John Brogden's downfall provokes media handwringing

There is a great deal of chest-beating going on in Australia at the moment. The media is wearing its hair-shirt, politicians are eloquent with rage or mumbling with guilt and self-doubt, and letters to the editors and callers on talkback radio are lacerating in their condemnation of the public keelhauling of John Brogden, the disgraced former New South Wales Opposition leader.

On Monday Brogden quit after admitting calling the Malaysian-born wife of former State Labor Premier Bob Carr a mail-order bride and making improper sexual advances to female journalists while in his cups at a Hotels Association function.

On Tuesday night, after stopping briefly at a church, Brogden locked himself in the back of his Mona Vale electorate office and cut his wrists. Police found him after a call from worried family and took him to hospital, and on Wednesday he moved to psychiatric care.

New South Wales has a diverse ethnic population and is sensitive to racist slurs. But there is broad agreement that the media acted correctly in reporting the insult to Helena Carr by a potential premier. But the inevitable hand-wringing that has followed Brogden's suicide attempt has raised some core issues about the nature of politics and journalism.

Thousands of words of commentary have tended to support the notion that Brogden must bear a sizeable portion of the blame; for drinking too much and acting and speaking stupidly in a room full of journalists.

Equally, anger has been directed at the brutality of Australian politics. There is no quarter asked or given - even among supposed allies and friends, let alone adversaries.

Eight years ago Labor Senator Nick Sherry was driven to attempt suicide by public humiliation at the hands of Federal Treasurer Peter Costello. Last year a Victorian federal MP, Greg Wilton, killed himself after his marriage collapsed and the media carried unproven allegations that he had tried to kill both himself and his young children. Former Labor Leader Mark Latham was also the victim of nasty rumours.

Political enemies are believed to have spread the rumours about Latham. And Sydney's Daily Telegraph, which has taken most of the heat for its publication of further sexual allegations about Brogden after his resignation, has confirmed it was sources within an opposing faction of the Liberal Party who had supplied the information.

And the media's ethics are once again under fire.

Most commentary has agreed that the Telegraph had no call to publish further rumours of other drunken leering, because Brogden had quit, his political career was dead, and his family was suffering.

The question the media is asking itself is: did we overstep the mark?

The general rule of Australian political reporting is that unless private lives impinge on performance, or demonstrate gross hypocrisy, they should remain separate from the political.

"Find a female political journalist who hasn't been propositioned by the odd drunken politician," Australian Financial Review reporter Jennifer Hewitt wrote. "It's hard. Harder still is what to do about it. The best answer has almost always been: absolutely nothing."

The Australian said: "This tragic affair places fundamental questions before us all: when does the personal become political, and when is the media duty-bound to report aspects of any public figure's private life, regardless of any personal hurt inflicted?"

Victoria's colourful and idiosyncratic former Liberal Premier, Jeff Kennett, worries Brogden's downfall and its aftermath may have established new, low-tolerance, bars for the private behaviour of public figures.

"More politicians than John Brogden were sobering up," Fairfax editor-in-chief Mark Scott said in the Sydney Morning Herald. "Has a new standard for 'acceptable behaviour' for public figures now been set? For journalists and elected officials the conventions around stories that never get published may well have changed."

The agonising over Brogden has been sharpened by the fact that for weeks the journalists who were at the function and heard, or knew of, his sins had not reported them. Editors made conscious decisions not to pursue and publish them - until, apparently via Liberal Party sources, the stories of lechery and the justifying element of racism were confirmed and reported from the federal press gallery in Canberra.

"Every day editors and journalists have the power to publish articles that can dismay, bewilder and devastate the lives of those about whom they write," Scott wrote. "Sometimes those stories are in the public interest and have to be written. Sometimes they don't ...

"Most of all ... we need to understand the effect of our words, and the consequences of our choices, the stories we write and the stories on which we remain silent."

The Telegraph has no such doubts, saying in its editorial yesterday: "We had - and continue to have - an unavoidable obligation to report the news. When we seek to avoid that obligation, or when for some reason the press is no longer free to report the news, democracy itself is imperilled."