Paul McCartney has often said that if the walls of the abattoirs were made of glass everyone would become vegetarian overnight. I'm sure he is right, and as an omnivore but one who blanches at the thought of the slaughtering process and indeed tries not to think about it, I will concede right at the start of this blog that I'm a tad (cheerfully!) hypocritical about aspects of life and so if what follows appears to have a superior tone; that I am taking the moral high ground, let it be noted that I recognise that I'm just as capable of applying double standards or in being in denial about unpleasant and troubling facts as anyone else.
The words 'extraordinary, 'dramatic' and 'unprecedented' are often bandied around in the media to try and whip up interest in a story, not least when it is about the media – because nothing, or hardly anything, interests the media more than itself – but in the case of the News International phone hacking affair these words and more are well justified. Indeed, overused phrase such as "impossible to exaggerate the significance", "tipping point" and "game-changing" may even be apt. And of course it isn't just 'about' the media but our whole political system, culture and not least the integrity of guardians and enforcers of the laws of the country.
I've been meaning to write this blog since the whole saga began about 10 days ago but each day something new and amazing has happened and I thought: "wait and see what happens and then comment on that". But I think if I wait until the end of it I could be waiting a long time! But because it did grow like topsy and I couldn't resist adding a few comments on each new, dramatic development, as well as (inevitably!) the occasional anecdote and autobiographical element, I've split this into two.
Quick recap of the headlines: just over a week ago it was announced that the country's biggest selling newspaper was to close after 168 years; News Corporation has announced that it is abandoning for the moment at least its plans to take over the 61% of BskyB - perhaps the best and almost certainly the most profitable subscriber-based TV system in the world – that it doesn't already own; the Coalition Government decided to back a motion on the Labour opposition day and two enquiries have been announced under a judge. Perhaps most significantly of all, Rupert Murdoch - the most feared and courted media baron in UK history – has been humbled, and politicians who just over a week ago were courting him are now falling over themselves to condemn him. It now seems inconceivable that any politician, whether in or out of government, will fear him and, indeed, the endorsement of any of his papers at the next election may be seen as a poisoned chalice. The request – then summons – from the Select Committee of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, along with son James, and Rebekah Brooks - until this Friday, the Chief Executive of News International - demonstrated the power of Parliament even when the two Murdochs are foreign citizens. In fact, one of the many things I've learned from this saga is that Parliament had the power to demand people's
attendance, even of foreigners, if they were the time in the UK. I would have loved to have seen the pictures of the Serjeant at Arms – even without her regulation tights – delivering the summons.
As I write this, the latest twist is that Brooks, who, un til yesterday, Murdoch insisted must stay, despite persistent calls for her to go from leading politicians and many of the journalists at the News of the World (a good joke being that the wrong red top had gone!) has finally resigned. This however it seems was not prompted by some mea culpa, but by the second largest shareholder of parent group News Corporation in New York, who demanded that she went. It is worth bearing in mind that, despite the Murdochs attempting to use them as a private fiefdom, these are public companies. It is also worth bearing in mind that many pension funds have money invested in BskyB, so we shouldn't be too delighted when their share price plummets. When it comes to the world of international finance and corporations we are all, to some extent in this together and it is inevitable that those with the most to lose, those on modest salaries and pensions, will be hit hardest if the Murdoch empire does indeed start to fall apart.
Finally, we have various allegations of police incompetence, collusion and corruption, going right to the top of the country's biggest force.
The only comparable such tale in recent times was the Hutton affair of 2004, when both the Director-General of the BBC and the Corporation's Chairman both resigned in the wake of the official report into the so-called 'sexed up Iraq dossier' saga on the then government's compilation of the case for going to war (see last paragraph!). That report got the Prime Minister of the day and his then the communications' chief off the hook, even then the ramifications were miniscule compared to the fast unfolding drama ran now witnessing. We are truly – another cliché coming up – in unchartered waters and every day is bringing even more astonishing revelations. Given its widespread ramifications in the political, cultural and economic life of the country 'the British Watergate' might not even be hyperbole and, indeed, Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who revealed the Watergate scandal has used this term in relation to the current events the size of the pond. It is even possible that it could ultimately lead to the ousting of the Prime Minister and/or the ejection of the Murdochs as "fit and proper people" to be a part of British broadcasting.
So, going back to my point about meat eaters not wanting to think about how the processes which brought that nice steak bacon sandwich onto their plate, if we're going to start apportioning blame to this terrible affair let's do the "we are all to blame" bit. Because the fact is that if we didn't want to read stories about the sexual peccadilloes of footballers, TV stars and the rest, the News of the World and other papers would not print them and the police would not have been drawn in to supplying vital information to the journalists. In what is unquestioningly a ruthlessly competitive environment, compounded by the structural changes in the media industry with advertising revenues flowing to the Internet and reduced readership (the 2.6 million sales of News of the World seems impressive, but it was selling about twice as many a decade or so ago and in my lifetime it sold an astonishing 9 million copies), the papers have been increasingly driven to getting stories they know will increase sales.
Now this might be met with incredulity, but I really believe that even journalists on the News of the World would much rather use their undoubted talents and skills to reveal wrongdoing and corruption in government, amongst officials, or serious criminal activities and bring crooks to justice. And of course they did continue to do this. But the fact is that sales went up when they had a front-page splash of the 'away games' of footballers and TV stars and the more salacious were the kiss and tell stories, the more they sold. So we get the tabloid press we deserve.
And how do people think – did they think – they got these stories? And more pertinently, what effect did they think they had on the innocents involved: the wronged wives and partners, the tearful and bewildered children? I was struck by one of the comments from someone who was brave enough on a recent Newsnight to admit that she had read the paper. To her it was just a bit of fun; she would get together with her friends at the Sunday lunch and they would pour over all the dirt and gossip and have a good laugh. Back to my simile over meat-eating: you don't think about the pain and distress of the animals being slaughtered, you just enjoy the nice steak or chop on the plate.
Well, runs the defence, if 'they' don't want to appear in the papers with these embarrassing stories 'they' shouldn't do it. So, it seems the British public expect, for example, young men at the height of their sexual drive and perhaps have higher than normal levels of testosterone, who have fantastically high earnings and women literally throwing themselves at them and begging for sex, to behave like eunuchs at a brothel? And what in any case have 'they' done wrong to justify such public opporbrium? Take another famous example, that of the revelations of Max Mosley going to a 'sex dungeon' and being whipped by leather-clad women. The justification for this story – that there was a Nazi motif to these proceedings - was wrong and he won a privacy action against the paper. But the wider justification on, as it were, moral grounds, was that Mosley, as the then head of Formula One, and so was a public figure. The same has been used as justification for exposing and deposing the former England soccer team captain. So, our moral leaders are the head of the motorsport or a footballer? This is hilarious to me. I might take my moral leadership from the Archbishop of Canterbury and there would be perhaps public interest if he was having extramarital affairs but otherwise, in my opinion, what goes on between consenting adults which affects no one else is a matter for them and it is not the job of a newspaper to reveal these things to their wives and children, etc. (Gentle reader: my thoughts on how to limit this sort of coverage whilst retaining the press's ability to expose 'real' wrong-doing is in the second part of this Blog…bet you can't wait!).
Looking through the front-page splashes that the final edition of the News of the World proudly reproduced, there are undoubtedly some genuine, public interest revelations, but they seem to have become fewer and far between. Yes, the scandal of the then Minister of War sharing a mistress with a Soviet spy at the height of the Cold War was justified (that was back in '63!) and the more recent match-fixing probes certainly fitted that bill, but most of the recent ones had no public interest justification.
What about when they exposed genuine law-breaking by celebrities, most commonly illegal drug-taking? Well, I have a problem with this too, because I do not believe that the private consumption of drugs should be a criminal matter. I may be deficient in my moral universe, but the criminal law is there to protect the property and personal safety of me and other members of society and I fail to see how someone snorting a line of coke in private threatens this. This isn't the place to get into a detailed exposition of my libertarian views and of course I have to accept that such things are illegal until and if Parliament decides otherwise, but frankly these stories do not pass the "so what?" test in the classic definition of news: "dog bites man - no news; man bites dog – news".
Given the prevalence of class A and B, never mind class C, drugs in the television and entertainment worlds, I would be surprised to learn of celebrities and stars who haven't taken them. The relish that many people have over 'slebs' being caught out reminds me of those kids at school who used to gloat at other kids getting into trouble and being punished. A joy in seeing other people in pain and humiliated. What does that say about us as a country? As school, it degrades everyone and whilst that sort of gleeful schadenfreude might be expected and acceptable in children, I don't think it is in adults. And it is no good saying that people aren't doing anything wrong by reading about what others were doing; that is the defence often given by paedophiles who look at child porn on the Internet. True, they haven't carried out the abuse, but if people like them weren't willing to use their credit cards to see it, it wouldn't take place. Obviously, some children would still be abused, but the market would be reduced, so the incidences fewer. All the evidence, by the way, suggests that this is also true of drug-taking: far from an increase in use of drugs after they've been declassified or decriminalised, all the studies show there is less, and of course most of the crime and gangs associated with the drugs' trade (perhaps accounting for some 85% of all criminal activity) would disappear. This is not to condone, let alone advocate, drug-taking certainly of A class drugs, but it shows the stupidity and futility of criminalising drug takers.
Most fair-minded people accept that popular newspapers like the News of the World have done important things and they have certainly played an important part in our culture for many decades. I was first aware of the NoW as an eight or nine year old, back in the mid-1960s. On Sundays, most of my nearby friends went to church or Sunday school but, coming from an agnostic family – indeed I have never been baptised in any faith to this day: my parents thought it wrong to decide for an infant what their religion should be, so it appears I'm going to both the Catholic and Islamic hell (double bugger!) - this wasn't part of my routine. So I started trotting down to a less well-heeled part of town where one of my school friends lived, a lovely tall and rather confident girl called Helen. Her home was in a classic hard-working, respectable working-class community and on Sundays her granddad would give her the cash, plus some pocket money, to go to the newsagents to pick up his copy of the News of the World and (almost unbelievably, and I am sure this was illegal even then for children of our age) his weekly cigarettes' ration! Helen had obviously picked up from her grandfather the importance of the paper and when I made some comment – no doubt picked up from my parents, whose paper on that day was the Sunday Times – that it was a bit of rubbish, she rounded on me (and I remember this really clearly!) that it was a very important paper and uncovered and reported on things people were doing wrong and this in turn led to important changes. Respecting the views of someone who was such a kind and compassionate person, this had a big effect on me and I used to flick through it as we skipped back to granddad's. Although this sounds like a boast, I did have a very high reading age for someone my years, so I could understand all the stories, although not of course some of the coded prose and euphemisms for various salacious tales involving vicars and choirboys and the rest.
More than that though, in talking to granddad it was clear that his relationship with the paper was quite complex and even profound. An intelligent man who, like most of his generation I guess would have left school at around 14, he didn't just look on the newspaper as a weekly dose of scandal and titillation, but as (and this might seem fantastic to later generations) as a form of education. This attitude would probably have been instilled by his parents or even grandparents. It is striking when you look through the really old editions of the paper how much of it is geared towards expanding the knowledge of its readers; it began publishing just as mass literacy, as well as the mass dislocation of the population was taking place, at the height of the Industrial Revolution and towards the very end of the 'taxes on knowledge', which had been used by the powerful elites to make newspapers unaffordable to the common man, let alone woman. The very first edition contained an offer of encyclopaedias, and many other popular Sunday papers offer versions of these types of books, as well as literary works. Moreover, millions, like Helen's granddad, believed such papers were on their side; they dealt with the aspirations and the problems of the working classes, and their investigations and exposures were against those who exploited, humiliated and defrauded them. Such newspapers had a personality; they were welcomed into the home as a friend and champion. To them, journalism was a respected and noble calling. It was practised by 'educated people", with the knowledge and skills to help, rather than exploit them. This may have been a somewhat naive belief, and of course there was a widespread understanding of the papers often also being used for propaganda purposes by rich proprietors. Nevertheless, a free press - which had only been established after several centuries of conflict and debate - was appreciated, I think, in a way that is quite hard to understand today. Although I wouldn't appreciate all of this until much later as I began to study media history – which now I'm privileged enough to teach and research – these partly formed views and perceptions definitely lodged in the Rudin brain and made me think about the role of journalism and newspapers.
In our family holidays to my grandparents' little holiday place on the Lincolnshire coast, one of my tasks was to go to the newsagents every day. I used to love this, as when on holiday we bought a wider variety of papers that when we lived at home and I was fascinated by all the tabloids, not least their use of language, especially the puns often used in the headlines – in fact at one stage I thought there was some sort of law that you had to have puns in all the headlines of papers of that sort!
But there was something else about the News of the World in its heyday which is hardly ever commented on, and that is that until around the mid-1980s Sundays in Britain for most people living outside London or a handful of other big cities, was incredibly boring. It really was! There was hardly anything open, apart from the pub for a few hours and the cinema if you are lucky, and so the News of the World provided some important diversion and entertainment, and - let's not be prissy about this! - in the days before the Internet provided such stimulation at the click of a mouse, for many men it was a classic 'one-handed read'. It wasn't just the pictures of scantily clad young women but the salacious and neo-erotic tales it had of celebrities getting up to rather more than the 'once a week in the missionary position with the lights off', which was the total sum (if they were lucky!) of many adults' sexual lives.
As a paperboy in the early to mid-1970s I learned how eagerly the paper's arrival on the doormat was anticipated by many of my homes in that distinctly suburban, middle-class area and let it be forgotten that although it is associated mainly with the working class readership, sales were so large that it also had the highest number of socio-economic groups A and B of any paper's readership. I also was instructed by the manager at the newsagents that I was to tuck the paper inside the more respectable, serious newspapers, such as the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. There must be countless couples who used to snuggle up in bed and read together the more revealing parts of the paper as a bit of foreplay of a Sunday morning, or when the kids were at Sunday school!
Naturally, one of the most welcome aspects of my time in the 'newspaper distribution business' was being able to read all the papers every Sunday as I went from house to house and I always bought a couple myself and certainly this quite often, if there was a particularly salacious story, would indeed include the News of the World, which helped my feverish imagination of many a day and night through those difficult years!
In part two of this blog I am going to reveal my own tales of ethical dilemmas in journalism, including a full confession of an illegal practice. I am also going to discuss my thoughts about the Murdochs, press regulation and generally how I see this affecting the media landscape in Britain. But, after a period when the trade of journalism has been thoroughly trashed and the already low reputation of journalists has been dragged down still further, let's remind ourselves of a few facts and a few reasons why a free press – that is to say, publication without the need for a licence, without censorship and subject only to the general laws of the land and a self-regulating code - has been and is so important. Our Parliament, public bodies, and our 'Rolls-Royce' civil service did not protect us from going into an illegal war and the only people who've lost their jobs from the whole nightmare of Iraq have been the journalists, who, in admittedly sometimes flawed reporting, did at least expose the lies and distortions used by politicians and the military, and the widespread abuses and torture practised by the Allies.
It was journalists, sometimes in league with friendly parliamentarians, and their use of the cloak of Parliamentary privilege, who have covered many miscarriages of justice and led to the release of many prisoners, who had usually lost several rounds of appeals from our supposedly brilliant judiciary.
It is journalists and journalism that has brought to book innumerable crooks, conmen, and webs of corrupt officials and politicians, which the police had failed to unravel, and indeed brought to book many corrupt police officers.
Many medical malpractices, cover-ups of many kinds and all sorts of threats to public safety and well-being have been exposed by journalists. Laws have been changed as a result of some of these and even the legal age of sexual consent was brought down by one of the first journalistic 'stings' - by W.T. Stead, an undercover reporter back in 1885. It was journalism that exposed the lies and incompetence of the military in World War I – though not, tragically, before the slaughter of the Somme. Much more recently, it was journalism that exposed the abuse of Parliamentary expenses and allowances (and it should be remembered that this only came to light after the distinctly unethical practice of a BROADSHEET paper using a stolen series of documents).
The list goes on and on, but finally we should not remember that the only reason the abuses alleged to have been undertaken by News International and perhaps some other newspaper groups have come to light is because other journalists have doggedly exposed these practices and published them at great risk to their reputations and fortunes. It is print journalists– seemingly chaotic, flawed, and compromised they might be by pressures of time, commerce and megalomaniac proprietors (as one academic put it: "it works in practice but it would never work in theory"), who produce something approaching a daily miracle: one which, when you see the conditions and pressures under which it is created, is astonishing for not what it gets wrong, but for how much it gets right - and astonishingly cheaply for the 'end user'. An incalculably important part of our national life and our freedoms.
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