SEPTEMBER 3 — I had a brief conversation with a friend about the way a politician’s divorce has become one of the hottest media stories around. It is everywhere, repeated across news outlets and discussed with an intensity that makes you wonder whether something of real public consequence has happened, and our conversation eventually came down to a very simple question. Why exactly is this our business?

This opened up a larger question about what happens when someone enters public life and we slowly begin to behave as though the distinction between the public person and the private human being no longer matters. Marriage, divorce, relationships, affairs, sexuality, children, private messages, past mistakes and personal crises can all suddenly become available for public inspection simply because someone holds political office.

This is troubling because accountability is fundamental to democracy, but accountability is not ownership. We should know what politicians do with the power we give them, and we should be uncompromising about that. Yet knowing how somebody exercises public power is different from assuming that we have acquired a right to know everything about the person exercising it.

That distinction has become harder in the age of social media. Political communication is no longer confined to Parliament, press conferences and policy speeches. Politicians post birthday celebrations, family photographs, anniversaries, holidays, children, spouses, private moments because personality has become part of political communication. Voters are invited to see the person behind the politician, and intimacy can be politically useful because it creates familiarity, relatability and trust.

So yes, there is a complication here. Politicians themselves sometimes open the door.

But opening one door does not mean handing the public the keys to intrude the entire house.

Scholar Helen Nissenbaum’s idea of “contextual integrity” is useful here because privacy is not simply about secrecy. Information can be true, accessible and even already known to some people, while it can still be inappropriate to move it into another context and expose it to a much larger audience.

Private lives are increasingly turned into news because they are sensational, highly clickable and good for readership, even when their public relevance is almost non-relevant. But the fact that something can attract attention does not mean it deserves a headline, and the fact that something can be discovered does not automatically make it public interest.

For me, what politicians choose to do in their private lives is their own business. That includes their relationships, marriages, affairs and other personal choices, however much the public may approve or disapprove of them.

The line changes only when something that happens in private has a direct bearing on the exercise of public power. If a relationship leads to favours or preferential treatment, then the issue is no longer the relationship itself but the abuse of office. If public money is involved, if there is corruption or a conflict of interest, or if there is coercion, violence, harassment or criminal conduct, then there is a legitimate reason for scrutiny. Even then, what matters is not the politician’s private life as such, but what that conduct tells us about the use or misuse of power.

There is something else at stake here. If every relationship, or private mistake can one day be dragged into public view, I am not sure that gives us better politics. It may simply give us politicians who are more guarded, and more careful about showing anything real. We already complain that politicians are too scripted, and yet we are helping to create a culture where any unscripted part of their lives can later be used against them. That is a contradiction worth thinking about.

There is also an important gender dimension that we should not be overlooked. Women in politics are still judged through marriage, motherhood, appearance, age, relationships, clothing, emotion and personality in ways that frequently have little to do with how they exercise office. A woman can be assessed simultaneously as politician, wife, mother and woman, and private events can quickly become evidence in a much broader social judgment about what kind of woman she supposedly is. At that point, political scrutiny becomes social surveillance, except that we legitimise it by placing it under the heading of news.

Then there are the people surrounding politicians. Someone may choose political life, but their spouse may not, their parents may not, and their children certainly did not. Yet once private information enters the digital news ecosystem, everyone connected to the politician can become a public character in a story they never volunteered to join.

This is where contemporary journalism carries a particular responsibility. A story is no longer simply published in the morning and forgotten by the next day. It is copied, aggregated, screenshotted, reposted across social media, discussed in videos, podcasts and comment sections, picked up by other outlets, indexed by search engines and kept alive far beyond the original news cycle. Today’s click can become tomorrow’s permanent digital record. A difficult moment in someone’s private life can remain searchable for years, long after whatever public relevance it may once have had has disappeared. That is precisely why editors should exercise greater care in deciding what deserves to be published and what should remain private.

Politicians today may choose to share more of their personal lives, and sometimes they deliberately invite the public into parts of that private world because this has become part of how modern politics works. But even when they choose to share some parts of their lives, that does not mean they have given up the right to keep other parts private, because visibility is not the same as consent to intrusion.

* Khoo Ying Hooi is an associate professor at Universiti Malaya.

** This is the personal opinion of the writers or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.