Tort Of Privacy

Paul Keating’s fondness for picking up the phone to relay his displeasure about media coverage is the stuff of legend. From the half-dozen spirited conversations I’ve had as a publisher with the former PM, the most memorable went to the issue of privacy.

An item had appeared in Sydney Confidential about his daughter being spotted on a date with a rugby league player at a city bar. The article didn’t suggest any hanky-panky, simply that they had met for a drink. Keating didn’t think it should have run at all and took particular issue with the accompanying photograph, which had been tagged as digitally altered, featuring separate merged images of his daughter and the said footy star.

Keating prefaced his remarks by reflecting on the level of moral bankruptcy which would attract someone to a career as a gossip writer, and indeed a career as the publisher of their work. To give you a sense of it, in his opening salvo he described gossip writers as “ugly biker’s molls who couldn’t get a root on a troop ship, couldn’t get a root on a troop ship coming home” and he concluded that whenever he rang editors about articles of this kind he routinely received a lecture about public figures and the public’s right to know which had no relationship to the “horseshit” we chose to publish.

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