Andy Gilder wrote:
... You may as well criticize the Fritzls neighbours for not reporting to Social Services that two old folks were going through a wheelbarrow of food between them every week.
A poor choice of comparison, one might say, Andy.
If nobody bought a publication – of any variety – then it would cease to publish. There has to be a market there. Now there's a history of salacious publications in the UK, so when loads more hit the shelves, it hardly came out of nowhere.
Now I'm not going to start with chicken and egg – because I wouldn't know where to start – but it is a fact that without the market for gossip and salacious, intimate details of people's lives (given voluntarily or otherwise) there would be no such publications.
While people might well have not suspected over the use of the so-called 'dark arts', it occurs to me that people were frequently paying to read about the details of the private lives of people who did not want those details revealed. Let's take the Mosely case as one example: did people really buy the
Screws that weekend. and for the follow up, in the belief that Mosely had invited the cameras into that aspect of his private life?
So I return to the question of why people think they have a right to be entertained/titillated by such details and secondly, why they find that so entertaining?
Oddly, your mention of the Fritzel case suggests that people snoop (or twitch their curtains) or should do, and should actually pick up on something as ordinary as shopping – even when (presumably) amounts increased over a long time and were a regular factor. Indeed, what you seem to be suggesting is that all of us should snoop – that, in this context, we should all become obsessed with the private lives of others. The Stasi would have loved you.
I would add that the drugs comparison doesn't really work either (or at least not fully). Although it's fairly simplistic a view of a more complex case, most of those who grow or sell drugs do so in the knowledge of what they're doing and, for whatever reason, having presumably reached a conclusion that they will do that.
So that puts the consumer in a rather different relationship to the producer than it does where someone's private life is invaded, without their permission, and then sold for the entertainment of others. That is not to say that there is no ethical complexity to the relationship between drug producer, seller and consumer, but it is clearly not the same.
