Late in the day - well it is Christmas - I see that the Twittersphere has been getting into a lather about the Sun on Sunday’s splash.
It reveals that the wife of Alan Henning, the man who was taken hostage and murdered by Isis, “is having an affair with her brother-in-law.”
The paper also carries two further full pages about Barbara Henning’s relationship with the husband of her late husband’s sister (all of which was picked up and repeated by Mail Online).
There are plenty of Twitter comments decrying the decision by the Sun on Sunday (and Mail Online) to publish the tale: a vile piece of journalism... disgusting... a nonsense story. “Her love life is completely irrelevant”, said one, echoed by another who asked: “Who cares?”
Among the upset Twitterati were several journalists. Ex-Sun writer Claudia Connell thought it “unnecessarily mean-spirited” and another ex-Sun reporter, Carole Watson, was “pretty appalled.” Former journalist John Staples considered it “disgracefully needless.”
Former News of the World reporter Andrea Busfield thought both the Sun and the Mail made a “very bad call.”
That comment was perceptive, certainly more than those who wondered whether it might require investigation by the regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso).
They included a BBC Radio 5 researcher who called me and wondered whether it had post-Leveson implications. It doesn’t.
In truth, as I told him, it’s all a matter of taste and discretion. I loathed it, as did plenty of others. But I can’t see that it broke the editors’ code of practice (or the law, of course).
See it instead as Busfield did: a very bad call by the Sun’s editor and then another bad call by the magpie Mail Online. It could be said to be intrusive, except for the fact that both Henning’s sister-in-law, Gill Kenyon, is liberally quoted, as is Henning’s wife, and Kenyon clearly posed for a picture.
One tweeter did ask about the privacy implications, but I cannot see how they are relevant. Similarly, although there is no public interest justification, not everything in a paper has to fulfil that criterion.
It’s simply a matter between the newspaper and its readers. If they want this tawdry stuff, I’m afraid they can have it. Personally, I would have advised Mrs Henning not to have spoken. She obviously thought otherwise.
As for the Sun on Sunday, I am just amazed that it thought its audience wanted to read this story.
