COMMENT
Perhaps you have no interest in federal politics. Perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps if you believe that many, if not all, members of the political class have come to work much harder for their powerful mates than for you, you have saved yourself an awful lot of bother.
What you may not have been able to save yourself from, however, is All. The. Endless. Garbage. About. Barnaby. Flipping. Joyce.
This bloke is the Australian Deputy Prime Minister. As you have, doubtless, seen or heard, he is also the object of scrutiny due to the end of his marriage. You know the painful story, so I shan’t tell you again about unhappy wife, new partner, new baby etc. There’s no need. Some other “commentator” will come at you with a story on the ethics of extramarital activities, or of the ethics of reporting extramarital activities, or the ethics of reporting about other people’s reporting….
You know how it goes. Something a little salacious happens to an orthodox figure, and journalists lose their minds. They will turn those minds into moral pretzels in the effort to report gossip as news. When they say, “It’s all about ethics in politics” what they truly and invariably mean is “it’s all about the potential for clicks.”
The distinction between gossip and Serious News in this Joyce case is as pointless as the distinction between pornography and “erotic art”. It’s the same thing; it’s just that posh folk call it something different.
Here, the supermarket magazines are, in fact, more principled than those Serious Publications which claim to print personal details in “the public interest”. When the trashier mags appeal to the interest in the private lives of others—and, hey, I’m not saying that I find myself always above such dish—they do so honestly. When journalists claim to cover the same details for any higher purpose, they’re fibbing, possibly even to themselves. To me, the distinction between gossip and Serious News in this Joyce case is as pointless as the distinction between pornography and “erotic art”. It’s the same thing; it’s just that posh folk call it something different.
Of course, the common defence of journalists, as it is of Joyce’s political foes, is this: we must investigate the man for any official wrongdoing. Did he spend taxpayer or party mines in pursuit of this “affair”? Did he accelerate the professional rise of his former staffer, now partner?
This is the rationale for all the prurient interest. And, you know, good on ya, Aussie journalists for your attempt to discuss “ethics” in politics. If only you’d pursue with one tenth the level of interest the truly unethical things done by politicians of both major parties every other day, I’d begin to buy a bit of this nonsense.
Let’s think about events we might consider newsworthy that have been eclipsed in recent days. This week, the tenth anniversary of the apology to the Stolen Generation, saw release of the Closing the Gap report. The verdict? Well, in short, we saw little material improvement for First Nations people. We saw a lot of politicians saying, “oh, gee, it’s so hard to know what to do!” and, if we listened just a little more carefully, we could have heard a load of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people say, “We’ve been telling you what to do. It’s easy. Just listen.”
Cronyism is rampant in both private and public sectors, and now you’re getting cross because one person may or may not have had some help?
And then, our central bank, the RBA, published a report on wages that continue to be low for many Australian workers. And the Climate Council warned of imminent threat to the Barrier Reef. And very quietly, a banking royal commission began, and I am yet to read from one of our journalists an account of just how powerfully, and legally, the finance sector determines the fortunes of Australia. But HEY. Here’s a picture of a pregnant lady.
Maybe this woman, one of two subject to leering public scrutiny, was given a boost to her career due to her involvement with Joyce. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe, in a nation run increasingly by and in the interests of the powerful, we shouldn’t be surprised if someone got a job because they knew elites.
This happens all the time. In media, politics and the finance sector, there is a revolving door and posh mates give nice jobs to other mates. Cronyism is rampant in both private and public sectors, and now you’re getting cross because one person may or may not have had some help?
Get off it. (Not you, by the way. I’m talking to journalists, here.) The nation is in a mess. A growing number of people do not earn wages sufficient to survival. A growing number of financials services are extended to these workers, who have no other choice but to get into debt. The very people from whom this land was stolen are still suffering from a brutal and ongoing colonisation and Queensland is about to become famous for its dead coral.
And you tell me this is about ethics in journalism.
I’m off to read an “ethical” gossip mag.
