A newspaper faced up to Murdoch, not parliament. Instead of regulation, leaders need the courage to call the media's bluff
The family was rich, ruthless and had the king in its grasp. The nation quaked. But when the 13th-century Despensers fell, the barons' revenge was savage. Hugh Despenser was strung up in Hereford market. His genitals were cut off and roasted before his eyes. His bowels were then torn out, to rid his body of filth. When still conscious, he was hanged close to death, taken down and sliced into four quarters.
Nothing changes much in British politics. Long courted by politicians galore, Rupert Murdoch and his family are now experiencing the Despensers' fate. Convicted by no judicial process, they are subjected to attenuated torture that knows no limit. High and low, they seem to have bugged them all. At fortress Wapping you could be forgiven for thinking that nuns were raped each night and children eaten for breakfast.
For their tormenters, the Murdochs' agony is exquisite joy. A great suppurating boil of commercial rivalry and political fear and loathing has burst, covering the body politic in pus. MPs in the Commons on Monday foamed and spat with rage. The BBC, long outraged by Murdoch's attacks on its salaries and by the success of BSkyB, relates the story obsessively round the clock. Famine in east Africa, bombing in Libya, the public services white paper can all go hang. The fall of the great Satan is real news.
That a culture of covert intrusion has long been rife in Fleet Street is hardly novel, as politicians and celebrities from Jonathan Aitken and David Mellor to Sienna Miller and Hugh Grant know. Bugged mobiles, stolen CDs, false notepaper and hidden cameras have all claimed their scalps. But what was considered merely dodgy tipped into the squalid and possibly criminal at the News of the World. No one has died, and 4,000 potential victims on a list of phone numbers is hardly a serial killing, earthquake or war. But the sheer crudity of the phone hacking and intrusion on Gordon Brown's grief has turned the stomachs of even hardened journalists.
Perhaps if Murdoch and his aides had disclosed everything from the start ? not just to the leak-prone police ? and if those responsible had been sacked, the affair might have ended by now. But we are dealing with a family not a corporation. Everyone who has ever been a victim of press intrusion is now enjoying judgment day. It may be unfair to link the antics of a News of the World gumshoe to the purchase of a tranche of shares in BSkyB. But to have Murdoch's organisation crying unfair merely evokes the cry: Oh happy, happy day.
The story has moved beyond a spat between rivals in Britain's cut-throat media, and beyond a parliamentary tit-for-tat over who cringed most to Murdoch at election time. Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are declaring a shift in political geology. We all sinned, they say, but we repent and are purged. A new order is declared, in which everyone can be beastly towards newspapers. No more parties, no more wedding receptions, no more Downing Street meetings by the back door. To show they really mean it, Cameron and Miliband are seeking inquiries, judges, commissions, regulators and statutes ? beyond anything thought appropriate after the Iraq war or the credit crunch.
The occupational disease of commentators is to have seen it all before. The 1990 Calcutt committee, on which I sat, watched the irresistible force of privacy protection meet the immovable object of a plausible "public interest" defence of intrusion. What the press clearly needed, and did not get, was some professional regulator at least to hold up bad journalism to censure and contempt. John Major panicked and there was no law and only a weak regulator. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now Cameron followed suit.
I am sure the geology will not shift and politicians will cringe again. The problem is not so much with the press. The News of the World proved vulnerable, if not initially to the law, certainly to the court of rough justice that is the rest of the media. It is thanks to the Guardian rather than the police or parliament that Murdoch is choking over his breakfast toast. That is why press pluralism must be the overriding concern of any regulatory regime, and no organisation should have more than a 30% share of any definable media market.
A bigger problem is the decayed internal accountability of politics. Lloyd George had trouble with Northcliffe, Baldwin with Rothermere, and the post-war Tories with Beaverbrook, but they could disregard these media mischief-makers. A circulation figure was not a vote. Political leaders answered for their behaviour to their colleagues, their parties, their constituencies and their judgment of public opinion.
Research has shown the political power of newspapers to be grossly exaggerated, a bluff perpetrated by editors and accepted only by timid politicians. The press is not influential on voting patterns, let alone in the internet age. It is informative, entertaining and, I hope, worth reading. But it cannot move political mountains. It is a sheep in wolf's clothing, even the Murdoch press.
Britain's last leader to disregard the media was Margaret Thatcher. She did not employ tabloid journalists to hijack her agenda and pollute her diary for overnight headlines. She did not care what the press said. It was her successors who allowed "the cult of 24/7" to demote strategy to tactics and corrupt long-term government with short. They allowed other audiences, notably their parties nationally, to wither on the vine, leaving only the media as a focus of their accountability. Surrounded by sycophants, they came to treat the press as a running commentary on their performance, as a teller of honest truths, a daily shaving mirror on the wall.
These politicians have found an opportunity to tell the mirror what they think of it, but this will not last. Baldwin dismissed newspapers as claiming "the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages". His response was not to regulate the harlotry but simply to ignore it. Politicians should likewise find the courage to call the media's bluff, not make it subject to copious statute law, but I think neither will happen.
Laws on hacking are in place and a professional rather than regulatory body should oversee complaints against the press, albeit a tougher one than now. But the greatest safeguard of press ethics is always going to be the press itself. Britain still has diverse and vigorous newspapers. They should be left to judge, hang and bury their own. They are doing a good job of that just now.
? Comments on this article will be opened at 9am on Wednesday morning.
Steve Coogan Darren Bent Noel Coward Mark Zuckerberg Christmas and New Year Student politics
No comments:
Post a Comment