The Only Way Is Ethics: How do we decide what is in the public interest?

A newspaper which only published articles to serve a narrowly defined public interest, or which only included details that were strictly related to the matter at hand would be pretty dry

(REUTERS)

If there is one phrase less fit for purpose than the utterly irritating “fit for purpose” then it is surely that smugly-said truism about the public interest not necessarily being defined by what interests the public. Rarely has such an inane expression been intoned with such faux wisdom and such frequency.

There are of course endless debates to be had about what type of content is and is not in the public interest. Common ground tends to be found over material that serves some sort of public good: an article which uncovers corporate impropriety; or a programme which exposes misleading statements by a person in authority.

But even if agreement can be reached on what the public interest actually is, there often remains division on the question of how frequently it should be employed as a defence for publication. To put it another way, should everything we publish serve the public interest (however defined) or is a public interest justification only required when there would otherwise be an infringement of some other ethical norm?

I was reminded of this question last week when a reader queried a report about a woman who had taken legal action to try to stop Westminster Council re-housing her and her children. In our article we included information about the woman’s background. We said she had successfully sought asylum some years ago, was now a British citizen and was a single mother. We also named her children and included a picture of the family.

Was all this information relevant, asked the reader? And was it, he wondered, really in the best interests of the children for them to be identified as being dependent on state benefits?

The second question was a reasonable one but overlooked the fact that we had published the children’s identities with their mother’s consent; and there was no obvious reason to withhold anodyne information which had been freely given.

As to whether it was relevant to note that the family originated from overseas, it is certainly true that the article would have hung together without the fact. That the subject of the piece was a single mother was pertinent in that it potentially had an impact on the family’s earning capabilities. But again, we could have written the article without mentioning her marital status.

Yet this issue of relevance, which is broadly speaking an extension of the public interest debate, can become an over-bearing mantra. Simply put, there are oodles of details that could be removed from news stories without the crux being fundamentally compromised. Likewise, a lot of media output does not strictly serve a public interest in the sense of being crucial to the common weal. But the point is, it should necessarily have to.

When David Cameron makes a speech about the EU, it is not crucial or strictly relevant to note that he was in Manchester or that he went there by train or that he spoke for 45 minutes. When a person is arrested it may not be vital or necessarily germane to name the road they live on. The fact that a person may or may not be married is not central to whether they have been treated properly by their local council.

But background information establishes context and, let’s be honest, makes a story more readable. A newspaper which only published articles to serve a narrowly defined public interest, or which only included details that were strictly related to the matter at hand would be pretty dry. And newspapers can only serve the public interest if people read them; they must therefore be interesting to the public. Now there’s a nice turn of phrase...