Sacrificed privacy of a duchess does not justify sacrifice of journalists’ jobs

GROUCHO Marx once observed: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”

In like vein, it’s fair to assume that Michael O’Kane, editor of the Irish Daily Star, has many times had a perfectly wonderful weekend, but that this particular one wasn’t among them.

Because this was the weekend when he did what a tabloid editor would do to sell more papers, no doubt expecting a bucket -full of high-minded condemnation from the kind of people who would never read his paper anyway. Instead, he found the condemnation coming in container-loads and his owners competing to pull the rug out from under him.

What Mr O’Kane did was risky, but must have seemed relatively minor, as risks taken by editors go. He published photographs of the former Kate Middleton on her holidays in France. Topless. This happened after the photographs had already been published in France, and at a time when an Italian publication had announced it, too, was going to publish them in a special edition of its magazine, due to hit the streets today.

Although he does not seem to have gone looking for additional protective cover, the editor would have found protective cover aplenty in what happened a couple of weeks ago, when the then-editor of the Evening Herald (now the editor of the Irish Independent) chose to publish pictures of Prince Harry, starkers, on his front page.

Lots of publicity ensued, with global media outlets from NBC to CNN looking for interviews with members of the editorial team, but not much negativity. Mr O’Kane may have expected much the same, particularly since he put only a small topless shot on his front page, saving the splash for inside the newspaper.

Mr O’Kane is a man whose journalistic credentials are pretty impressive. Before his 10 years in RTÉ, (some of them spent in Belfast) which predated him moving to serve as Ger Colleran’s second-in-command in the Star, he had been with The Irish Press. Immediately after publication, when British media descended on him, red in tooth and claw, he was matter-of-fact, his understated and unsentimental responses (“I’m a little taken aback by the reaction in the UK”) suggesting that he may have felt, like Macauley, that there’s no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.

“The Duchess would be no different to any other celeb pics we would get in,” he explained. “It only seems to be an issue in the UK because she is your future queen, but in Ireland, Kate Middleton is just another of the fantastic line of celebrities…”

He did not spout tripe like that produced by his Italian counterpart, the editor of Chi magazine, who warbled something to the effect that the pictures were congruent with a new concept of monarchy. Nor did former Star editor and current managing director, Ger Colleran, unique on the red top front in his capacity to ascend to the high moral ground — particularly when he’s in the wrong — with the speedy grace of a Sherpa. Colleran, in one of the few comments he made since the edition hit the streets and the smelly stuff hit the fan, defined the episode as nothing more than an Irish newspaper “trying to make a few shillings”.

This incident allows for an abundance of “on the one hand and on other hand” reactions. On the one hand, Kate Middleton didn’t get nicknamed “Waity Katy” for nothing. She waited a long time to marry the man who would be king, and therefore had a solid opportunity for action research about the realities of being his consort.

Those realities include media intrusion. The understanding the young woman brought to her difficult role as Duchess of Cambridge would have been informed by what British media regarded as perfectly acceptable, prior to the Leveson Inquiry and the News of the World doing ritual disembowelment on itself. So she would have been well aware of the camera secreted in a gym to take photographs of Princess Diana, unbeknownst to the late Princess of Wales.

However, knowledge is one thing. It’s another thing altogether to expect a newcomer to world celebrity status to translate that knowledge into predictive text about her own future so that it restricted what she might do in the private home of a relative. The rationale presented by those who commissioned the long-lens shots; that the Duke and Duchess were out in the open on a balcony, and visible from the road, is nonsense. If a grainy shot is the best that a strong telephoto lens can achieve, then the couple were not, in real terms, “visible from the road”.

Yet within hours, the British co-owners of the newspaper, a company named Northern and Shell, had come out to indicate that they weren’t responsible, hadn’t known, wouldn’t have approved of publication if they had known, and wanted the tabloid closed. This was not a general aspiration: Northern and Shell’s top guy, Richard Desmond, announced that he was taking immediate action to shut down the joint venture. Not long after, the other co-owner, INM, established that they hadn’t known in advance either, and that if they had known, they wouldn’t have approved. Suddenly, what might otherwise have been an issue of privacy became a real and present threat to the survival of the paper and the maintenance of its 70-plus jobs.

NOW, call it naivete or attribute it to my lack of familiarity with the works and pomps of Northern and Shell and Richard Desmond, but I’d have expected the British part-owners of this newspaper to take a Voltairean stance, establishing their disagreement with an editor’s action but willingness to defend to the death his right to take such action. And I would hazard a guess that Michael O’Kane, for two reasons, would not have expected the reaction Desmond delivered. The first reason is that Desmond has not publicly disapproved of earlier editorial behaviour on the part of the Star, which would lead any editor to believe that the way the paper was run and the kind of material it published were acceptable to the co-owner.

The second reason Desmond’s response may have blind-sided the Star’s editorial team is that Desmond doesn’t have much of a track record in what used to be called “serious media”. In fact, much of his money was made through his publication of Penthouse magazine, and who to this day publishes magazines with titles like Horny Asian Babes. Seamus Dooley, head of the NUJ, without getting into the details of Desmond’s porn-based wealth, did object yesterday to “being lectured on ethics and morality by Richard Desmond”. Dooley’s major concern as a trade union leader is about the possibility that Richard Desmond may be happy to abandon his equity in the Irish Star in order to protect his UK interests and become a more accepted member of the British establishment.

Sacrificing the privacy of a modest, pleasant and professional young woman like the Duchess of Cambridge invites easy condemnation. It does not justify sacrificing the livelihoods of uninvolved and clearly innocent journalists.