Have you ever staggered out of bed, bleary-eyed, and tottered to the grocery shop round the corner for an emergency carton of milk and had a photographic record of your creased T-shirt-and-shorts pyjama combo broadcast to the rest of the world?

Or have you ever opened your mouth wide to bite into a juicy burger and had a snap of your greedy gulp frozen in time and shown on the World Wide Web?

Have you ever dieted unsuccessfully and had evidence of your lack of will­power shown to all, as a photograph of you straining against your stomach control swimwear is uploaded online?

Luckily, most of us haven’t had to face these reminders of embarrassing (though perfectly legal) moments captured on film. Not everybody is as fortunate in avoiding such unwelcome attention.

Nationalist MP Claudette Buttigieg has complained about the invasion of privacy of fellow Nationalist politicians. She said that the candid snaps of fellow MPs being uploaded on certain sites was conditioning them and that the prospect of being featured on online blogs was deterring some of them from doing perfectly normal everyday things.

Buttigieg mentioned being photo­graphed with her daughter. Even though her daughter’s face had been obscured in the photograph, it was clear to viewers that it was her daughter.

According to Buttigieg, the MPs caught on camera are the victims of those behind the lens who are snapping away in an effort to condition the MPs’ beha­viour and to destroy them psy­cho­logically. There were also the many spiteful online comments, constantly spewed out by anonymous commentators, to contend with. Parliamentarians were hurt by these unidentified haters.

There is very little public interest value in citizens being able to pore over politicians’ paunches, or giggling because they’ve had a bad hair day, or being privy to who their dining companions are

She is quite right, of course. There is very little public interest value in citizens being able to pore over politicians’ paunches, or giggling because they’ve had a bad hair day, or being privy to who their dining com­panions are. I would say that the public has absolutely no right or need to know what politicians’ minor children are wearing or what they are doing. It is simply not right to drag them into the public eye simply because their parents are elected representatives of the people.

And there is no other reason for up­loading such shots than to condition the subjects of the photographs and to put them in the uncomfortable situation of always having to look over their shoulders, wondering if the diner at the next table is sending that photo of you wolfing down spaghetti to some unfriendly blogger. This is not holding politicians to account for their actions as elected officials but causing them to feel that they are being stalked round the clock.

However, what is not right or ethical is not always illegal. And so it is in this case. Taking photographs of others in a public place is perfectly legal – even if the photographs are taken without their con­sent. There is no legal bar to the political paparazzi papping away even if it causes distress and is not justifiable.

So where do we go from here?

Do we have to put up with a situation where all are fair game even in un­guarded moments? Regrettably, it looks like it, as there is no way of putting the genie back in the bottle.

In the local scenario, this hounding of political figures started in the 1990s when the movements of Labour’s Alfred Sant were constantly made public with men­tion being made of when and where he was dining with his minor daughter and the highlighting of the details of personal court proceedings to a wider audience.

This is very similar to what Buttigieg is finding objectionable now.

Back then, the public’s ‘right to know’ was used to justify people’s prurient and uncharitable instincts and it has been one long race to the bottom, with the era of scurrilous reporting reaching its nadir now with the age of modern technology.

To paraphrase Gandhi’s “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”, “A snap for a snap makes the whole world public fodder”.

If there are any lessons to be learnt from this, it’s that we should resist cruel and unethical behaviour at all times, even when it is meted out to our political enemies. Otherwise we will not attract much sympathy when we are on the receiving end of the same actions we ignored.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt

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