J-Bro, Media and Our Quest For Gossip

I don’t (didn’t?) like John Brogden.  I thought he was a smarmy, cheap politician who got by on attempting to undermine everything and score points off the failings of the incumbent government.  I don’t believe he ever proposed viable solutions to the trains or health or any other matter, he simply repeated the mantra “Bob Carr can’t make it work, get rid of him”.

That being said, I also have distaste for the fact that grubby details of the personal lives of high profile individuals are pushed upon us as “news” and that we as a population now have this insatiable thirst for celebrity gossip.

Perhaps now we should take some lessons from the John Brogden suicide bid and the fact that the Daily Telegraph (the number one peddler of gossip) was to publish more allegations of misconduct from as far back as 2003.

What John Brogden did was wrong; very wrong.  He was rightly and publicly crucified for the 2 sexual harassments and the vile racial slur on Helena Carr.  He resigned in disgrace and I cannot be happier about it.

That however should be the end of it.  He held a position of authority and potential leadership for our biggest state and his actions clearly showed he wasn’t fit to be that leader.  He was shown to be the fool that he truly was and he fell on his sword.  But once that was done, the media should then have focused on his replacement.  Who was to lead the Liberals, how would this affect Morris Iemma having to deal with a different and surely better political opponent? There was so much more pertinent news worthy stories as a result of the Brogden resignation you could have filled 3 newspapers.  Instead, the Daily Telegraph dragged out people who approached them to claim that they too were harassed by Brogden in 2003, that there was rumour that he was having an affair with a staffer and that he attended a function and left with a women who was not his wife.

This stuff is irrelevant and not newsworthy.  Once Brodgen left the public position he held, we should not care what he does or did.  He is not the first person to cheat on his wife and he won’t be the last.  He won’t be the last guy to try and pick up women with bad lines fortified by a bit of liquid courage.  And given that he no longer had any form of responsibility to the people of NSW, then we should not care either.

Now that he has failed in a suicide attempt, perhaps we should take a good hard look at ourselves and say do we care about this stuff and that perhaps we can focus and raise the collective intellect of the people by analysing the issues of the fallout of the resignation from a political perspective and not focus on the tits and arse chasing sensationalism that seems to fill our newspapers.

Remember that on the day that the Telegraph chose to fill its front pages with Brodgen dalliances, perhaps hundreds of people died in a tsunami style event in New Orleans and that 1000 people have died as a result of a stampede in Baghdad.  Do these events not rate in comparison of a failed politician making a bad taste proposition to an unnamed woman in 2003?  If you have an answer for that question, I think you’ll find that the Telegraph made a serious error in judgement.