The post you are reporting:
here is a piece from the media standards trust website dated last october.
Paul McMullan is probably not the best defender of press freedom. His arguments are muddled and contradictory. He puts forward moral arguments for privacy intrusion, but then confesses to having no moral sense. Yet he is worth listening to, partly because his arguments clearly reflect the views of others working in newspapers, and partly because - as Nick Davies said at the City University debate on phone hacking last night - he is the one of the only ones "who had the bollocks to speak on the record" about phone hacking and other 'dark arts' practiced at the News of the World.
McMullan was a features executive and member of the News of the World's investigations team. He now runs a pub in Dover. He told Nick Davies at the Guardian that "Getting information from confidential records, we did that regularly, time and time again. I always hid behind the journalist's fundamental get-out clause that, if it's in the public interest, you can do what you like. Some of what Steve [Whittamore] did was legal, like using the electoral register, but if he went a step further, I would not have given a second thought to whether that was illegal, because that's part of your job."
McMullan was one of six panellists debating how far a journalist should go, to a packed auditorium of 400+ students and journalists at City. Also on the panel were Guardian journalist Nick Davies, solicitor Mark Lewis, Professor Roy Greenslade, Max Mosley and Lord (Ken) MacDonald (former DPP), chaired by Andrew Caldecott QC.
For McMullan journalism pursues noble ends by ignoble means. It exposes corruption, hypocrisy, misbehaviour and moral transgressions. This is his justification not just for phone hacking but for delving deep into the private lives of public figures. If they hold themselves up as figures of public virtue, he argued, then the press should be able to show people when that is not true. We have a right to expose "dirty little sinners... breaking their marriage vows", McMullan said.
Nor is it just public figures, but anyone who might have done something wrong. McMullan was particularly proud of a News of the World splash he worked on that 'named and shamed' 50 peadophiles in the UK, publishing their names, photographs and addresses in the paper. Unfortunately, as Roy Greenslade pointed out, not all of those named were paedophiles and a number later successfully sued the paper for defamation.
Privacy, for McMullan, is just another word for secrecy, and secrecy should be exposed. "Privacy is the place where we do bad things" McMullan said. "In order to have a free and open society, you must treat privacy as the demon". Though the former NotW journalist may have been exaggerating for the sake of effect, the idea that journalists should have a right to invade people's privacy for the greater benefit of society is shared by others. Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of Mail Group Newspapers, made a similar argument in one of his rare public outings in November 2008:
"if mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don't have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process" (Paul Dacre, Society of Editors, 9 November 2008).