Dialogue: Toads' role is not to lead but to make 'em think

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Sometimes in the news business you feel like a toad. Last Sunday was one of those times.

Across the pond, a rival had discovered that a High Court Judge had succumbed at some time to the sexual temptations that pop up on the internet. Was this important? Probably not. Do people want to know about it? You bet.

So you start croaking with the same gusto, trying to suppress sympathy for the poor judge whose embarrassment has been exposed to all and sundry, and whose reputation, if not his career, must be exploding before his eyes.

You convince yourself that this really is a matter of public importance. Judges, after all, are exalted beings. The Prime Minister, no less, is saying it raises questions of His Honour's most important faculty, his judgment. And Margaret Wilson, Attorney General, is taking advice to the cabinet.

There were people truly appalled at the news, men as well as women, in newspapers and politics. The interesting thing was, though, they couldn't bring themselves to make a moral judgment.

They don't deal in morality, they are social liberals, until a heterosexual male takes one of the liberties available. Then it becomes an issue of power, I think.

In any case, they found it more comfortable to argue, as Helen Clark did, that the judge's offence was the misuse of a work computer. If he had been using his own, supposedly, they wouldn't care.

Then they raised the double standard. Ordinary folk might be fired for breaking an employer's edict on internet access. Why should a judge, of all people, get away with it?

Well, he didn't. He was chastened, much as any first offender in a company would be, by being discovered and having to answer to his supervisor.

But these are transparent and tiresome excuses for exposing the poor fellow. Personally, I think we toads should cease pretending that every splash we make is a matter of solemn social importance.

Quite often, it is merely interesting. And there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is better that the press do not invest their role with too much gravity and higher purposes, no matter how much we are urged to.

I receive unsolicited mail from a body calling itself the International Communications Forum. It holds gatherings at which journalists are invited to consider what they do and its impact on society.

Its latest newsletter reports on a seminar in Aberdeen at which, it says, the Lord Provost, Dr Margaret Smith JP, recalled her "shock when in 1996 I asked a group of media representatives if they saw themselves as having a leadership role and they answered no".

The vast majority of journalists would answer likewise. It might surprise people outside the industry, but in my experience most within it have no sense of power and no desire to have any.

They see themselves as observers, investigators and informants. Opinions, if they are asked for them, are offered in the spirit of conversation. They want simply to engage people, not to lead them anywhere.

If the press seems to have power, particularly the power to bring people down, it is usually because the disclosure warrants a resignation or, increasingly these days, because supine public relations advises a sacrifice. The way Southern Cross threw its chief executive to the wolves was a case in point.

At the beginning of the week it was hard to see how Justice Robert Fisher could survive, but then, many of us learned something about the country's common sense this week.

That is one of the merits of media that pander to public curiosity. It leaves room for people to think, as distinct from a predigested diet of the wholesome and important.

On Sunday the Prime Minister plainly believed the public would share her disgust at any man who gave pornography more than a passing glance. On radio on Monday she was practically advising the judge to resign.

That day or the next, she must have sensed the public mood was not so clear-cut. On Tuesday night Margaret Wilson met the Chief Justice, Dame Sian Elias, and afterwards announced, "No further action is required".

By Wednesday, Kim Hill was grilling MP Rodney Hide about initiating the disclosure, since even his own Act colleague, Stephen Franks, did not think it too serious. You can't have it both ways, apparently.

But you can, and you should. This is a subject the public ought to discuss and the result does not in any way discredit those in politics and the press who put it in the public arena.

On this page on Wednesday, a moral conservative, Bruce Logan, lamented that the country could not condemn the judge because it was no longer clear about the virtues that sustain civil society. I don't think that is right either.

For all the sexual display available today, we are actually quite moralistic about it. Not many will comfortably admit to vicarious sexual predilections. The judge will probably never live this down.

For a long time men couldn't understand the feminist objection to pornography. But these days they come across posters of male strippers and the like, and possibly feel the little blow of degradation.

But it is a strength of liberal societies that we do not feel the need to suppress every appeal to base instincts. That is one of the things the destroyers of the Twin Towers didn't understand.

When you return from the Middle East or, previously, the Eastern bloc, the sexual landscape is one of the features that make the West feel wonderfully free. We can live with it. I hope Justice Fisher can too.