Qualified Intimacy, Celebrity, and the Case for a Newsgathering Privilege

In this symposium issue Robert Nagel, Diane Zimmerman, Robert O'Neil, and Erwin Chemerinsky explore the intersection of privacy and freedom of the press. In his fascinating inquiry into privacy and celebrity in modern American life, Robert Nagel demonstrates the connection between the American public's strong commitment to privacy and its simultaneous passion for robust protection of freedom of speech. Among his most important insights is the exposure of "pseudo-intimacy" as a principal currency of contemporary celebrity status. Diane Zimmerman, Robert O'Neil, and Erwin Chemerinsky all investigate the legal principles that ought to surround aggressive and surreptitious newsgathering techniques, each in their own way drawing the conclusion that some legal protection ought to extend to at least some exercises in surreptitious newsgathering.

Spurred by these efforts, my aim here is to look for links among the themes in this scholarship, and to offer some comment ofmy own on the cultural and legal issues presented.