Rod Liddle: How could we print such a thing? All too easily

I suspect that it was as much the captioning – written in that strange grammar unique to journalese – which offended so many newspaper readers last week. As the Browns drove away from the hospital having watched their child die, they were invariably described as "haggard", "grief-stricken", "in despair" and a whole sackful of other adjectives which were either obvious or unknowable. They were also, more definitely, intruded upon by the press in their hour of acute suffering.

The photograph of the bereaved parents was hideous, to my mind. For most editors, it was irresistible. Even the austere Financial Times may find itself standing alongside The Sun in the dock of the Press Complaints Committee. The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Mirror, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and The Sun all put the picture on page one. You can decide for yourself whether the Daily Star's decision to tuck it away on page two was a laudable nod in the direction of restraint or simply that it thought Britney's tits would provide a more resonant and compelling front-page image.

Then came the outrage in the letters pages of the broadsheets. How could you print such a thing? Just what were you thinking of? The Independent at least printed a large selection of the letters. All the editors, when asked, seemed surprised at what they'd done, and agonised about it.

But the harsher truth is that they had not been afflicted by some unaccountable spasm of base tabloid mentality, but were thrown by the fact that here was a very important politician at the centre of a Real Life Drama, rather than Tamsin Outhwaite or Gazza. The decision to run the photograph was effectively predetermined by the mentality that there is no longer a line between tabloid and quality, public and private. It has become so porous that it is discernible only sporadically. You cannot rely on it to save you or your family from intrusion, if you happen to be in the eye of a storm.

Remember that this came not from some paparazzi-fed news agency staffed by blokes called Steffano who haunt yachts in the Med waiting for royals to sunbathe. It came from Reuters, which conferred upon the thing a degree of legitimacy – respectability even – that, otherwise, it might not have had. That may have helped make up a few minds in the newsrooms. But even before then, the die had been cast. If a newspaper had decided that the birth of Jennifer Jane Brown was a story of significance which would have an impact upon the political life of the country, then it was already halfway down the road to printing that awful photograph of the parents. That's the truth editors are unwilling to face.

Subsequently, those same papers will have decided that it was vital for their readers to know all about Caesarean deliveries and the dangers posed by premature, underweight, births. They will also have snapped the delighted parents, joyous at the arrival of the newborn, and may well have reported the delight, by proxy, of Gordon Brown's colleagues, advisers, relatives and enemies. They will have mulled over the choice of names. The broadsheet newspapers did all or some of the above. None of the details were seen as taboo or off-limits or too personal for private consumption. And so, when the terrible end came, the photograph of Gordon and Sarah Brown became the final act of a brief but painful tragedy. Why not run the picture? They had told us everything else! And while they were at it, there was Friday's picture of the grieving father at the funeral, too.

But it is not right that the media should shoulder all the blame. The line between what is a matter of public interest and what is a purely private affair becomes more blurred by the week, to the extent that even at the Today programme, with our rigorous guidelines designed to protect individual privacy, we are not sure what side we're standing on.

Last week I wrote an article for this newspaper about the media attention paid to the birth of Jennifer Jane Brown. It was, wisely, pulled from most editions when the little girl fell ill. But the gist of it was this: we no longer choose our politicians according to their ideologies because ideologies are a redundant concept. Instead, we choose between competing groups of pragmatists on the grounds of competence and appeal. And so, the attractiveness of politicians – their character, their family life, their private life – has become central, and displayed as never before. While we in the media collude, or connive, with the politicians in this process, it is as much their fault – and your fault, frankly, if you don't mind my saying so – as ours.

Because the big thing we want to do these days is empathise. It's become a national hobby, or obsession. The whole thing turns my stomach, but there's no escaping the potency, the public effect, of a good burst of empathising. So, we are encouraged to feel for our politicians as they struggle with their family lives, through photographs, references in speeches and in interviews; and it is inferred that these revelations, these vignettes, are their way of identifying with us. For the spin-doctors, this is powerful stuff. But what is public and private gets ever more mixed up. And, of course, politicians' private lives are not always endearing; sometimes they are ghastly, bizarre or unbelievable, or simply conflict with official policy in some way. Then our interest is provoked and we "intrude" on what they were happy to exhibit only the previous week.

Appalled at this grotesque invasion of privacy, the spin-doctors cry foul. What was once for us, in the upmarket end of the media, a fairly simple equation – public versus private – has become far more complex. We have lost the moral high ground. Fortunately, in the recondite world of radio, we are absolved from taking potentially dangerous decisions over photographs. But there are other things which drive us to the boundaries of what the spin-doctors, and sometimes the public, would describe as "intrusion".

Politicians, these days, rarely swing into the Today studios and divest themselves of information that the listeners could not have guessed or known about in advance. When they've done something wicked or incompetent they disappear from view. Control of what is said (and not said) on air is tight. As a result, we sometimes resort to methods that could be deemed an "invasion of privacy". If they've done something dreadful and gone to ground, we tend to hound them. We ring their wives, or husbands, and record the conversations. We follow them down the street. We track them to their exotic or mundane hideaways and surprise them as they're about to take a dip or bring in the milk.

Our justification is that they have asked for it; that the public has a right to know what they're up to and that they should be compelled to answer salient questions. We did all of the above with Keith Vaz when he was refusing to answer questions about his property portfolios. Were we right?

I think so. But, having taken that decision, I am a little more sympathetic to those editors who ran the photograph of Gordon and Sarah Brown. I loathed the photograph itself, and I'm not happy about the process that brought it about. I'm still less happy about what it is doing to all of us.

Rod Liddle is editor of Radio 4's 'Today' programme