Trial by media is an easy phrase, but what does it actually mean? Last week the Australian Press Council made an adjudication upholding a complaint against The Age over its reporting of rape allegations against Victorian MP Theo Theophanous — allegations that helped wreck his political career.

The ABC’s Media Watch program covered the story comprehensively this week, including Age editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge’s less than convincing defence of the paper’s conduct.

And the story has attracted a comment from Theophanous on the Media Watch website in which he accuses Ramadge of being unwilling to accept the umpire’s decision. It is hard to disagree. Ramadge’s response to Media Watch is full of technical truths and lawyer-like defences.

The Age has comprehensively rejected the allegations against it, and yet it seems to me that its conduct breaches many of the rules in common parlance in newsroom codes of conduct and ethics codes about disclosure and conflict of interest.

The essence of the matter, as Age reporters have been muttering for some time, is that the reporter, Carolyn Webb, knew the woman making the allegations beforehand. Webb’s defenders say she was a mere acquaintance, and that the two women had not seen each other for five years before the research for this article.

Nevertheless, there was a connection that some might be more inclined to call a friendship. Webb stayed with the woman in Greece. They visited restaurants together. It seems to have been more than a dispassionate job of research. And, most important, their prior acquaintanceship was not declared to the readers.

This is not just a matter of the journalists’ judgement. We have all been too caught up in a story. It is a question of editorial standards and editorial judgement. Someone should have interrogated the method, and the facts.

The woman making the complaint was later described by the courts as an unreliable witness, and the charges against Theophanous were dismissed.

It is not only the newspaper’s conduct that is in question here. The police officer investigating the case also behaved strangely, seemingly glossing over errors and inconsistencies in the many drafts of the complainant’s statement. Could we have a case of cop and journo egging each other on? Webb declined to comment when contacted by Crikey this morning, other than to point me to Ramadge’s response to Media Watch.

As well there is the claim, upheld by the Press Council’s finding, that there were witnesses available who were not interviewed by Webb, although she knew they existed. And that prior inconsistent statements by the woman making the rape allegations were known to Webb, but not revealed in The Age story.

To my knowledge, journalists at The Age have been worried about this case for months — well aware, even if the editor was not, of the difficulties of a reporter who had a personal relationship with a complainant writing a story of this sort.

Ramadge told Media Watch: “At the time the story was being prepared there was no friendship between the women, in the sense of emotional or social ties, and so no impediment to the journalist doing her job impartially” cut the mustard. I don’t think this cuts the mustard.

Everyone — The Age, Media Watch and the Press Council — is in furious agreement that there is not necessarily anything wrong with the media reporting serious criminal allegations that never make it to court. But common sense tells you if you are going to publish such material, exceptional levels of care are required. There should be nothing slipshod about the approach.

The obvious point of comparison is that other famous case of rape allegations — those against then ATSIC chair Geoff Clark. This is a case that has made its way in to most of the journalism ethics text books, and remains controversial.

In 2001, Age journalist Andrew Rule wrote a front page yarn and multiple follow-ups detailing rape allegations from a number of women against Clark. As in this case, those allegations were never tested by the courts. The evidence was found by police to be insufficient to sustain criminal charges. And, as in this case, The Age did not back down, defending its right to bring attention to serious allegations about a public figure.

There were problems in that case — in my view, most of all, the way the stories were written in a tone that suggested the women’s accounts were accepted as true, rather than as mere allegations. And on that occasion The Age broke the story, whereas when the Theophanous yarn was published it was already known the man was under investigation for an alleged rape.

Yet by and large the ethical case in the Clark allegations stands up, because of the care taken. The women, for example, were taken in to a hotel room and subjected to cross examination by The Age’s defamation lawyers before publication. The people who were there emerged convinced that the story could and should be published.

In the Clark case, then Age editor Michael Gawenda published a lengthy explanation of his decision-making process over whether to publish, and also subjected himself to radio interviews. The case was treated with gravity and judgement.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that a less than forensic approach was taken here.

The other way in which this case is significant is that for once an adjudication by the Australian Press Council is actually being noticed. There is not only the Media Watch coverage, but also comment from Andrew Bolt among others.

And the adjudication in itself is both longer and better written than the usual Press Council fare, and actually manages to address the key issues — perhaps a symptom of the winds of change at the Council, something I have written about previously.