| | | Brendan O'Neill | | After the News of the World, who's safe?
The unprecedented harrying to extinction of a tabloid newspaper is likely to have a chilling effect across the British media. |
|  |
   Printer-friendly version  Email-a-friend Respond
Around the world, miles of column inches and hours of television and radio debate have been devoted to the closure of the News of the World. And yet the gravity of what occurred yesterday, the unprecedented, head-turningly historic nature of it, has not been grasped anywhere. A newspaper of some 168 years' standing, a public institution patronised by millions of people, has been wiped from history – not as a result of some jackbooted military intrusion or intolerant executive decree or coup d'état, but under pressure from so-called liberal campaigners who ultimately felt disgust for the newspaper's 'culture'. History should record yesterday as a dark day for press freedom.  In a civilised society we tend to associate the loss of a newspaper, the pressured shutting down of a media outlet, with some major corrosion of public or democratic values. We look upon the extinction of a paper for non-commercial reasons, whatever the paper's reputation or sins, as a sad thing, normally the consequence of a tyrannical force stamping its boot and its authority over the upstarts of the media. Yet yesterday's loss of a newspaper has given rise, at best, to speculative analysis of what is going on inside News International, or at worst to expressions of schadenfreude and glee that the four million dimwits who liked reading phone-hacked stories about Wayne Rooney on a Sunday morning will no longer be at liberty to do so. Many of those politically sensitive commentators who shake their heads in solemn fury upon hearing that a newspaper in a place like Belarus has closed down have barely been able to contain their excitement about the self-immolation of a tabloid here at home. Many people, including us at spiked, had reservations about the News of the World's mode of behaviour, especially following this week's revelations of deplorable phone-hacking activity involving murdered teenager Milly Dowler and the families of dead British soldiers. The paper undoubtedly infuriated many people, too. Yet this was a longstanding public institution. Just because a newspaper is the private property of an individual – even if that individual is Rupert Murdoch – does not detract from the fact that it is also a public institution, with an historic reputation and an ongoing political and social engagement with a regular, in this case numerically formidable readership. That such a public institution can be dispensed with so swiftly, that a huge swathe of the British people can overnight be deprived of an institution they had a close relationship with, ought to be causing way more discomfort and concern than it is. How would we feel if other public institutions – the BBC, perhaps, or parliament – were likewise to disappear? The treatment of the closure of the News of the World as merely a big news story, rather than as a spectacularly unprecedented thing, speaks to an inability to grapple with the political and cultural influences behind the rise and rise of the hacking scandal and the anti-Murdoch moral crusade. What yesterday's events confirm most of all is the emptying out of the right, the extent to which the right-wing sections of political and public life have lost the capacity or the willingness to withstand pressure and give a lead. Instead they balk at criticism, roll over in the face of attack, and think little, it seems, of bringing to an end one of the key media outlets for their way of thinking. It is this defensiveness on the right which in turn morally empowers what are erroneously referred to as the 'liberal' sections of public life, the anti-tabloid, 'respectable' media and political classes, which feel emboldened to harry and hound their increasingly at-sea opponents. Fundamentally, the hacking scandal points to a shift in the Culture Wars themselves, with an isolated right on one side and emboldened illiberal liberals on the other.  
Indeed, one of the great ironies of the media debate about the hacking scandal over the past week is that it has depicted Murdoch as an immensely powerful force that can devour politicians, even entire political parties, and squish other media outlets at will. The truth, as we now know, is that the so-called Murdoch Empire is very much on the backfoot, frantic and frightened, while the 'liberal media' have demonstrated theircapacity to mobilise the forces of the state – parliament and the police – in the pursuit of certain agendas. The overestimation of Murdoch's power and the underestimation of the influence of the illiberal liberals, the uncritical acceptance by many of the 'Murdoch controls Britain' narrative, is perhaps another reason why some are unable to compute the enormity of yesterday's events. It is very important to point out that the influential anti-hacking, anti-News of the World campaign is not really motored by a true concern for journalistic integrity. More fundamentally it is underpinned by a cultural aversion to the outlook and the politics of the tabloid world. That is why so many politicians said yesterday evening that the closure of the News of the World is a good start, but doesn't resolve the problematic 'culture' of Murdoch's low-rent titles. A self-described 'high-minded' columnist in The Times, keen to distance itself from its stablemate the News of the World, says there are 'several journalisms in Britain' – there's the one 'represented by people like me and those I have worked with at The Times, theIndependent and the Guardian' and then there are 'our exotic colleagues'. Hugh Grant, actor-turned-hero-of-the-anti-hacking-campaign, put it more bluntly on BBC 1's Question Time: 'I'm not for regulating the proper press, the broadsheet press. But we need regulation of the tabloid press.' There you have it: this is about Us and Them, the Enlightened and the Annoying. There are proper people and improper ones, decent media and scummy media, and the latter must be policed and possibly punished. Who will be the next victim of this great shrinking of What It Is Permissible To Publish? The Daily Mail? The Sunday Express? Surely the Sunday Sport, with its nonsense stories and naked girls, must go? Yes, stamp it out. You don't have to have been a fan of the News of the World, still less of its recent indefensible antics, to recognise that the anti-Murdoch moral crusade is likely to have a chilling effect on the British media and on press freedom. British journalism is having its cojones removed. It is being 'tidied up' under the threat of being subjected to a judicial review into press standards, a strengthened Press Complaints Commission, or exposure by a 'liberal media' offended by tabloid culture. These developments need more serious treatment than they have so far received. Which is why next week on spiked, we will explore what they reveal about the Culture Wars and what they mean for the freedom of the press and the future of the tabloids. Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal websitehere.
Anybody who sets his stall out to defend the freedom of the press, in the terms offered by Brendan O'Neill, now graduated to The Failygraph, has very little understanding of the concept. "The press in Britain", he writes, has been pretty much free since the 17th century". It will, thus, "be a very sad day for open and honest and unfettered media investigation and debate if that now changes in the wake of the hacking scandal, and if politicians tiptoe into what was previously a no-go zone for them: the hearts and brains of hacks", the man adds, thus reserving his place in the land of the fairies. The one thing we do know, though, is that the "press" – by which we mean the MSM – loves to elide the issues of its own "freedom" with that of the people's freedoms. A free and commercially viable press gives voice to voiceless readers and protects them from being exploited by the rich and powerful, says The Mail. In fact, though, all it is interested in doing is defending own its power and privileges, and its monopoly access to the powerful, which it wrongly positions as "telling truth to power". This day, for instance, we see British Gas hike its prices by eighteen percent, driven to a huge extent by the failure of government energy policies and the obsession with global warming. When it comes to "telling truth to power", however, the Failygraph has been leader of the pack, selling the tired, discredited concept of global warming, making itself a laughing-stock in the process. It is this newspaper that, more than most, perpetuates the sodden, dispiriting creed of EU "reform" – helping to keep us locked into a monstrous construct that deprives us of our freedoms. Yet those who would fight it, it ignores and marginalises. For instance, over the many years, it has made a habit of cutting references to UKIP from copy submitted by journalists, and rewriting stories to favour its Tory MEP friends. This is a newspaper that does not tell the truth to power but sucks up to its friends in power, and tells them what they want to hear. And no single newspaper has done more to suck up to Cameron, the man whose comments on the media Brendan O'Neill now says "should freak out anyone who cares about press freedom". But it was always thus. Cameron has never been a democrat, has never been interested in any freedom but his own, and within his own circle and those he can reach, is known for ruthlessly suppressing dissent. A newspaper at all interested in "telling truth to power", or even just to truth to its readers, would have said that. It would have exposed Cameron for the disgraceful, low-grade slime that he is. It would have exposed a lot more that is rotten in this society and the putrid ranks of the Conservative Party. But now, having licked and slurped it way round the powerful, this paper feels insecure. Yet it only has itself to blame. Its own ineptitude and betrayals of its own principles has eroded its own power and authority, alienated its core readership and turned itself into a joke. Now it is whining that a monster it helped create is turning on it. This is the paper that should die of shame. At least the News of the World made no pretence about where it lived – in the gutter. But the Failygraph, from being a proud, independent newspaper that was a pleasure to read, has betrayed every principle it ever had, and joined the NOTW in the gutter. Perhaps that is why it feels so threatened. Living in the gutter and seeing one gutter-dweller wiped out, it must feel that it could so easily be next. So it whines about freedom, presumably expecting its readers to rally to the cause. But when we have newspapers – and media in general – that are actually interested in our freedom, then perhaps we might take an interest in their concerns. In neglecting us, they have sowed the seeds of their own destruction. And all they now have to offer is humbug. They can rot – they should rot. The torch or freedom is – amid the dross – passing over to the internet and the new media. You will not find it in the self-serving pages of the MSM, which is long past its sell-by date. You need not even bother looking. COMMENT: "BROTHEL KEEPERS" THREAD Had Cameron any convictions or balls, writes one of our commenters, he could easily point out the monstrous leftist humbug at work here. Not long ago the very same duo of Sad Old Trots, the Al-Beeb and the Grauniad were treating Julian Assange as if the second coming had happened, for dealing in stolen/hacked state secrets from the US whose publication put many lives in danger, from regimes that think nothing of bumping off opponents after prolonged torture first. Yet when Murdoch's hacks are caught doing the cyber equivalent of nicking an open briefcase off the backseat of a car with all its windows left wide open in Moss side, it's as if Beelzebub was stalking the land eating our children. Autonomous Mind had it straight away. This is all about stopping Murdoch turning Sky News into a UK Fox News and preserving the Al-Beeb/Graindiad stranglehold on political debate. From a political perspective though, this is - or should be - mainly about the judgement of Cameron, the man masquerading as our prime minister, who chose as one of his most senior and trusted advisors a man who was arrested this morning in relation to investigations of police corruption, along with former NOTW royal editor Clive Goodman. It should be about the judgement of a politician who is far too close to the tawdry end of the press business, and makes up his policy on a whim, without principles or intelligence, concerned more with how he looks than what he achieves. Nevertheless, some uncomfortable questions are now being asked about the role of the media, with Nick Cohen in The Spectator accusing the managers of the British media have a pimp's morality. He has a point, although it is a bit rich coming from the Spectator which is one of the premier brothel keepers to which Cohen refers. Andrew Gilligan also writes about the fate of the press, concerned that the effect the mob-enforced closure of the NOTW is to threaten press freedom. This man is a halfway decent journalist, but again his choice of platform weakens his case. Of those newspapers which have contributed to the loss of respect for the media – and thereby weakened it – the Failygraph must rank close to the top. With perhaps more justice, Brendan O'Neill of Spiked-online worries that a "public institution" patronised by millions of people, has been wiped from history. This, he writes, is not as a result of some jackbooted military intrusion or intolerant executive decree or coup d'état, but under pressure from so-called liberal campaigners who ultimately felt disgust for the newspaper's "culture". History, he says, should record yesterday as a dark day for press freedom. Actually, they all doth protest too much. I never read the NOTW and very rarely looked at its website - for very good reason. I will not miss it. It always was a crappy rag, and as the rest of the media got caught up in the race to the bottom, it simply became crap amongst crap. The media and its apologists over-rate themselves if they think that anything worthwhile has been lost - or that there is much worthwhile left to lose. What has been gained, though, is an insight into a sleazy, low-grade nexus between politicians and the media, although it merely confirms our opinion of an industry and a calling that could hardly get lower. Long before the NOTW started on its current path to destruction, the media had become brothel-keepers and pimps, alongside their political friends whose values they share. Standing outside the bubble, we can only wish a plague on all their houses. We could lose the whole damn lot of them and we'd be none the poorer. |
No comments:
Post a Comment