COMMENT The modern media melodrama typically involves the courtroom: from Jacob Zuma’s indictment for rape, to Julian Assange’s sex-crime troubles, to Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy arraignments, the dramatic beginning of a trial simultaneously heightens and hides issues in the backdrop.

The issue of the morality of the arraigned is raised against a background where there is not much that can be said about that aspect of the lives of people who stand to gain if their target is found wanting on that score.

And hidden by the high-octane drama is the question of the fragility of standards of civilised conduct in times when powers-that-be are in a state of panic over a threat to their position...