By pursuing her privacy case, Naomi Campbell has performed a service on behalf of freedom of expression.
That this is probably the first time you've come across such an evaluation since the announcement of the Law Lords' judgment last Thursday is a measure of the extent to which the media have come to abuse their privileged role as disseminators of fact and opinion by promoting their own interests to the exclusion of contrary views.
Ms Campbell's case was that her privacy was invaded by an article and photographs published in the Mirror newspaper, revealing her attendance at a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. The House of Lords overturned an appeals court ruling and reinstated a 2002 High Court decision awarding her damages for the Mirror's breach of confidence and invasion of privacy. Media interests have been fulminating that the judgment will restrict what the media can publish about the private lives of public individuals. I hope they are right. The Mirror said it published the story "in the public interest" because Campbell had claimed repeatedly that she, unlike other models, was drug-free.
The judgments focused on the balance said to be required between the competing rights of individual privacy and freedom of expression. Three of the five judges found that publication of the photos and details of Ms Campbell's treatment were unnecessary and interfered with her therapy. Two judges dissented, one judge finding that the press is entitled "to put the record straight" when public figures present a false image and lie about their life.
All five judgments exhibited a narrow grasp of the public interest and of freedom of expression. As has become commonplace in legal circles, an essentially tabloid version of free speech was taken at face value, and departed from only to a degree by a majority of the judges because of the extreme nature of the particular privacy issue involved. And little in the five judgments conveyed the potentially lethal consequences for people like Naomi Campbell if the particular principle she was arguing for is defeated.
Drug addiction is a fatal illness. Narcotics Anonymous is not so called for the fun of it: anonymity is the foundation-stone of its capacity to help drug addicts. Without anonymity, no NA, no recovery programme and perhaps ultimately no Naomi Campbell. By breaching her anonymity, the Mirror was arguably placing her life at risk. Whether or not she had, as one judge put it "gone out of her way to make repeated claims that she didn't take drugs" is neither here nor there. She had a perfect right to protect her privacy and anonymity in this life-or-death matter. To suggest otherwise is monstrous.
The view taken by the courts in general has been that if people seek publicity to present a positive image of themselves, they cannot complain if others succeed in presenting a different picture by invading their privacy or breaching confidentiality. The guiding principle is that the public should not be misled. This is essentially an anti-hypocrisy charter, but among the things it misses is that we are all of us, including judges and newspaper editors, hypocrites of one kind or another. Nor does it take sufficient account of the nature of modern media, which often pursue a strategy of "build-'em-up-to-knock-'em-down" - firstly presenting celebrities as whiter-than-white, and then, when this vein is exhausted, trotting out the feet-of-clay exposés.
In a certain sense, the view of press freedom put forward by the Mirror amounts to a blueprint for censorship. If it were accepted that, by courting publicity at all, an individual forfeits the right to privacy, the consequences for free speech would be catastrophic. If it were further established that an individual has no right to have personal weaknesses kept private, the end result would be that only saints and morons would seek publicity, with appalling consequences for public debate and cultural life.
Future generations may therefore have cause to be grateful to Naomi Campbell for the persistence with which she has pursued an important principle. For, imagine that the celebrity in question was a writer, film-maker, philosopher or even a pop singer, who had attracted media interest on account of his or her work. By declaring open season on the private lives and affairs of such individuals, we place at risk their continuing willingness or freedom to contribute to societal culture or debate. (Indeed, not content with destroying the lives of celebrities, certain media interests have on occasion sought to extend their "rights" to the affairs of the celebrities' children.)
We have a clear choice: which are we more interested in preserving, the right of people to make artistic or intellectual contributions without having their private affairs become public property, or the right of tabloid newspapers to print whatever they please?
And Naomi Campbell is not in the least a weak example of the principle: the right to be beautiful and wear nice clothes in public is as important as the right to expound ponderous ideas from behind a grey beard.