Publish or keep hidden : How readers of the tabloid Blesk discuss the public and private lives of politicians
Abstract
Politicians as public persons are under increasing review by both the media and the general public. This review focuses not only on acts in public office, both official and unofficial, but also on the behavior of politicians in private life that could, in a real or imagined way, influence their performance in public office.
This paper presents the perceptions of the boundaries between the public and private lives of politicians by readers of the most popular Czech tabloid, Blesk. The qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews and a focus group with readers presents arguments that readers use to categorize information about politicians into that that belongs in the public domain and should be therefore published, and that that belongs to the private sphere and should not be published.
In the readers’ views, citizens have the right to know about a politician’s private life, such as information that reflects a politician’s character and about possible influences from their private life on their performance in public office. The readers also consider how it feels for a politician to be a private person in public office under public scrutiny.
These readers then often advocate the right of a politician to have his privacy respected, since these readers themselves would not be pleased to be under such a high level of public scrutiny regarding their own lives. It seems that the readers’ arguments are largely based on their personal history.
We finally suggest that research on political participation would be enriched by including the perspective of everyday life experiences of the general public.