It’s way too generous referring to Catharine Lumby as a media operator, as Crikey did yesterday. Lumby has an academic title related to media studies and she writes a lot of op-ed pieces. For all her very long career parading all manner of opinions, Lumby’s spent very little time as a working journalist. Whatever she knows about cultural theory, one has to question her authority to talk about the dilemmas facing reporters in the field.

And, as usual, much of what Lumby says is complete tosh. Lumby displays her true sisterhood credentials when she says “I think we are watering down the definition of true sexual harassment if we make it a hanging offence for someone to flirt while they’re in a bar socialising.” Excuse me!

A working journalist, in the company of other journalists, approaches the Leader of the Opposition and asks him a question about politics, and he puts the hard word on her. I think a lot of women, and men for that matter, would see that as entirely inappropriate behaviour. (The fact that the journos present that night did nothing to report Brogden’s behaviour is an entirely separate matter, as are the motives of the Liberal Party bovver boys who made the whole thing public.)

Lumby says that over the years we have politcised many behaviours such as sexual harassment – she makes it sound like a lament. Lumby also tells us “there has been an undoubted tabloidisation of the mainstream media in the past two decades.” Surely that’s something she would celebrate, given her constant harping about the elitism of the broadsheet media. It’s intriguing that Lumby seems to be questioning whether these revelations about Brogden are a good thing, given everything else she has said about celebrity and the exposure of the private lives of the famous. God knows how many times I’ve read Lumby’s defence of the tabloids and their obsessive interest in the sex lives of celebrities.

She says it’s hard to draw a hard and fast line between the public and the private. It’s only hard, Catharine, if you don’t give it some thought.