Private lives of public figures

Having spent Sunday morning grumbling to myself about newspapers putting irrelevant personal gossip about a government MP’s marriage breakdown on their front pages, I unexpectedly found myself asked to appear on Sunrise this morning to talk about the topic.

There isn’t always an easy dividing line on this principle, as there a range of different and sometimes conflicting criteria that can determine when a private matter becomes one of genuine public interest.

I can’t see any reason why a politician’s marriage breakdown is anyone else’s business – unless perhaps the politician had gone out of their way to promote and brand themselves on the basis of their family and marriage, which certainly isn’t the case in this latest incident.

But situations like the Belinda Neal – John Della Bosca incident are less clear cut. There were some valid issues there about alleged efforts to abuse a position of authority (albeit on a fairly minor scale) which merited media coverage. But once there is a whiff of any sort of scandal, the tendency is to blow the thing out of all proportion, using the controversy as a chance to adopt an ‘anything goes’ approach where every piece of anonymous gossip is trotted out for salacious enjoyment. It’s hard not to get a sense of a baying mob joining in the fun of kicking someone when they’re down when some of these scandals get blown far out of proportion to the original allegation.

You can’t be too unrealistic about this sort of thing. If you’re a figure of public interest, then it’s an occupational hazard that aspects of your personal life can end being a topic of publicity. It’s sensible to take a precautionary  approach and try to avoid doing things that wouldn’t look good if they ended up on the front of the newspapers – although that can lead to people leading such risk-averse lives that only cardboard cutouts will take on such roles.  While its easy to blame the media for poking inappropriately into this stuff, there’s no doubt lots of people love this sort of gossip, so one could say the media is just giving people what they want.

I think generally in Australia media intrusion into private matters is not too bad for politicians and other public figures. Media breaches of privacy are certainly nowhere near as bad as they can be in the UK or the USA. There is still a degree of acceptance that some matters are off-limits, even though there are plenty of things amongst the private lives of politicians and other public figures (including journalists) that would create some juicy headlines should the media decide to publish them.

However, as with all unwritten rules, it can be hard to predict when they will be breached, and when they are, there is a tendency for a feeding frenzy to develop.

This does have negative consequences for the health of democracy. The more political reporting becomes about entertainment rather than information, the less informed people are likely to be about issues and decisions that affect their lives.

And there is no doubt the potential for having irrelevancies about your personal life being the subject of intrusive public coverage is a disincentive for people who might consider getting involved in politics.  I’ve lost track of the number of people who said to me over the years there’s no way they’d get involved in politics because they wouldn’t want their private lives – past as well as present – subject to media scrutiny.