Hacking of cheater website titillating

The reason we're getting involved is because it's about sex, and probably about people having more sex than we are. FILE PHOTO

AMONG my journalism colleagues, there is debate about how far we should go, as media, with the computer hack on the "affairs" website Ashley Madison.

At the moment media is getting into what job types are being uncovered, including school teachers.

Generally speaking, affairs aren't newsworthy. It isn't illegal and it's pretty commonplace. The risk is your own.

Traditionally media got involved when the affair involved a public figure, or reeked of hypocrisy. Public figures, like political leaders, were expected to be above tawdry pleasures of the flesh, because a leader can't be seen to be vulnerable and compromised - or distracted.

Equally, a moral campaigner who commits an affair is hypocritical - it's a fall from grace.

The public, who generally don't like outspoken moralists, delight in disgrace.

The reason we're getting involved is because it's about sex, and probably about people having more sex than we are. But the new, fresh angle is that there's a website out there that turns an immoral act into a matter of convenience.

Dating is rife with cheaters. Online dating has got plenty of people who are about as sincere about wanting "Mr/Miss Right" as a wet T-shirt competition.

Now, there's a site that's online dating for cheats, openly.

That's interesting.

Is this, as one of my colleagues put it, the next level of modern infidelity?

The hacking is also newsworthy. Hacks always are, because it touches on all our fears of our data being stolen, our money taken, our secrets exposed.

But there's one other basic principle.

A single affair isn't newsworthy, apart from the exceptions above.

But multiply any basic idea by a thousand and it becomes interesting.

Protests, deaths, model aeroplanes - numbers can be an angle.

Thousands of people having affairs, thanks to the convenience of a send button?

And they're all, collectively, in danger of being discovered? That's an amazing angle. Let's enjoy the ride.