John Roughan: Hurt results from intent

When I was a raw young reporter I was sent one morning to cover a court martial at the Devonport naval base. "We don't know what it's about," the chief reporter had said. "Go and check it out."

Not long after the proceedings got under way, the subject started to unfold. An officer standing there in his starched white uniform was said to have sexually molested several young ratings when they were on a ship together.

My newly acquired news sense started to beat with excitement. Within the hour I was on the phone to the office dictating breathless copy to a typist, visions in my mind of front page headlines in the afternoon editions.

I had barely finished the fourth paragraph before the chief reporter came on the phone.

"Come on back," he said. "What they do among themselves is their own business."

On the drive back to the city I thought about this. The reason he had given was not, I knew, the real reason they didn't want the story. Like all news editors they ran lots of stuff that was strictly somebody's own business.

They didn't want this because they could sense it was going to be too grubby to put in front of their readers, and they were right. It was an early lesson in the limits of journalism.

That newspaper, incidentally, was the Auckland Star. All media observe boundaries of taste that broadly reflect what they judge to be their audience's sensibilities. When they get it wrong you have a right to be offended because they are not just expressing their own low standards of taste and judgment, they are acting on their assessment of yours.

The boundaries are difficult to define and they change over time. That court martial could be reported in lurid daily detail now, probably with a feature of several pages to wrap it up at the end.

Subjects such as child abuse and paedophilia, which were almost never covered 30 years ago, have become part of the daily news diet.

It is said to be better that these things are "out in the open" and we presume readers agree, though quietly I still have my doubts.

There is not much consistency in these trends. Suicide, for example, is seldom reported in much detail because the authorities insist it is not better to deal with it out in the open, that it is positively dangerous to discuss cases in public in case they are copied. I have my doubts about that, too.

And there is no consistency in the changing treatment of those two sensitive issues of the human personality: race and religion. Race is treated with much more care now than it was 30 years ago. But religion is an increasingly rare experience for people in this country and many in the media don't know what it is.

They know only the religion that makes news in fundamentalist forms or in moral absolutes that are hard to reconcile with human nature. They have no idea of the way religion settles into your heart and stays there, a part of your identity, long after you have decided you don't believe it.

Last Sunday I was lured on to John Tamihere's Radio Live programme to talk about the Herald's decision not to run the now infamous Danish cartoons. It was a decision made by editor Tim Murphy who had summoned several of us to discuss it.

It was quite a brief discussion. All of us were of the same instinct: the cartoons had been published by newspapers in Europe that felt a need to show Muslims the free Western media was prepared to offend them.

That did not strike us as anything we needed to prove or to be sufficient reason to give anybody offence.

But Tamihere threw me two curve balls called the taniwha and the Virgin in a Condom. They've been haunting me ever since.

I wrote some scornful comment on the trouble that a Tainui hapu's taniwha caused Transit New Zealand when it was building the Waikato expressway, comment that was bound to hurt Maori whether or not they "believe" in taniwha.

I know it would have hurt them because a few years earlier I had felt the offence of Virgin in a Condom. The injury I was done by Te Papa's exhibit surprised me at the time because, like John Tamihere, I have come a long way from a Catholic childhood.

What hurt then, and what hurt Muslims this week, was not so much the defiled image as the intention to offend. That is the difference between the Virgin in a Condom and, say, Life of Brian, which had me helpless with laughter and not at all offended. The movie was also good, which helps, too.

It was no surprise that the cartoons, when they appeared in the Dominion Post, were abysmal by any standards of the art.

Clever work almost never gives offence because it clearly has a better intention.

Tamihere's question reminded me that while I was writing fiercely against the Virgin in a Condom I don't recall feeling even slightly offended by images of it in the Herald.

The reason, I think, lies again in the intention. Te Papa put the thing on display to be "challenging". Newspapers used it to illustrate the story.

That is what Bill Ralston says he was doing when his TVNZ news programmes carried the Danish cartoons, but I don't think Muslims could be expected to accept that. The medium sometimes is the message. Nobody would use them but for their ability to bait Muslims.

As for press freedom in this instance, the last word deserves to lie with a Muslim, a woman, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who writes for the Independent in Britain.

She said of those who reprinted the cartoons, "They have taken something precious and turned it into a licence for the intelligentsia to behave like yobs."