Mallen Baker says that rather than just Murdoch-bashing, we should take the chance to reform journalism properly


Many of us watched with interest the recent questioning by a UK parliamentary committee of Rupert and James Murdoch. The big headlines had been for weeks that the News of the World newspaper had engaged in the most disgraceful invasion of privacy of victims of crime. At last, it seemed, Murdoch senior was getting his comeuppance.


For many it was payback time. Out of all the media moguls of recent decades, it had been Murdoch who wielded the power of the press most shamelessly to make, or break, the political parties or individuals that most suited his interests. It was Murdoch that was feted by prime ministers who acknowledged his part in their ascendancy and were respectful of his potential role in their downfall.


The fact that the News of the World had been caught enabled the critics to make the story about him and News International. What they want is what people always want in such circumstances – to see the suddenly changed environment to lead swiftly to the downfall of an individual.


But it is a wider story than telephone hacking. It is about ongoing and routine abuse of power.


We immediately got an example. The most effective questioner on the committee (who ironically almost didn’t get to ask her questions due to the intervention of a moron with a foam pie) was Louise Mensch. She asked pointed questions about whether the culture of hacking and intrusion into private lives was endemic throughout the tabloid press, not just restricted to this one newspaper.


Within a very short period, unnamed people were sniffing around in her past seeking information that could undermine her. When sent an email promising imminent publication of details of her early youthful indiscretions, she promptly circulated that email, and her reply, to all media outlets, adding the comment that she would not be intimidated from continuing to pursue the issue.


It was pretty mild stuff, compared with what happened to the likes of former cabinet minister David Mellor, who once threatened the press that they were “drinking in the last chance saloon” only to find media stories of his private life suddenly bursting forth. It got to the point when the Sun, then News International’s top-selling UK daily tabloid, could taunt him that he had gone “from toe job to no job”, a reference to lurid accounts of an extramarital affair.


But for decades, society had come to accept this as a normal, even entertaining, part of public life.


Fair game?


After all, nobody was threatening to seriously disrupt News International when its bullying and intrusion was “only” aimed at politicians and celebrities. The self-serving logic was that such figures, because they sometimes benefited by good publicity, were fair game. Live by the word, die by the word.


It allowed the rest of us in the UK to continue with our comfortable myth – that we lived in a well managed society with a fair judicial process. And those who made decisions were held accountable for those decisions, and there was a mechanism for redress when anything went wrong.


All the while, we had raw unaccountable power in our midst that was routinely flaunting its ability to retell the story of our lives in its own self-serving words, and to bully anyone who thought to hold it to account.


The beating of News International is good news for those that believe that all corporate abuses get found out in the end, and sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost.


But there is plenty of evidence we haven’t got there yet. The final edition of the News of the World celebrated some of the “great” headlines of its long and controversial history. The newspaper’s editors wrote that they regretted the phone hacking outrage. But at the same time, they celebrated the intrusiveness whose logic had inevitably led there and called it “quality journalism”.


Hence it would not be surprising if Louise Mensch’s tack – that this is an industry-wide problem, not just something to fling into the face of Murdoch – managed to provoke more of a fightback from those companies that want phone hacking to go down in history as a tale of illegal methods, not immoral ends.


It’s a direct challenge to any company that owns news outlets to re-evaluate what constitutes an ethical approach to journalism and what defines the public interest. For all that the apologists of the status quo will spin yarns about the tabloid press sniffing out corrupt politicians, that is no more credible than the protection-racketeers who will tell you that they are there to help protect your safety.


Mallen Baker is founder of Business Respect and a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation.

mallen.baker@businessrespect.net

www.businessrespect.net



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