(andPOP) - The issue over celebrity privacy has been battled in the press, in the courts, and in school. Once a person becomes famous, do they give up their right to maintain a private life? It's a debate that remains heated, and a debate that can cause sympathy in some cases, a roll of the eyes in others.
Media outlets, especially the Canadian Press, should be ashamed of themselves for the way they covered the latest Paris Hilton incident this weekend.
The summary: somehow Paris Hilton's address book from her cell phone was leaked onto the internet late Saturday night, causing dozens of phone numbers of her celebrity friends like Christina Aguilera, Eminem and Lindsay Lohan to be spread across the internet within hours. Also leaked to the web this weekend were nude photographs stored on her phone, and personal notes and reminders she saved.
CNN's web site reported on the story late Monday afternoon. They used a quote from a T-Mobile (the phone manufacturer) spokesperson who said the company does know about incident and things are being looked into. The Associated Press also reported on the story late Monday afternoon, using a quote from Victoria Gotti that was used in the morning's New York Daily News. Other sites and news agencies also posted similar stories, relying on the basic facts of the story.
The Canadian Press took it many steps too far.
In the
CP's article, posted on canoe.ca, thestar.com, and macleans.ca Monday evening, the writers appeared to have called numerous numbers that were on the list. The writers of the story, Tara Brautigam and Jen Horsey, knew that the numbers for Eminem, Ashley Olsen, and Anna Kournikova were disconnected. They reported that messages left for Fred Durst, and pages left for Lindsay Lohan and Vin Diesel, were not returned. They wrote that Sum 41 member Deryck Whibley's voicemail was full and that his outgoing message was a belch. They were able to reach a Montreal businessman, a friend of Hilton's, who said he received about 400 calls.
They also studied Hilton's personal notes and revealed private information the hotel heiress would not have wanted the whole world to know.
All these facts should not have been uncovered because it is breaching an unwritten ethical code, breaking the privacy of people who unwillingly and unknowingly became part of a story. If they wanted to know how many times someone called Fred Durst, they should have called his publicist or waited until a spokesperson for either him, Hilton, or the phone company revealed such information. Relying on representatives is something reporters learn to never do (keep digging past the flak), but in this case it would have been acceptable.
Adding more stress to the celebrities and other Hilton friends made the writers part of the story. Her Montreal acquaintance didn't receive 400 calls. He now received 401.
andPOP did not break the story. We were the second site to report on it after the Drudge Report broke it Sunday morning. The phone list was sent to us Sunday morning, and we soon found more information about it on the Drudge Report site. By Sunday night, the mass media had still not reported on it, but message board around the web had already been spreading the news for hours.
When andPOP found out about it, we decided to
report the newsworthy details: her information was leaked, nobody knows how yet, and as Drudge reported, the FBI is investigating. We did not call up phone numbers of people that we did not know for comments, we did not upload Paris' personal photographs, and we did not report on Paris' personal notes. That would be an invasion of both Paris and the other people's privacy. We did not take the information and take it a step further by using it to gain more information; we reported on the information that became available.
We could have called up every person on the list to see what they thought, and we could have posted some of Hilton's tasks on her to-do list, but it's something a sleazy tabloid would do, not something a reputable news organization like the Canadian Press would do.
We assumed that when the major news outlets eventually picked up on this story, they would do similar things: report on it, but not cross the line. The line is unwritten because a story like this is so bizarre and demands an instant judgement call.
The Canadian Press failed that judgement call and should issue an apology not just to Hilton and her friends, but to its readers for crossing the line.
