Flogging press freedom

PRESENT TENSE:THE BRITISH PRESS has been having a certain amount of fun with the ongoing Max Mosley vs News of the World trial, writes Shane Hegarty.

Not only has it presented the opportunity to use such arresting headlines as "Max Mosley beaten until blood was drawn in SM session" (Daily Telegraph), but the Guardian asked "What the Max Mosley SM trial reveals about sex and Britain".

By way of illustration, it dressed its own logo in a leather-and-zips outfit. This was cuter than you might imagine. Neither approach the News of the World's original claim: "Max Mosley has sick Nazi orgy."

Mosley, head of the FIA, which regulates Formula 1, has sued because he believes this was both untrue and that it infringed his right to privacy.

And the press's motivation for reporting the case lies not just in its mix of titillation, prurience and old-fashioned British sex comedy, but because the whippings, Luftwaffe uniforms and bloody bottoms are the ingredients of a trial that could seriously alter British press freedoms and trigger further cases.

Mosley has never come across as a particularly sympathetic character, and held on to his job against the wishes of a large minority of the FIA but, in taking the case, he is doing something quite valiant.

Regardless of what you might think about his sexual fetish, he is opening this up to scrutiny for the second time this year. The first time around came with the tabloid's sting, which claimed that on two occasions in March Mosley had paid five prostitutes to enact a concentration camp scene. The attraction of the Nazi angle comes chiefly from the fact that Mosley is a son of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

The tabloid's video footage was subsequently posted online, and the prostitute who filmed the romp, known in court as "Woman E", was to be paid £25,000. Afterwards, however, the fee was renegotiated, with the News of the World's editor, Colin Myler, claiming that the paper had been affected by the credit crunch. Mosley's QC claims it was because she hadn't captured him doing Sieg Heil salutes.

The newspapers contend that it reported on Mosley's carry-on because it was in the public interest to do so. In what way?

"The fact he spent five hours with five girls in a brutal orgy [is] rather significant given who he is - both in terms of his professional position and his antecedents within his family," Myler told the court. Besides, he claimed, the role-play had a "potential criminal flavour" to it. Mosley has never denied that he engaged five prostitutes to indulge him on some sadomasochistic role-play, but says that what he gets up to in the privacy of a bedroom is not in the public interest. The reporting, he is claiming, was a breach of Article Eight of the Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to privacy.

By suing for damages, then, he is exposing himself both to humiliation and serious financial damage. But, in doing so, he is asking some serious questions of a culture which often blames the subject of such intrusion.

Editors will regularly argue that those who live in the public eye are always fair game. They cling to this as a default argument, a line of defence to also retreat to. The News of the World is at the fore of stretching that argument to its most tendentious.

The Mosley case came around the same time the paper ran footage of a home sex tape that featured a premier league manager and an "un-named mistress", as well as some graphic descriptions of what featured in it for those unwilling to have a look themselves.

Yet the tape was six years old, and it's hard to see where the public interest lay in running it. Had the manager made pronouncements on public morality? Did he use his family to further his image or career? Had he sold a player who had played away? No. Yet he was subjected to public humiliation which began in the newspaper and went straight to the terrace chants. If Mosley wins his case, the impact will be felt the next time an editor is presented with a story involving a public figure and their private life. There has been a core within British journalism, though, which would welcome this, which feels that the moralising of the tabloids has gone too far, too often. These represent, in the main, broadsheet journalists.

Others argue that a judgement for Mosley would lead to an erosion of press freedom, pushing it further towards European norms, where private and public lives do not mix in newsprint. Ultimately, the consequences are unlikely to be so extreme, but it would set a standard that would force a change of editorial attitude by more than just the News of the World.

For the press in Ireland, while there would be no legal implications, it would stunt certain elements within the British papers, which have steadily encroached on the local media landscape in both sales and method. And it would at least serve to take such stories - with tactics and personalities largely disconnected from the Irish market - off the newsagents' shelves here. Would many customers gripe about that?