrassing acts. Acts from different eras or different cultures or among different social groups aren't relevant. So there's little reason to think that what's embarrassing today will be necessarily embarrassing tomorrow.
[1] Let's hold to one side the concept of hyperinflation for now.
#1 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Wed 25 Feb 2009 at 02:02 PM
Hey Josh--Sorry for the tough question, but it's good to have you back week after week. Anyhow, I agree that this isn't an easy one. (I also think that certain things we find embarrassing now won't be seen as being as embarrassing in our upcoming see-through society, but, whoa there, I'm sure there's a limit, and I know I won't be happy to find it myself.)
One thing that came up when we were chewing over this question was yesterday's New York Times's piece on a company that specializes in making loans with works of art as the collateral.
An interesting story to be sure, one that lies somewhere between a trend piece and business reporting. But caught in the middle of it is a surprise celebrity--Annie Leibovitz. As it turns out, public records show that her real estate and photo rights are mortgaged with the company.
Leibovitz is a big celebrity, but other than for the sake of the narrative (in other words, to interest and titillate the reader) what good reason did her financial details belong in this story?
Now, the reporter did nothing wrong here--they just used public records to put a face on a trend. (And they did call her for on the record comment, which she declined to provide.)
But I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if the Times, instead of Leibovitz, had gotten similar financial records for an totally unknown hedge funder showing that he'd, now on hard luck, had hocked his art collection for a $5 million loan, and listed the towns where he owned property (second homes, likely) that he'd also mortgaged.
How would that person feel? And would they have a case against the paper, either moral or legal? Probably not.
#2 Posted by Clint Hendler, CJR on Wed 25 Feb 2009 at 05:15 PM
I see a significant distinction between Clint's example and the kinds of things Josh is talking about. If The New York Times was convinced there was a story about people hocking art and other non-cash assets to make mortgage payments or debt payments, and that information is available in public documents, then to me it doesn't matter whether they choose to write about Annie Leibovitz or an anonymous hedge funder. It's no different from things newspapers have done since well before the digital age, such as publishing marriage, divorce, and bankruptcy filings.
The more interesting aspect of the who's-a-public-figure debate today is the variety of ways that people have to inject themselves into the public eye. Bill Keller is surely a public figure, but what about Josh Marshall? Or a blogger in Asbury Park, NJ, or Riverside, CA? Or how about that guy who posts all his bad poetry on his Web site? Or those frisky teens who send nude photos of themselves to classmates? Are they in effect sacrificing a bit of their status as simply private citizens? Would libel law think so? And where does the whole question of anonymity on the Web figure into this debate?
#3 Posted by Brent Cunningham, CJR on Thu 26 Feb 2009 at 11:55 AM
It seems to me that public versus private, as a broad distinction, has virtually no practical meaning in a cultural moment that marries self-exposition and voyeurism as deftly as ours does. The traditional basis of the contrast between the two states--seeking publicness being the standard for, you know, deserving publicness--no longer applies in any meaningful way, for the simple reason that, in the age of blogs and Facebook and cell-phone cameras, the seeking of publicness is virtually written into the cultural code. We're all public figures now.
So the question for journalism, I'd say, isn't whether certain people are public figures, but how they are. Are they celebrities in the traditional sense? Do decisions they make every day somehow affect the public interest? Have they, most likely, sought the anonymous eminence of the Web? I'm not sure which versions of publicness correlate (or, rather: should correlate) to the press treatment formerly reserved for "public" figures...but, certainly, some re-thinking and re-defining are in order.
The rethinking could go two ways: it could either expand the lines of permission when it comes to reporting on public figures...or contract them. The former--everyone's fair game!--is a more obvious trajectory, and it seems to be the one we're on now. But I'd argue for the latter--for a narrowing of what we deem acceptable in terms of reporting about public figures. Which is to say, about everyone.
Take the Leibovitz story. Was the famous photog's financial situation so pertinent that it fell under the rubric of The Public's Right to Know? No. Leading with Leibovitz--and using her as a "character" to illustrate the article's broader argument--simply made for a better story, upping the ante of the face-to-phenomenon edict by making that face one that belonged to a celebrity. Now, sure, in a letter-of-the-law sense, the Times was entitled to use Leibovitz's example in its piece--the information it shared was already part of the public record, they dutifully asked her for comment, etc.--and yet I couldn't help but come away from that article asking myself, "Wow, was that really necessary?"
There's a line between sharing pertinent information about a public figure and exploiting that figure's publicness for your own story. To my mind, in Leibovitz's case, the Times story skewed toward the latter. Which, hey, you could say that that's the Times's prerogative. So-sad-too-bad for Annie, and everything...but she's famous, and this is what she gets for having sought and won fame.
But, then. When the it's-fair-game-to-report-about-public figures assumption meets the everyone's-a-public-figure reality...something's gotta give. While that something could be our general pretensions to privacy--we may well be, Josh, on our way to an embarrassment-free (or, at least, -desensitized) society--I'd actually argue the opposite: that the more public we become--the more we "put ourselves out there," as it were, for others' consumption--the more ardently we'll guard whatever other facets of our lives we deem to be, you know, none of your business. And the more control we'll want and expect over our own public identities. And by extension: the more inclined we are to see ourselves in public figures (celebrities, politicians, etc.)--and thus the more empathetic we become toward public figures who get "outed," or what have you, by the press--the less tolerant we'll become toward the media's current, generally permissive attitude about what constitutes publicness. And the more umbrage we'll take on behalf of figures like Leibovitz who get outed out of proportion to their fame.
Or maybe we'll all be too busy uploading homemade porn to care...
#4 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 2 Mar 2009 at 07:16 PM
Privacy as a personal choice is getting more and more complicated by the day. When one is online, one tries to hide ones identity by having `chat names.' However, the same person would reveal everything about himself/herself while chatting. The concept of public/private has changed drastically with everyone having their pictures on Social networking sites for the world to see.
It is easy to blame the press when one's private life is apparantly invaded... but I want to know... who are the people who are most concerned about privacy? If one enters a slum area and talks about their lifestyle, we would put it in a sociology research paper and discuss it in seminars. We would perhaps call it social service. Will that slum dweller be even aware that his privacy has been invaded? The question is who is going to define the concept of privacy? The law? The govt? The UN? or each of us who have our own idea of privacy?
#5 Posted by Archana, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 09:46 AM