The press has every right to invade the privacy of Posh and Becks
The Sun is very unhappy with Der Spiegel. According to the German magazine, Britain is a land of `declining moral fibre, public services and law and order'. Our hospitals are understaffed and our prisons are overflowing. Drunken brawls at weekends have reached epidemic proportions. Our railways are hopeless. Truancy is prevalent. Our gutters are awash with condoms. And, oh yes, our idols are drunken footballers.
A reasonably accurate picture, you might think. The Sun, though, would have none of it. In an angry piece on Tuesday, the paper claimed that the `UK economic motor has kept rewing over the past five years. Germany's has spluttered and stalled.' (Well, yes. The difference is, perhaps, that between a souped-up Ford Escort with twin exhausts and wide wheels, and a run-down Mercedes held together by string, but a Mercedes nonetheless.) The Sun accused the Germans of being lazy, and pointed out that our unemployment rate is much lower. Even the vaunted German railway system came in for a bashing. According to the Sun, 15 per cent of German trains are late. So there. Nowhere in this broadside was there the slightest concession that Britain is not an absolutely perfect country.
In the same issue that the Sun let Jerry have it, the paper carried a near-naked picture of Sarah Marbeck, who claims that she had 'wild sex' with the footballer David Beckham. Two inside pages were devoted to the latest developments in the saga. (The following day the Sun claimed that Sarah has had a stint as a hooker. She is not to be confused with the first woman, Rebecca Loos, formerly revered by the 'red-tops' as having a 'cut-glass accent', now written off as `the sleazy senorita') On Monday the Sun had cleared five pages for the story. On Sunday its sister title, the News of the World, had given over its first 11 pages to Beckham's alleged infidelities. Eleven pages! But don't let's pick on just these two newspapers. The other tabloids were almost as bad, and of course the broadsheets joined in, with the Daily Telegraph running a piece on its front page.
I put it too you, ladies and gentlemen, that a country whose bestselling newspaper devotes 11 pages to the sexual antics of David Beckham is probably at least as dysfunctional as Der Spiegel suggests. In no other country in the world would the allegedly seedy sex life of
a footballer with a reedy voice and a ridiculous ponytail be treated as a national event Shall we blame Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the News of the World? Certainly. And its editor? Of course. But don't spare the 12 million readers of the News of the World either. I didn't see any of them burning copies in disgust in my neck of the woods. If they did not enjoy reading about Beckham's sex life, I don't suppose the paper would write about it.
And yet I comfort myself with the thought that there are people in all walks of life who do not want to read about David Beckham and the sleazy senorita. Do not worry: I am not about to plug a planned upmarket newspaper which will confine the likes of Beckham to the sports pages. There are millions and millions of us, men and women, young and old, dukes and dustmen, who do not give a fig whether David Beckham has a hundred affairs with a legion of sleazy senoritas and alleged hookers. In our perfect world he would be earning 1500 a week, cleaning his own boots, and be counting himself fortunate. We do not fancy him if we are women, or admire him if we are men. We would be perfectly happy if we never read another word about him again, though some of us might show a flicker of interest were he to score a goal for England during the forthcoming European championships.
We who are utterly indifferent to David Beckham the man constitute a teeming army. And although we wish we lived in a Beckham-free country, I don't think that we believe that he has been shabbily treated by the press. He and his wife Posh have lived high on the hog in the media. They have basked in the gushing admiration of OK! and Hello! magazines, befriended the newspaper proprietor and pornographer Richard Desmond, had their publicity agents stroke and flatter their friends in the press to secure favourable coverage. Even now they strain every sinew to perform for the media as the perfect and happily mar
ried couple. The press created them with their eager compliance and now attempts to destroy them before, no doubt, building up Becks — the seemingly wholly talentless Posh may be jettisoned — all over again.
Perhaps the coverage is false, you may say. Well, it is one thing to instruct your lawyers, as Posh and Becks have done, quite another to issue writs; and no one should take talk of legal action seriously until the writs begin to fly. It is all part of the PR dance — Posh and Becks joshing in the snow in France, Posh and her son flying out to Madrid, instructing lawyers. I am afraid that I cannot get very worked up by the idea that the privacy of Posh and Becks may have been invaded. They have lived by the media, and now they must be prepared to die by them.
Last weekend's Sunday Telegraph carried a large picture on its front page of a young German man who had been killed by Iraqi insurgents. It was very gruesome. Blood covers the face of the dead man. He lies on the ground, one bloody arm stretched above his head. The photograph was accompanied by a vivid and well-written account by a young reporter called Lee Gordon, who, no doubt having faced some risks himself, had interviewed the killers.
Should this picture have been carried on the front? The defence is that this event happened. The German was murdered. Showing his bloodied corpse illustrated the terrible things of which the Iraqi mujahedin are capable. Many years ago, no doubt after similar reasoning, the Sunday Telegraph covered most of its front page with a photograph of a British soldier who had been cut to pieces by an IRA mob at a funeral. Again, the defence would have been that picture showed how bestial the IRA could be.
And yet I do have misgivings about using such photographs so prominently. What is to us a mere corpse is to someone somewhere a dead son, husband or friend. For us and the newspaper, the purpose of the dead man is to illustrate a political point. Would the pro. war Sunday Telegraph have carried on its front page a picture of a mutilated Iraqi child killed by an American bomb? The trouble with corpses is that they end up as pawns in an argument. We look at them without thinking about their humanity, or perhaps caring very much that a few minutes before this awful picture was taken this was a live human being who mattered to someone.
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