EDITORIAL - Public interest and concern for privacy

Concerns for the privacy of those involved in a supposed love triangle involving a town vice mayor, his wife, and the other woman have come belatedly. There was none of that concern when the skewed relationships first became public, as a result of a very public incident - the wife, in a car, allegedly rammed the other woman, who happens to be a lawyer, in another car. That done, the wife pursued the attack with a baseball bat.

To be sure, it was the media that brought the incident out into the open. Are there pangs of guilt in media circles about how the privacy of those involved may now be jeopardized? To those who do not know media, there is little guilt, if any, once a conscious decision has been made to run a particular story. A little tweak on the conscience, maybe, but not guilt certainly.

Guilt involves a supposition of wrongdoing. And there is no wrongdoing in a job that requires reporting a story fairly and accurately. But does a story have to be reported just as long as it is reported fairly and accurately? Of course not. But the rule of thumb is that a story makes public if it is in the public interest. So was there public interest in a story that now raises some concerns about privacy?

The answer, sad to disappoint, is there was and there still is. The main qualifier for public interest is the fact that one of the protagonists is a sitting elected public official. There is no getting around that fact to dilute public interest. Even that alone already begs for public disclosure in the name of public interest.

But there were other qualifiers as well. The story involved a very public incident. Even without the alleged romantic angles involved, even an accidental coming together of two motor vehicles on a public road is news enough, more so when the coming together is apparently by design. And then there is that not so small matter about the baseball bat. And that does not even take into account the profession of one, and their relationships to the elected official.

All in all, there was no way all self-respecting journalists could avoid running the story the moment they learned of it. The fact that the story was on the front pages of all the local newspapers is testament to the vigilance and professional skills of the journalists who handled the story when it broke. As to how other journalists later picked up and picked on the story is another story altogether, and perhaps that is where the concerns about privacy should be directed.

Obviously, we cannot speak for all journalists other than our own. More so about the after-incident comments that these journalists may have made as a result. However this story will eventually go, there is a light that ought to shine out of it for everybody to see - there are stories that go public and others that don't. But whichever path they go, they are often sewn up by some common thread, which in this case happens to be the stuff of which people sit up and talk about.