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| During the farce of the "impeachment" of President Clinton by the Newt Gingrich, lame-duck Congress, I urged the position that public people, especially presidents of the United States, had the same right to personal privacy as did every other American. The reason is that their privacy is everyone's privacy. If salacious tabloids and keyhole-peeping gossip columnists can violate the privacy of public people, there is nothing to prevent them from going after the privacy of any one of us. I argue the same position about the unfortunate young women who have become media starlets, taking a stand against those who would destroy their careers and their lives by trolling the cesspools of Hollywood and against the hard-eyed readers who revel in their torments. | ||||
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It is nowhere written in the Decalogue or other ethical catalogues or books of morality that a person loses his or her right to privacy because she or he has become a "celebrity" -- surely an intolerable corruption of ethics that serves only the twisted needs of media "consumers." I await jeremiads from evangelical clerics against these immoral purveyors of dirt. Moreover, Sen. John McCain is entitled to his own privacy and does not lose his right to it because he is running for president of the United States on the Republican ticket -- which is, at most, a venial sin. The innuendos of the New York Times with respect to an attractive woman lobbyist who hung around the senator puts the great, gray Times in the same category as the National Enquirer. If both people say that they are only "friends," then the rest of us, dependent as we are on journalistic integrity to preserve our own reputations, must accept them at their word, whatever our dirty minds would like to think. McCain's vicious and untrue attacks on the senator from Illinois do not justify us engaging in morose delectation over McCain's own conflict with the NYT. |
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It would have been completely appropriate for the Times to point out that a lobbyist close to McCain had access to the senator, his staff and his office, and that this lobbyist was able to participate in fierce threats to the Federal Communications Commission if it did not acquiesce to the demands of the lobbyist's client. Indeed, that fact was on the public record, as the diligent Washington Post discovered in a couple of days. This was certainly unfortunate behavior for a senator who has taken such strong stands against lobbyists. But what difference did the gender and the age and the hair color of the lobbyist make? How was the nature of the relationship between the senator and the lobbyist germane to the lobbyist's influence in the senatorial office? The Times apparently argued that it would not be a powerful enough story without its crude suggestions of possible adultery. The public had a right to know this, apparently -- the argument the national media made when they cooperated with the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to do in President Clinton. The public had a right to know what happens in a president's bedroom because the president is a public person. It might also be said that the editors and reporters of the national media are public people. Are they willing to open their private lives to professional snoopers and gossipmongers? As for those folk who consume the checkout counter tabloids, they should consult with their confessors or spiritual advisers as to whether this behavior might constitute venial sins, perhaps even more serious than running for the presidency on the Republican side.
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 A Stupid, Unjust, And Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007 Father Greeley calls to task those who justified, planned and executed the war and reminds us that God weeps at the destruction of war, whether lives lost are ‘ours’ or ‘theirs.’  Order
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