Doorstepping is a word often used in media circles to describe a form of interview, usually with a politician. It derives from the old tradition of literally conducting interviews with people on their doorstep. You see it a lot with British politicians leaving their homes surrounded by reporters and cameras.

There is a famous scene in the movie Notting Hill where Hugh Grant’s character opens his front door to a wall of flashing cameras. That is what you call a doorstep. But doorstepping has become a colloquialism for managed street-side interviews too.

A public relations handler will ring you up and tell you that “the minister will do a doorstep after the meeting”. It means he or she will take questions from the gathered media huddle in a hallway or outside the building.

On the move

Doorstepping is also the term used to refer to an investigative reporter following a subject down the street in order to elicit a comment or answer a question in the public interest.

There are many examples of this but before a reporter would surprise a reluctant interviewee in this manner, they will have exhausted all other avenues first in trying to organise an interview or have questions answered.

It’s an action of last resort to knock on somebody’s door or to approach them in a public place. Remember Charlie Bird calling through the letter box trying to get an interview with former Anglo Irish boss David Drumm at his luxury US home? It isn’t something a journalist would do lightly. And of course there are issues regarding privacy when it comes to journalists going to whatever lengths to get a story or a quote.

At the National Ploughing Championships two weeks ago, there were a handful of anti-immigration activists following politicians around, sticking phones in their faces and shouting at them

Now, though, in the world we live in, everybody with a smartphone is a self-appointed journalist, but in most cases without morals or credentials. Thanks to social media, anybody can publish to a public forum. And that includes the worryingly more frequent phenomenon of vigilante types with an agenda of sticking phones in the faces of people, shouting at them and harassing them.

We saw during the recent beef protests how farmers and contractors were filmed at blockades and had their vehicle registrations zoomed-in on. Gardaí in particular are a popular target for this type of focus. Go back to the water protests and there’s any amount of online videos of gardaí being harassed in a most intimidating manner.

At the National Ploughing Championships two weeks ago, there were a handful of anti-immigration activists following politicians around, sticking phones in their faces and shouting at them for a response.

Public interest

Politicians and public figures must take the rough with the smooth, but is following them with a smartphone, menacingly shouting at them the way to go about it? If a member of the gardaí is unlawfully using unreasonable force going about their work, then of course they must accept that people might film them in the public interest.

But if they’re going about their business trying to uphold public order, they don’t deserve to have people with mobile phones aggressively asking for their name and number to be circulated by propagandists online.

I don’t know if there’s a law against this, but surely there should be some boundaries when it comes to this form of harassment. It can be quite sinister and social media platforms need to catch on to how they are facilitating it.

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