G'day. John Miner is a Webdiary columnist [1] who's worked both sides of the fence, as journo and media minder for a pollie, in his case Paul Keating. (His Webdiary bio is here [2].) John emailed:

"I haven't done this exercise for a while, but there are so many double standards being raised in the wake of the Mouse Pack's failure to report the Brogden affair, I thought it worthwhile to take a critical look at some.This version of events appeared on smh.com.au. NOTE: I finished a draft of this before John Brogden went into hospital; I haven't changed my comments on the article."

John Miner on Brogden's media and Cuming's case

by John Miner

I've been around long enough to know a proposition [3]

August 30, 2005, SMH

Angela Cuming, a Sun-Herald reporter, was among journalists who encountered John Brogden drinking at the Hilton. This is her version of the night.

I went to the Australian Hotel Association's annual dinner to catch up with colleagues and contacts. [Not really working, then.]

The function was held in a room inside the Hilton Hotel, not at the Marble Bar as has been reported. [I fail to see the importance]

By 9.30pm, the event was winding down. Speeches had been made, a few business cards exchanged, when John Brogden and a few of his staffers walked in.

It was only a day after Bob Carr had resigned and Brogden looked to be in high spirits. Lots of back-slapping and high fives from people in the room.

I didn't speak to Brogden at the official function. [NOTE] I said my goodbyes to a few people, scanned the room and noticed Brogden had already left.

I went downstairs to join colleagues at the Marble Bar for a nightcap before going home. ["Colleagues" now, not "contacts"; definitely not working]

We were surprised when we spotted Brogden, even merrier than when we first saw him, standing among the heaving bodies and clutching a beer. The Opposition Leader was in fine form, working the room like a man on a mission - with every pretty girl catching his eye. Some got a hug or an arm around the shoulders.

A male colleague of mine excused himself to go and chat to Brogden. They stood off to one side of the bar, talking. When I wandered over to join them, I approached Brogden [NOTE who approached whom] with Carr's resignation in the front of my mind. I was hoping to ask him about his chances of winning the next election. But I never quite got that far.

I said: "Hi, John" and started to ask him about his chances of taking western Sydney Labor seats. He then stopped me by raising one hand.

He slipped one arm around the small of my back, leant down and said: "Enough of that. Are you available?" I must have looked startled, as did my colleague.

I stumbled out some reply on the lines of: "No, I have a boyfriend, thanks very much."

Brogden froze. Beer in hand, he looked at me, my colleague, one of his staffers, then back to me. It must have clicked. I wasn't another young girl at the Marble Bar he might try to chat up. I was a newspaper reporter. [Why wasn't she "another young girl at the Marble Bar"? She hadn't spoken to him at the function, hadn't introduced herself as a reporter; she was "a young girl"and she was at the Marble Bar]

He appeared to realise he had made a terrible mistake.

To be fair, I never introduced myself as Angela Cuming, Sun-Herald, but I thought he knew I was with the assembled reporters. [He isn't allowed an assumption, but she is]

He asked his staffer to hold his beer and said he needed to go to the toilet. But he must have high-tailed it out of there. We never saw him again that night. His behaviour, leading up to that event and his comments to me, shocked me and the colleagues I was with.

Here was the Opposition Leader, who had just been dealt the best break of his career with Bob Carr's resignation, carrying on like a young single looking to add a few numbers to his little black book.

We were doubly shocked that his staffers were standing by, drinking with him, and not calling a taxi as they should have done.

I, like every other girl in Sydney, is used to the odd drunken suit throwing out a dodgy pick-up line in a bar on a Friday night. It makes me feel uncomfortable any time, as I believe women have a right to a night out without being harassed. [Who was harassing whom? Who approached whom?]

But when it is a politician with a wife and young child at home, then that really makes my blood boil.

What has upset me is Brogden first claiming the incident took place at the AHA function. It didn't. The AHA event was over and I was with colleagues at a bar, trying to enjoy myself.

Brogden made his remarks to me under the impression I was just a girl at a bar on a Friday night. [Wasn't she? See above]

But I am not his mate. I don't share jokes with him in the corridors of Macquarie Street. [So why should he have recognised her, as she assumed he would?] Nor do I accept Brogden's claim yesterday that his actions were in jest.

I have been around long enough to know when a proposition is a  proposition.

Being drunk is no excuse to make any woman, of any age and in any social situation, feel like I did that night. [Even though "like every other girl in Sydney" she is "used to the odd drunken suit throwing out a dodgy pick-up line in a bar on a Friday night."]

*

Ms Cuming is a well regarded reporter, but this report represents the application of the egg-beater with the "moral outrage" dial turned up to 11.  And it is curious that Ms Cuming says she is not one of Mr Brogden's mates and still did not introduce herself as a reporter, but merely expected him to be aware of her presence and her job.

Members of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (AJA Division) - as all the Advocate's staff are - commit to a code of ethics and that's a part of it: you should declare who you are and for whom you're working if you want to report what people tell you. Most of us take it seriously, but it can be a judgment call in the situation Ms Cuming describes.

Members also commit to tell the story (when they have obtained it ethically). The question remains: why didn't Angela Cuming or anyone else tell this one earlier? Why did none of her "colleagues" report it? Even if the AHA function were off the record, that function was over, wasn't it? Ms Cuming says so; she says these events happened in a different venue: why were they not reportable? And why were they not reported? Alternatively, if they weren't reportable because the details were not gained ethically, what makes them reportable now?

As for off-the-record functions…I know that they occur - the Placido Domingo speech came out of such an event - but I have never accepted an invitation as a journalist to attend such a thing. The off-the-record rules, often misunderstood by the public, are sacrosanct to members of the MEAA.

One of my former colleagues, Michael Harvey of the Herald-Sun's Canberra bureau, is looking at porridge for contempt of court for refusing to reveal who let him see some documents in 2004 that have already resulted in serious consequences for a public servant.

Even if they got the wrong public servant, Harvey cannot under the Alliance code of ethics tell the court who would have been the right one.

Journalists do go to jail for this principle from time to time. The industry supports them because it's very helpful to all journos for sources to be reminded that they will not be dropped in it, even to the courts.

Not all observe the rules.

The easiest way to avoid ethical dilemma, I believe, is never to accept an invitation to such an event.

But this wasn't such an event. Ms Cuming says so. So why didn't she write it three weeks ago? Why did none of the reporters who witnessed the events write the story then?

Grahame Morris, a former adviser to John Howard and now principal of a p.r. firm, went on television to explain that journalists usually know quite a lot of stories that they don't tell. They all have their favourites and wouldn't dob on them. The relationship is symbiotic.

Mark Riley, a gun reporter, had steam coming out his ears almost visibly, but his riposte was delectable: in the modern press gallery, he said, reporters did not become friends of politicians or their families.

The emphasis was subtle but perceptible, and put Morris in his place: yesterday. Yet Mr Morris's explanation has the virtue of making sense of the failure of reporters who witnessed the events in the Marble Bar to write the story.

Apart from that, Riley might have been expounding a principle long held in America: if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. It's good advice for both those who report and those reported on.

I feel sorry for Ms Cuming. Her story appears and Mr Brogden, apparently, attempts suicide. That is not her fault. People who attempt suicide are responsible for their own actions.

I feel doubly sorry for her because she wrote, "What has upset me is Brogden first claiming the incident took place at the AHA function." She must have been shattered when the group editor-in-chief of Fairfax's metropolitan newspapers and acting editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Mark Scott, said on smh.com.au today: [4]

When John Brogden confessed to our reporter on Sunday night, confirming on the record his behaviour at that Australian Hotels Association party and his racial slur …

He proceeded with his explanation of how the paper had covered the political story and not the personal, but it makes me wonder which stories he read and how he knows what his paper has published. Certainly Ms Cuming's was personal: it's in the first person.

The one other element of the whole tale that amuses me as much as anything is the assumption underlying all the myth-making that women journalists are vestal virgins.

The Alliance code of ethics must have mistakenly omitted the vow of chastity.

In reality, journalists have their own lives. If they are sexually active, who should be surprised?

I have known female reporters who have had affairs - some casual in the extreme, some serious and long-lasting - with male reporters, superiors in the office, politicians, political staffers, even each other.

So what? They have always seemed to me perfectly capable of negotiating these situations like other mature adults, i.e. sometimes with success

The journalist herself must decide whether it compromises her ability to report on a particular person or field of endeavour, but the suggestion that a political figure, or a rock star or any other person in the public eye, can't try to negotiate something that goes beyond professional acquaintance is, frankly, immature. Because such things do happen.

What remains unexplained is the failure of anyone to write the story.

There has been a view among political reporters that the private can be separated from the political. It's the same as the view - once dominant and still prevalent - among sports reporters that what happens on tour stays on tour.

As various cases of the past two or three years have shown in sport, that's not really tenable.

Perhaps it was the remorseful recognition that they had failed which prompted Sydney's media to respond with the throttles wide open when they were upstaged from Canberra.

It's a question worth further examination, because our democracy depends not only on the behaviour of politicians. The media have a proper role, too.