The wandering eye of the Tiger – brisbanetimes.com.au

…His Wednesday statement on Tigerwoods.com about this being an invasion on his privacy was vastly more interesting than his admission to ”transgressions” – it is just about the first stand he has ever taken, on anything – but pleas for compassion and reason are usually drowned out by the noise that surrounds ”Gotcha!” The media and masses love hypocrisy – cops behaving badly, priests committing sins, politicians contradicting their platforms, humans being human.

So too many of us will rationalise away our judgmental behaviour now by calling him a fraud, cheater, liar and hypocrite and filing it under a public’s right to know, as if a public’s right to know about a guy who hits a golf ball somehow trumps an individual’s right to privacy.

But here’s where that falls apart: Woods never sold you family values; what he did was start a family. And then he took all his opinions and went and hid on his appropriately named yacht.

He didn’t build that image for himself. We did…

If you bought him as packaged perfection, the only one lying to you was you. His commercials? That’s him selling us purity? No, it isn’t. That’s him selling us razors.

The media used to exist, at least in part, to expose the wrong/illegal.

But now we’re more comfortable than ever uncovering the wrong/immoral…

via The wandering eye of the Tiger. brisbanetimes.com.au [my emphasis]

A breach in the principle of the separation of church and state – in a time when we no longer belong to churches.  The media has become a moral community, or a plurality of moral communities even while pretending that it is no such thing. But it is inverted – the media presents an IMAGE of morality and reproduces that image (and an implied judgement) for consumption by sometimes hundreds of millions of viewers. And each consumer interprets the images from the media as if the people being presented were standing there in their living room in person.  This media morality includes a paradigm of (inverted Big Brother) values, but they are not the same family values you have in your personal life and that a consumer would judge what they are seeing with.

Conventional media and secular public spaces contain values as well and it is also judgemental. These values could be understood as a rigorous paradigm to test propositions and public facts – the usual testing of ideas. These secular values include aspects of identity in that a persons social standing and self respect are tied to how well they understand and master the rules and norms of their communities. It can be difficult for many people to join specialist communities – think of what you need to do to participate in professional or academic disciplines and they how treat people who don’t understand their field as they do. But within a community, the critical testing is impersonal and is focused outside the community onto the object of study. This protects the people involved and it includes the idea that errors are interesting to find and can be instructive. It does sometimes become personal as well.

The use of media as a moral community can destroy people.