Naomi Campbell case raises issue of privacy

Supermodel Naomi Campbell was photographed by the Mirror newspaper as she left a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She claims this was an invasion of her privacy.

Naomi Campbell has taken the issue up in the High Court in London, claiming that the Mirror newspaper invaded her privacy by revealing the photographs in an edition published last year. The 31-year-old supermodel told the court that she realised she had a problem with hard drugs in 1997 but that she had sought professional help.

She said the article in the Mirror left her feeling that “for the first time in a long while I doubted my resolve to go on”. She claims that the photographs and article were a violation of her personal rights and declares that she felt “shocked, angry, betrayed and violated” by the publicising of her personal life.

The newspaper states that since taking drugs is illegal, she has no case to argue and that as a public figure, she loses her rights to privacy.

The Mirror newspaper is one of those connected with so-called gutter journalist, the sort of rag which pays reporters to place microphones in toilet bowls and hounds distressed people to the limit, if not to their deaths.

Journalists and the newspapers have the responsibility to provide news but it is they who should draw the line at where to stop. News is issues of public interest, which shape public opinion or mould social behaviour, which foster a collective thought process or nurture dialogue or comprehension.

Whether Naomi Campbell has a drugs problem or not, is not information for the public domain. It is her private and personal life. Public figures have all too little of this and what little they have should not be invaded by cheap guttersnipes who earn a living by smearing the reputation of others in public. Such beings bring the whole profession into disrepute, making the journalist for many people the most hated and vilified life form in professional life.

Naomi Campbell is a model. It is on this and her performance on the catwalk that she should be judged, for in becoming a model, she opens herself up to criticism within her professional activity, but not her private life.

The same goes for the members of a public figure’s family. People in public office can be judged, praised or criticised for what they do in the act of performing this office, whether it be political or not. What they do 50 metres from the workplace is of no concern to anyone, except the guttersnipes.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru