Research has revealed the public’s equivocal attitude towards the media, finding that while most people rely heavily on the media for information about a wide range of social and public affairs, and feel that the media do a good job of informing them, most people also mistrust the media’s motives and operational methods and feel that the industry is driven by circulation, audience figures and often deliberately sensationalise stories.
The report, published jointly by the BSC, BBC, ICSTIS, ITC, IPPR and the Radio Authority, studied attitudes relating to public interest and media privacy. Its relevance has been highlighted recently by high profile court cases involving celebrities and their privacy, as well as the debates on the future of media regulation.
The report found that while 91% of the general public think that children have virtually inviolable right to privacy, 54% of respondents thought that sometimes the media have to ignore people’s privacy to report on important issues. Expectations of privacy were found to depend on context, and respondents felt that people have a duty to behave appropriately according to the public or private space they are in at any given time.
The favourite cry of journalists accused of invading privacy: “Public Interest”, continued to prove slippery to define in the course of the research. The term was found to be widely understood by media professionals and recognised by the public, but neither group could clearly define it. However, a clear and strong public sense that certain information was publicly owned because it related to publicly funded institutions or could have an impact on society in general, such as health or crime issues, was discovered.
A downloadable version of the full research document is available on the ITC website.
BSC: 020 7808 1000 www.bsc.org.uk ITC: 020 7306 7743 www.itc.org.uk Radio Authority: 020 7430 2724 www.radioauthority.org.uk
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