I have just returned from sunnier climes to find that the News of the World has been shut down, Rebekah Brooks arrested and the Murdochs ordered to appear before the House of Commons to answer questions about the phone hacking scandal. How I missed all this I do not know. And they call July the 'Silly Season' !
The Observer helpfully listed a number of questions they felt should be put to the Murdochs and Brooks. I have one or two of my own, not least 'what unbreakable appointment did Rupe and James have that meant they initially declined to come and account for themselves before our parliamentarians and had to be summonsed?'
Yesterday's proceedings were more about a media spectacle than really getting to the bottom of the issue and, if you will forgive the mixed metaphors, no smoking gun or knockout blows were found or landed. Frankly the MPs blew it.
We did have Murdoch senior claiming he wasn’t responsible and didn’t know anything about it.
I don’t buy this abrogation of responsibility. Murdoch’s empire been built on very aggressive and intrusive journalism. The phone hacking scandal is the sort of thing that happens when people have inadequate boundaries set.
Fascinating though the proceedings were and with the upper echelons of Met in meltdown you have to ask where is this going to stop?
The hacking scandal has the feel of being to journalism what last year's expenses scandal was to party politics. As with that issue, I would urge caution in judging everyone in that profession harshly.
Most politicians are honourable people who are trying to do the best for their communities and countries. A few bad apples don’t spoil the whole barrel, as they say.
The same is true of journalists. I have worked with many, many journalists over the years. With a tiny handful of exceptions, I have found them to be responsible and decent human beings whose contributions are every bit as important in a democracy as our elected politicians. They care passionately about getting the story right. Often they are trying to present complex information in understandable and succinct prose.
It is not an easy job and often that means reporting something that some one doesn't want us to know. As Newspaper Baron Lord Northcliffe once stated “News is something someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising.”
The need to open up public life though stops short of allowing tabloids the right to carry out the sort of surveillance, that Harold Wilson, when he was PM, used to insist, needed cabinet minister level approval.
Most of the people whose phones were hacked were celebrities, which I would argue implies that the stories were too trivial to warrant the intrusion. That some were cabinet ministers meant that they were being spied on in a fashion that compromises security. Members of the public, including myself, have been appalled that murder victims' phones were hacked - this suggests an outstanding level of cynicism.
The Murdoch school of journalism is out on a limb in terms of the lengths they will go to get a story. I think that they are beyond the pale but don't throw the baby of a free press out with the bathwater by branding them all the same.
