Dig that alliteration, the News of the World's been caught again! And this time it's actually gone for some real criminal intent!
The only thing which outrages the public more than a, to quote the Sun, "serial child-sex beast" is a serial child-sex beast's victim's phone being hacked into by seedy a private investigator working for a multinational media corporation. That's the big difference here. The public has no problem with the personal abuse of "celebrities" or the rich and famous. I don't think it's justified, but everyone else apparently does and, as the tabloid and lifestyle mags show, there's a real sadist culture when it comes to unpleasant tales of the rich and famous. As such, when the phone-hacking of the likes of Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller and the Royal Family came to light, no-one really went mad about it since they're, somehow, getting their just desserts for having the nerve to be well-known. This is another issue to discuss, but the point is that now that the phone-hacking centred on a dear, sweet, innocent, cute, etc. member of the public who was murdered by a serial child-sex beast (that could be such a great B-movie title), the outrage will really come to the fore...she doesn't deserve it like the rest of those rich scum!
Well, it's not hard to be outraged - it's pretty textbook on the outrage front, even if you don't normally care about these kinds of functionalist histrionics. There's absolutely no defence for the NOTW in this case, they've gone and perverted the course of justice and misled the police and prolonged and manipulated a murder case. Someone should go to jail.
Well, Glenn Mulcaire's already gone down for six months. This is pretty much irrelevant, since he's just a tool of the trade. Clive Goodman went down for four months. Meh. James Weatherup was arrested, but nothing seems to have come of that. And that's it. These are just News International's vestigial tails, lackeys who can be thrown into the firing line when they're asked for blood. Otherwise, no-one of any real power has been seen with their head on the block and it's a scam.
Like I said in the title, they've become like a crime syndicate. They can send out their mugs to do their dirty deals and get fresh victims and then toss them off as fall guys and cover their tracks so no-one can find the route back to the Godfather, Murdoch, or his consigliere, Rebekah Wade.
The Press Complaints Commission and its Tory peer head, Peta Jane Buscombe, have been utterly impotent. It has so far failed to do a single thing, beyond issuing lame, unthreatening, powerless "edicts" and according to the Daily Politics, Buscombe is today, "not happy". Oooh, I'll bet Wade's just shaking in her polo boots...David "Mr. Rebekah Wade" Cameron has been irrelevant, as has Justin Hunt who's giving Murdoch another pat on the back by allowing his buying of BSkyB to go ahead.
Perhaps the Guardian and the Independent have been the only ones to really gain any boost to their reputation out of this out of this - it's hardly surprising that they've been jumping at the opportunity to tear down another wall of the Murdoch empire, but on top of that it's really allowed them to take the moral highground and with good reason. After all, neither paper has had to resort to illegal tactics to get the dish and it's not as though their sales are slumping and they're very keen to emphasise this. I think it's a good thing, because - at least for the time being - it proves that a paper and its journalists can maintain an ethical compass, that it's not a matter of making a fast buck by any means necessary.
Personal morality should not be dismissed. It is not enough to say that the public want it and therefore anything goes or that the press are just part of one big rat race (with the cheese being sales and mild, totally ineffectual electric shocks being the PCC) and so journalists need to resort to dirtier and more suspect tactics in order beat the competition.
Still, the big question here is that if the the Press Complaints Commission, self-regulation and personal ethics can't prevent the press undermining the law and society, then what can be done. How about statuatory regulation? Then we let the politicians decide what the media can and can't print?
Like the bankers, the media essentially hold the government at ransom - but they also hold liberals and progressives at ransom, too. While none of us would mind if the bankers had their every move followed and kept in line by white-collar cops, the thought of state-regulated media is a far more dangerous and risky notion; no matter how much we rant and rave at the government, if they turn around and say, "well, do you want us to sort it out, then?", we all just cringe and say, "Um, actually, uh..." If we do that, then it's a blanket thrown on all the news media, not just the corrupt media like News International and that's a very scary prospect.
So what can we do? We could all stop buying the Times, the Sun, the NOTW, stop watching Fox, stop reading the Sunday Times, the Wall Street Journal, Caribbean Life, Papua New Guinea Post-Courier...etc. And so force Murdoch into bankrupcy! All we need is to convince about 3 billion people to do that and there would no problem!
Still, the Milly Dowler case is important - by perverting the course of justice, there is a straightforward legal case to bring against the people in power and so Murdoch might not be untouchable if it can somehow be proved that he was consciously in on it. This is all that needs to be lobbied for - genuine legal reaction to the breaking of the law. This can't just be a matter of outrage from the government, this isn't just a case of the kind moral disgust that the NOTW and the Sun like to splatter over their pages - this is real, straightforward, unambiguous law-breaking. And Glenn Mulcaire was hired to do this and so those who hired him should be punished the highest level to prevent it happening again. But because it's so many levels of authority heading back to the big boss man, with so many levels of "deniability" and so many people good at covering up the evidence that the Godfather might still be pulling the strings for some time. Still, if the consiglieri goes down, I'll be happy...
In spite of everything, there's going to be a lot of public outrage and perhaps a nice bone for Jeremy Hunt to throw would be to stop the BSkyB takeover? Not too much to ask is it? At least it might show that we're a few steps away from being totally at the thrall of the Murdoch Mafia...
No comments:
Post a Comment