After the whoops of salacious joy from media rivals at seeing Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks being paraded along the streets of London before being hanged drawn and quartered at Tyburn, I am not entirely sure that a public inquiry over phone hacking will be in their best interests.
No wonder the politicians are so cock a hoop. The public exposure of the fetid corruption that has led to the most appalling and illegal invasion of privacy will make the MPs' expenses scandal seem like a teddy bears' picnic.
The depressing fact is most newspapers have been behaving despicably for years. Richard Thomas’s report in 2006 came to the conclusion that apart from the FT, Guardian and Independent, all the other national newspapers were using dodgy investigators who had hacked phones, bunged coppers, obtained telephone bills, bank accounts and just about anything they wanted.
Top of his list was the Mail and Mirror who are rather foolishly wallowing in Murdoch’s discomfort. Oh, and before the Guardian becomes too smug and self righteous, their sister newspaper, the sainted Observer, had some pretty dishonourable mentions in dispatches.
So what are these sanctimonious companies who, I suspect, for the basest reasons of self publicity, pulled the advertising plug on the News of the World going to do? Crawl back or pull advertising from most of the others?
But we are all complicit in all of this. We buy the bloody things. We salivate over the latest divorce, shag, roasting or murder. It’s bit like enjoying a leg of lamb but not wanting to know how the poor thing was slaughtered.
What has most resonated and revolted the public into a quite justified sense of outrage is that it has not just been publicity hungry celebs, dim footballers or publicity hungry politicians who’ve had the treatment; nobody is safe.
If your son or daughter has been involved in a nasty murder, been an innocent in an atrocity, or somehow got onto the radar of some middleman on the make, there’s a reasonable chance that there will have been some dodgy digging with money changing hands.
So who knows about it all? You have to understand that sophisticated Chinese walls have been in place for years to protect editors. It’s not unlike the security services and ministers. They need plausible deniability.
No editor is going to tell anyone to bug the phone, steal the bank balance or hack into the voicemails of anyone. They will just action an investigation. They won’t know how the information is gathered nor who by. They won’t even sign the cheques. So all this hysteria over Coulson and Brooks is just that.
If you want to find a culprit just follow the money.
The real villains are the middle men. Those sniffing for kiss and tells, entrapments and waving a cheque book or a directional microphone at some wannabe footballers wife trawling the clubs of Manchester. These guys will do almost anything to get a story. And Her Majesty’s Press is only too eager to print it.
Years ago when the body of Stephen Milligan was found in unusual circumstances a mate of mine who was a senior whip attended the scene. He was rather alarmed to see that his dark coat was covered in lasered spots. He thought it was a firearms team. In fact it was directional microphones from the press trying to over hear his conversation.
To be fair, after the Mulcaire trial the press have gone a long way to clean up their act. Most of the hacking is pre-2006.
So the government, apart from drawing up codes suggesting that the press obey the law, are going to have to do something. Of course, they haven’t got a clue what. That’s why we have a nice buck-passing inquiry.
But whatever they do it better be quick. The election is only a few years away and they will all be wanting to crawl up the backside of Mr. Murdoch again. Even the saintly Ed Miliband.
Comments
notinyourparty / July 07 2011 11:36am
There are things we can do:
Stop buying the rich old bugger's propaganda sheets.
Press your worse than useless MP for reform to the political donation system.
Something like "We welcome donations to the political life of the nation, all donations must be paid into a central fund which will be administered by civil servants and paid out in direct ratio to the number of fee paying members in each party."
and action on lobbying such as:
"Approaching an MP for any reason must be done via his or her local constituency office at the normal times of his or her regular surgeries with no precedence given to any individual or group."
And of course make any attempt to break or even circumvent such laws a most serious criminal offence.
I find it laughable that you remark the press have cleaned their act up, they will have course simply found better ways to hide their activities.