Media Standards Trust

‘We're able to feast on every detail’ of the Meredith Kercher murder – partly because the press do not risk contempt of court and partly because chief suspects Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito published photos and accounts of their private lives on social networking sites. Is this degree of detail justified? Are there any limits and if so, what are they?

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A ‘slow and agonising death’

Since Meredith Kercher’s gruesome murder in Perugia on 1st November we’ve been made privy to almost every detail of the ongoing investigation. As with Madeleine McCann in Portugal, the contempt of court rules do not apply, and the local police and judiciary have been much more open with the progress of their investigation than their British counterparts would be in a similar situation.

The ‘minute-by-minute dossier’ written by judge Claudia Matteini (said to have been leaked by local police) coupled with the report of the pathologist, Luca Lalli, has led news outlets to describe Kercher’s death in all its grisly specifics.

From the Sunday Mirror, for example, we learn that: ‘Traces of Meredith's blood was found on Sollecito's underwear after police searched his home. The suspects used a mop and bucket to clean up the murder scene which Knox, an American, hid at her Sollecito's house after the killing [and] Meredith was still alive when her attackers fled the home, leaving her to bleed to death’.

To some journalists this level of detail demonstrates how out-dated and unjustified the British system is. ’The closed nature of our own system is often cited as a mark of our judicial superiority’ says Peter McKay in the Daily Mail, ‘but it only serves the interests of lawyers’.

But such reports inevitably rely on other reports, on leaks, and on conjecture – some of which later turns out to be false. The press initially reported for example, that Ms Kercher was not sexually assaulted, and that there was a fourth suspect, both of which stories have since been denied (and then resuscitated).

As a result of the coverage, Magnus Linklater argues in The Times, it 'is almost impossible to imagine'...'How any of the three suspects so far arrested in Perugia can expect a fair trial'.

 

‘Foxyknoxy’ and the ‘mad doctor’

We already know significant amounts about two of the chief suspects – due partly to the details they published about their private lives on social networking websites. ‘Within hours we knew more about them than we could ever have wanted’ Peter Popham writes in the Independent, ‘their naff ideas about dressing up, their lousy sense of humour, Knox's laboured and inconsequential attempts at prose fiction.’ Much has been made of these personal details which appear to incriminate each of them.

Amanda Knox: or ‘Foxy Knoxy’ as she calls herself on MySpace, can be seen ‘drunk and rambling’ with her friends in Perugia in a 30 second YouTube video or, in a separate image, holding a machine gun and laughing. John Follain, writing in the Sunday Times, quotes her as saying "I love new situations ... The bigger and scarier the rollercoaster, the better." And a number of news outlets picked up on her short stories, one of which – about two brothers discussing drugging and raping a girl, has been presented as evidence of her sinister character. Knox has, as Mary Riddell writes in the Observer, already ‘been found guilty in the court of social networking’.

Raffaele Sollecito: has been ‘similarly damned’ after pictures of him were found on the internet posing ‘as a mad doctor wielding a meat cleaver’ (from Mary Riddell).
The pictures on his blog ‘showed him dressed in a surgeon's outfit, holding a meat cleaver in one hand and a container of bleach in the other’ (from Daily Mail). Articles also talks darkly about Sollecito’s ‘travels to Prague, Nuremburg and the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau’.

Did Knox and Sollecito sacrifice their right to privacy when they published their details on the internet?

 

Should different images and personal details be treated differently? How?

If the private lives and images of the suspects in the Kercher murder are ‘fair game’ for reporting, what about other people’s details? Should different rules apply to pictures of Meredith Kercher, for example, photographs of whom we have seen enjoying herself at a Halloween party the night before her death?

Or what about other personal details pulled off the net? How, for example, should journalists treat pictures of the firefighters who tragically died at the fire in Atherstone-on-Stour?

‘Atherstone-on-Stour and Perugia are a long way apart’ Dan Roberts writes in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘But their twin tragedies last week produced hauntingly similar images: casual, smiling faces of young people posted on the internet’.

‘The media has a responsibility’ Roberts continues, ‘to treat these pages with the respect we give to memorials carved in stone’.

And how should news outlets treat images of self-confessed murderers like Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the Finnish student who recorded himself preparing to shoot his school mates and posted it on YouTube?

 

How do you place a value on privacy?

‘Personal information has become the currency of the information age’, Charlie Edwards of Demos commented earlier this year. People now have a different understanding of ‘private life’ compared with previous generations. As such ‘the parameters of the debate on privacy’ Edwards writes, ‘need to be redefined to reflect the new environment in which we find ourselves’.

Does this new understanding extend automatic license to the broader media to publish whatever is available on the net? What responsibilities do news organisations have when using this information?

If our previous understanding of privacy is dead, what should replace it? How can we redefine privacy in the self-promotional age of Facebook and MySpace? Do we need to ‘encourage in young people an understanding of the value of privacy, and a sense of the very real dangers that might attend them should they discard it’ as Marina Hyde suggested in the Guardian last Saturday?

 

Are there any limits to reporting on the ‘fame generation’?

 

Recommended

‘Murder in Perugia: Dangerous games of the Facebook generation’, Peter Popham, Independent on Sunday, 11-11-07

'Whether Meredith or Madeleine, it's trial by media', Magnus Linklater, The Times, 14-11-07

‘The narcissism that terrifies parents’, Mary Riddell, The Observer, 11-11-07

‘The faces that haunt us on Facebook’, Dan Roberts, The Sunday Telegraph, 11-11-07

‘Whose privacy is it anyway?’, Charlie Edwards, The Guardian, 28-3-07

At the risk of sounding like the sociologist that I am, privacy is always a normative construct - it's a set of cultural, moral or legal rules that we (in the West) create and observe, to delineate separate spheres of our lives. Much of the time we don't need these rules because technical obstacles do the work for us. But when these obstacles are removed, suddenly we have to get to work on producing rules instead. The shift to open plan offices is a good example: because people don't actually *want* to do everything publicly, they have to learn to whisper in a way that was previously unnecessary.

Presumably the same thing will happen very quickly with social networking sites. People will learn how to preserve their privacy in an age when there are insufficient technological obstacles to do it for them. Perhaps new networking sites will be built with more closure (livejournal did this; facebook offers it).

But what makes this case different is that nobody in such instances expects to ever be front page news. We're all pretty comfortable now with peer-to-peer surveillance (the many watching the many), and anyone with any common sense will be able to weigh up the risk of a prospective employer snooping on them online. The risk of becoming a celebrity (the many watching the few), on the other hand, is so small as to be deemed irrelevant.

I don't see any obvious solution here, other than for people to start using greater privacy settings on networking sites. Perhaps some equivalent to the creative commons license could be invented, and attached to photos (effectively saying 'not for commercial or public use') which would make them unusable by large news organisations. But without that, it is surely impossible for us to start splitting our definition of 'public'.

With our increasing sophistication comes increasing cynicism and I suspect that as more people communicate globally through social networks and blogs of all kinds, the more wary we must all become about the veracity of what we read. The public's appetite for sensationalism and drama, for details and gory ones in particular is endlessly fuelled by movies and video games and now virtually unregulated speculation is possible on the interweb. The impact on true, hard facts, unbiased juries and the justice systems - which vary so much from country to country - can only be detrimental. But any attempt to restrict our right to write would be resisted and subverted. Police and ambulancemen sell stories. Papers print them. We buy them and then recycle them instantly around the world. We sometimes profess our distate, but the circulation continues and the appetite appears unsatisfied. And our concern for the impact of all this on those closest to the people killed, lost, wronged, or missing seems of worryingly little importance. Does our prurience know no bounds?