Background: Food critic outed and ousted from restaurant Times critic S. Irene Virbila was waiting for a table at Red Medicine when the manager snapped her photo and told her to leave. It sparked a debate over whether modern critics can — or should — remain anonymous.
By Christopher Reynolds and Rene Lynch, Los Angeles Times, December 23, 2010
Synopsis: A restaurant owner doesn’t like a food critic because he thinks she’s not fair. Restaurant critic shows up at his place of business, he takes her picture with his cellphone. The critic asks him to delete the picture. He says no and puts her picture on his website along with her name. Food critic didn’t want her picture up because it makes her job harder: when restaurants recognizer her they might treat her differently because she’s a critic for a big newspaper.
I think it is definitely wrong for the restaurant owner to do that.
The problem is, should it be illegal? If it were to be made illegal, how can you possibly enforce it?
My opinion: it should be illegal, but I don’t know you can enforce it, if for example the hosting company is outside the legal jurisdiction of where the restaurant is and the restaurant critic works.
The background can be treated as unrelated to the main issue. You can take another example: I see someone whose name I know, take his picture, put it on my personal webpage along with his name, even though he asks me not to. Should it even matter that the person has a work-related reason to not want to have his photo published?
That would be different, because if you’re a celebrity, presumably people know what you look like already. In this case the restaurant owner is unmasking someone’s anonymity.
So? As far as I am aware, the law does not treat restaurant critics differently. Presumably Ms. Virbila’s appearance wasn’t a secret either - after all, the owner knew what she looked like.
If that person was not a “celebrity” of sorts, then I can see the problem with posting her picture. However, she’s in the public light, by her own doing, and probably no more protected that any other celebrity is from the paparazzi. I don’t think the fact that she wished to remain anonymous is really relevant.
Well, there is what we think should be the case if we (as an individual) could wave our magic wand and make it that way.
Then there is what the law has to say about it.
I wonder whether or not she can be deemed a public figure for purposes of the law. I’d also be curious if her status as a public figure (assuming a food critic for a major paper is one) can be mitigated by her trying to remain anonymous. For that I suspect she’d have to show efforts at remaining anonymous (presumably writing under a pseudonym at least). If she goes on, say, a TV show under that name as the newspaper’s food critic she is not really trying to remain anonymous and has put herself out there.
I suppose a court would probably have to sort this out. I have no idea (legally).
I don’t think this is a journalistic or right to privacy issue. It’s just about the nastiness of the restaurateur, who decided he wanted to make it hard or impossible for her to do her job the way she prefers to do it.
The writer is definitely a public figure. She prefers to keep a low profile to do her job, which food critics generally do. Some of them go to silly lengths about it and I suspect a lot of their identities are open secrest anyway. Virbila doesn’t have some kind of legal entitlement to anonymity and I doubt she really needs it. You really can’t put it any better than the owner does:
That is, he thinks he’s a big meanie, so he doesn’t want her to review his restaurant and he hopes everybody else thinks she’s a big meanie, too. This guy really could not have done any more to make himself look worse except spit in her food: he kept her waiting for a long time for no reason when he had no intention of letting her eat, and went after her when she was a civilian and not even reviewing his restaurant. How can this possibly work out better for him than a bad review would have?
I can’t see any reason whatsoever that other people should be legally or morally bound to honor someone’s preference to remain anonymous in this situation. Even if a journalist called herself The Velvet Shadow, wore a mask and lived in a cavernous lair, and sped to the eateries she intended to review on a stealthy motorcycle/jet airplane/sewer submarine, neither her profession nor her personal peccadilloes should prevent photos of such personages in public.
If she could compel others not to take a photo of her, could restauranteurs prohibit reviewers from writing about their food? Why should “I don’t want to have my picture taken” be treated any more seriously than “I don’t want my restaurant to be in the newspaper?”
The restaurant owner caused some damages to the critic, therefore he is eligible to being sued. That’s how it works. Even more so when the owner does it just out of malice (and btw, he doesnt even have the privilege of refusing people because he doesnt like them, one more reason for the critic to call her lawyer).
Damage to the critic is not enough – otherwise, the critic could never say that a restaurant was deficient in any way. Malice is not enough either: people criticise politicians maliciously all the time, and can’t be sued for it.
Given that there is no suggestion that the owner alleged anything false about the critic, the big question is whether the critic is a pubic figure, and I suspect that she is.
That’s what I was thinking. All the restaurant owner had to do was tell the critic that if she publishes an article about the restaurant he’ll make sure every restaurant owner in town knows what she looks like and leave it at that.
Most restaurant owners know each other so this could all be done by email (or pix message) instead of posting it on a public website. Even if posting it is legal (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be), why go up against the lawyers the newspaper probably has on retainer?
