UK media inquiry becomes hottest show in town as JK Rowling, Hugh Grant take tabloids to task

By Associated Press, Published: November 25

LONDON — It was a bad week to be a tabloid journalist in Britain.
For four days, the famous, the infamous, the bereaved and the wronged sat in a London courtroom and told how snooping, smears and snatched photographs had made their lives a misery. They portrayed the press as cynical and brutal in its treatment of individuals, capitalizing on their tragedies with little decency or compassion.

 

High-profile celebrities testified in UK courts about how they say they were hounded by paparazzi after their phones were hacked. (Nov. 25)

A-list witnesses including J.K. Rowling, Hugh Grant, and Sienna Miller turned Britain’s media ethics inquiry into the most compelling drama in town. But critics say it’s a misleading and one-sided show.
“It has not been a pretty sight,” said Bob Satchwell of media group the Society of Editors. “But there are 1,300 newspapers, national and regional, in Britain, and most journalists don’t behave in the way that’s being portrayed.”

The behavior of Britain’s scandalmongering, scoop-hungry and millions-selling tabloids was summed up by “Harry Potter” creator Rowling as “cavalier.” The best-selling author said newspapers took the attitude that “You’re famous, you’re asking for it.”

Rowling recounted how journalists slipped a note into her 5-year-old daughter’s school bag, took pictures of her children in their swimsuits and staked out her home until she felt “like a hostage.”
Grant said that since “Four Weddings and a Funeral” made him a star, details of his hospital visits had been leaked, his garbage rifled, his ex girlfriend and infant daughter harassed.

Miller, the star of “Alfie” and “Layer Cake,” described being pursued down the street at midnight by 10 large men.

“And the fact that they had cameras in their hands meant that that was legal,” said the 29-year-old actress. “But if you take away the cameras, what have you got? You’ve got a pack of men chasing a woman.”

Witnesses’ detailed descriptions of aggressive press intrusion, broadcast live on British television, have focused public attention on murky tabloid practices.

Media lawyer David Allen Green wrote in a blog for the New Statesman magazine that the inquiry was already helping freedom of expression.

“The merit of the Leveson inquiry — regardless of its formal findings in its reports — is that it is giving a platform to those whose voices are deliberately smothered by the tabloid press,” he wrote.
Not all the witnesses were famous. Some suffered because of proximity to fame. Mary Ellen Field, who worked for Elle Macpherson, recounted how the supermodel blamed her when personal stories started appearing in the press, and forced Field to go to a rehab facility in the U.S. for her — nonexistent — alcoholism.

Macpherson later learned her phone had been hacked — newspapers were getting information by illegal eavesdropping, not because of any indiscretion on Field’s part. Field had already been fired.
The parents of missing and murdered children told of much worse ordeals, of unbearable intrusion at times of grief.

Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine vanished during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007, said she felt “totally violated” when extracts from her private diary appeared in the News of the World tabloid in 2008.

Washington Post