Some people inherit infamy, others owe it to their profession, whilst a few live and die as a result of the media.  The industry can be kind; it can be cruel, while it may shake with one hand, it may slap much harder with another. Yet it always acts in its own interests, as does any other 'rational actor', to maximise its gains. In doing so, the media often tells the public what it wants to hear, rather than what it ought to hear.  The media’s willingness to print invasive stories is a reflection of the public’s active appetite and consumption of these types of newspaper story.

Working from this premise it is hard to have sympathy with Max Mosley, the FIA President, who recently went before a Select Committee, having won £60,000 in Court as a result of the publication of details of his sordid S&M antics.  Morally he was in the wrong; an adulterer with acute sexual practices, paying prostitutes and dressing up in militarist attire was sheer recklessness.  Yet he was willing to do this even after he was warned that he was under surveillance.

Legally he was in the right, the News of the World were unscrupulous and themselves reckless in their dissemination of the story.  This aside, £60,000 for acting unconscionably makes a mockery of long standing legal and equitable principles.  To have the audacity to then go before a Select Committee, in search of sympathy or a change in the law?
 
More sympathy must lie with those who attract media attention due to their profession, but even then it can be argued that they choose media scrutiny which is concomitant with their high profile profession.  Here careers can be made, or more likely broken.  It is a queer paradox that politicians are often judged on their private lives over their political credence or qualities and is a sad irony that the public takes a greater interest in what lies beneath the sheets than lies within the House.  However this again must be reconciled with the public figure's realisation that they will be subjected to greater media scrutiny, which therefore demands not just high standards of behaviour but care in not getting caught.

This leaves the final category: those who owe their life to the media, without which they would have been nothing.  The twenty-first century has proved that the conveyor belt of ‘reality’ mediocrity is churning out chinless wonders with Stakhanovite resolve.  Unremarkable people have been thrust into the spotlight, ill prepared for it and with little talent or tact to survive.  Most fade into the obscurity into which they rightly belong, but Jade Goody avoided that fate, instead she is embalmed in the very media light which made her.  Whilst her obituary is written, her lasting epitaph of her relationship with the media is not yet finished.
 
Sadly there is little than can be done to change the role of the media, provided it remains profitable and legal to print such stories, then these types of stories will remain permanent fixtures in ‘newspapers’.  Although some such as Mosley or Naomi Campbell may use the law to secure injunctions, sue for defamation or breach of privacy, this only has the effect of short-term and hollow victories.  Indeed not everyone who is subjected to such intense media scrutiny can afford this privilege and many would rather become yesterday’s news than have their court action reported in the press and their illicit behaviour subject to a further revivification.  Nor can the Independent Press Complaints Commission (IPCC) be relied upon to provide effective redress to those who have been wronged.  After all, professions which regulate themselves will have little inclination to declare the standard practice of the industry invalid.

Yet so long as the public has a warped and insatiable appetite to read about the private lives of celebrities, the invidious nature of 'kiss and tell' stories will prevail.  Moreover, as has been shown by Mosley and Goody, one cannot choose when to use the media, it uses you.  It is able to make or break people, especially those who fall foul of its expectations.  For those who try to play the media for their own ends will find that the media has its own ends and as such is an end in itself. 

Accordingly the media is not as fickle as is readily made out; it acts in a predictable and rational way – to serve its own interest by selling newspapers. Rather it is those who buy the newspapers and absorb the wavering opinions that are fickle.