Did the Sunday Mirror’s sex sting protect women, or exploit them?

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/sep/30/sunday-mirror-sex-sting-brooks-newmark

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The Sunday Mirror’s defence of its Brooks Newmark sex sting is essentially that powerful men should not be sending lewd pictures to young female admirers. Which is all well and good until you ask whether powerful newspapers should be using pictures, lewd or otherwise, of women without their permission.

No one is arguing that there is no public interest defence in revealing a junior government minister to be a fool and a hypocrite, and Newmark’s behaviour – added to his once laudable and now awkward support for getting more women into politics – marks him out as both. But there is so much more to this sorry saga than that, issues on which the brand new press regulator, Ipso, now has to adjudicate.

Lloyd Embley, who as the Mirror’s editor-in-chief was ultimately responsible for agreeing to run the sting on Sunday and Alison Phillips, the weekend title’s editor, have defended the story for being in the public interest. But Embley has also apologised to two of the women whose pictures were used online by fake Tory PR woman Sophie Wittams, one of whom has said how “shocked and exploited” she feels that her image was used by a young male reporter for his own ends.

Swedish model Malin Sahlen was obviously not thinking that her photo might have helped protect wannabe politicians when she said it “feels awful” to have her image stolen in this way. Another woman featured in an intimate picture understood to have been sent to Newmark, some say in an attempt to encourage him to reply in kind, is more difficult to identify so we have no way of knowing how she feels.

Somehow Embley made it worse by saying, “We thought that pictures used by the investigation were posed by models, but we now know that some real pictures were used.” Not only does he underline the fact that we’d feel a bit sorrier for the 21-year-old “victim” of Newmark’s dodgy pictures if she were real but, with pictures posed by models used all the time by newspapers, can it have been that hard to check how Alex Wickham came up with the identity of his alter ego Sophie?

Former Sunday Mirror journalist, Susie Boniface, who blogs as Fleet Street Fox on Mirror.co.uk, has argued that this story is all about men behaving badly, not the press. Her blog was reposted almost verbatim by the Guido Fawkes blog which employs Wickham under the headline “Brooks Newmark did a bad thing”.

But, with the industry under intense scrutiny from a new regulator as well as many victims of press intrusion, it isn’t that straightforward, is it? We don’t know all the details but with a fake persona and tweets sent to several Tory MPs without yet hearing of evidence of previous wrongdoing, it seems as though men of the press and not just politics are behaving badly.

It isn’t all about the misappropriation of the pictures of course and Boniface also points out the irony of rival papers publishing the pictures of these women online when the Sunday Mirror failed to do so. “I wouldn’t like photographs I’d innocently made public to be used like that – but I’d like it even less if half of Twitter was making it worse,” she said.

In his first public appearance as chair of Ipso, Sir Alan Moses agreed with her when he said “What the public deserves and democracy needs is a press distinguishable from the noise and flatulence of the internet.”

Moses, just a few weeks into the job, is already facing criticism of Ipso’s code of conduct and his own board – sightly awkward that Ipso’s industry implementation group is chaired by Paul Vickers, senior director of the Mirror – is beginning to make disturbing noises.