Matthew Johns is his own best judge

18 May 2009

Channel 9 stood down rugby league star Matthew Johns last week, not because his behaviour was immoral or illegal, but for commercial reasons. That is the view of Harold Mitchell, Australia's best known buyer of television advertising time. He told ABC Radio: 'Advertisers in my experience are very sensitive to public opinion because it lands on their doorstep very quickly in the form of sales.' New Zealand police did not charge Johns over his involvement in a 2002 group sex incident in Christchurch, as they could not see that he'd broken any law. It was commentary after last week's ABC Four Corners investigation that was labelling it 'rape'. Significantly the public appears to have followed the leadership of opinion and judged it as such. While Channel 9's decision looks self-serving, the commercial logic that governs it can at least seen to be democratic. That is, it ensures the community's standards of common decency are reflected in what is shown on commercial TV. However the court of public opinion is heavily influenced by the dominant media commentary, and its power must not be allowed to eclipse that of the more traditional forms of arbitration, the civil courts and private conscience. Last week the British were preoccupied with media revelations of obscene — though not necessarily illegal — expense claims by government MPs. Financial regulation expert Joe Egerton wrote in Eureka Street's sister publication Thinking Faith that the court of public opinion has a place, and of course a vital say in the fate of the MPs under scrutiny: '[If an MP] takes a public stance that some well publicised and controversial claim was in order, we are also entitled to ask whether we are going to vote for a person who thinks that that sort of claim is proper to make on the public purse.' But Egerton stresses this point: 'Most claims will have been entirely proper. Not all of the reporting is fair and proper.' That is why popular judgments must be tested by civil law and, most importantly, one's own personal law — conscience. As Egerton says: 'This is not a matter of our judging an MP's actions. This is a matter of each MP judging his or her own actions.' The MP may well be confined to electoral oblivion by what the people think when they come to vote, just as commercial reality has ended Matthew Johns' career, at least for now. But it's the

AUSTRALIA

Matthew Johns is his own best judge

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