NOTW
This week we found out just what News of the World have been up to. Ironically the paper that used to pride itself in reporting scandal has become embroiled in scandal of its own. Sadly it is some of the most disturbing stories that I have ever heard.
Firstly it was the tapping of the phones belonging to Milly Dowler's family, then the families of the Soham girls and then the families of service personnel killed in action. It just got more and more sickening as the revelations came out. According to Rebekah Brooks and NOTW staff there is worse to come. I dread to think that there may be worse and cannot begin to imagine what that may be. In fact I am not sure I want to know.
Brooks claims that she was unaware of the phone hacking taking place under her watch as editor of NOTW. If anyone believes that then there are serious problems. How this woman has been allowed to keep her position at News International is beyond me, it is not enough that she has been taken off the internal review. There are around 400 people who are going to lose their jobs tomorrow when the NOTW closes in the wake of the allegations, but Brooks will stay on with her high salary and seemingly lack of guilty conscience.
It is easy to forget this but for the last 20-30 years all British politicians have been at the beck and call of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Tony Blair gained power in 1997 after he began courting The Sun, etc. and even Gordon Brown attended parties held by Brooks and Murdoch. David Cameron has been friends with Brooks and Coulson for years and it was initially thought that the backing of Cameron by The Sun helped to get the party back into power. At least we can say that with the new media of Facebook and Twitter this was not the case as they could not gain an overall majority, hence the coalition. It is just a shame that no one trusted Vince Cable on the issue of the Murdoch empire when he spoke out. Perhaps if Cable had not been such a supporter of the coalition and had not let a lot of supporters down then he would have been taken more seriously.
Now the politicians need to break away from the 'king maker' and go their own way. Any politician seen to be courting the press in this way again is sure to be shot down by the public. Opinion of the press is at an all time low. The most embarrassing thing for Cameron though is that he now has to cut his friends loose and hold enquiries against all his old chums. He has to do what Ed Miliband is saying and put his foot down on the press and break away to be his own man. That must be the most galling thing of all for him.
The best thing to come out of this is that the takeover bid of Murdoch for sole ownership of BSkyB has to be put on hold. How can he be considered a 'fit and proper person' to hold a broadcasting company in the wake of these allegations? It is not like the NOTW was a small part of his company in Britian, it was the biggest selling Sunday paper. This could not have come at a worse time for Murdoch and co.
I remember a couple of weeks ago a relative of mine declaring that they would never have Sky because (and I quote): "It would be like having a huge bucket of s**t in the corner of your room". For years my family have refused to buy into the News International brand so we have avoided The Sun, The Times and NOTW and we have always refused to have Sky. We have Freesat so that we would not be putting money into the pockets of Murdoch et al. There was always something unseemly about the whole company and it was something that we wanted to avoid. After all this time of boycotting the company on moral grounds it turns out that our gut instinct was correct. We were horrified by the details of the hacking as they came out, but we were sadly not surprised that the company was capable of this.
The true test of public opinion on this issue will be shown in what happens next. There has long been talk in News International that they would like to produce a Sunday Sun. The closing of NOTW leaves this open as a distinct possibility. The likely hood is that the NOTW staff will be employed to work on this paper in the same offices. Will the public go out and buy this paper the way they did NOTW? Will they believe that things really have changed? I would like to hope not and would like the paper buying public to restore my faith in them.
The issue that has come out of these events as far as I can see is how we look at the media. In America and France this sort of 'investigative journalism' simply does not exist and they cannot understand how our papers have been allowed to report the stories they have. It is time that our papers just stuck to reporting the facts and not invading the personal privacy of everyone from "celebs" to grieving families. There needs to be some regulation of the papers as the PCC is obviously not working in its current form. Also there needs to be a separation of politics and media in this country. We are supposed to be intelligent people. I know that I can look at all the party policies and make my own decisions on who I vote for. I don't need a paper to tell me what I should and shouldn't do/follow. With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter and 24/7 news the way we rely on newspapers has changed. Maybe we should be asking ourselves questions about what we want from our papers and whether we are all partly to blame for the dealings of NOTW, etc. After all, if the paper buying public hadn't bought the papers then we would not have been offered the stories they tried to sell us. It is a case of supply and demand. Maybe we need to think about our own grim fascination with the stories they printed and we need to re-evaluate our thirst for information we do not need.
Firstly it was the tapping of the phones belonging to Milly Dowler's family, then the families of the Soham girls and then the families of service personnel killed in action. It just got more and more sickening as the revelations came out. According to Rebekah Brooks and NOTW staff there is worse to come. I dread to think that there may be worse and cannot begin to imagine what that may be. In fact I am not sure I want to know.
Brooks claims that she was unaware of the phone hacking taking place under her watch as editor of NOTW. If anyone believes that then there are serious problems. How this woman has been allowed to keep her position at News International is beyond me, it is not enough that she has been taken off the internal review. There are around 400 people who are going to lose their jobs tomorrow when the NOTW closes in the wake of the allegations, but Brooks will stay on with her high salary and seemingly lack of guilty conscience.
It is easy to forget this but for the last 20-30 years all British politicians have been at the beck and call of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Tony Blair gained power in 1997 after he began courting The Sun, etc. and even Gordon Brown attended parties held by Brooks and Murdoch. David Cameron has been friends with Brooks and Coulson for years and it was initially thought that the backing of Cameron by The Sun helped to get the party back into power. At least we can say that with the new media of Facebook and Twitter this was not the case as they could not gain an overall majority, hence the coalition. It is just a shame that no one trusted Vince Cable on the issue of the Murdoch empire when he spoke out. Perhaps if Cable had not been such a supporter of the coalition and had not let a lot of supporters down then he would have been taken more seriously.
Now the politicians need to break away from the 'king maker' and go their own way. Any politician seen to be courting the press in this way again is sure to be shot down by the public. Opinion of the press is at an all time low. The most embarrassing thing for Cameron though is that he now has to cut his friends loose and hold enquiries against all his old chums. He has to do what Ed Miliband is saying and put his foot down on the press and break away to be his own man. That must be the most galling thing of all for him.
The best thing to come out of this is that the takeover bid of Murdoch for sole ownership of BSkyB has to be put on hold. How can he be considered a 'fit and proper person' to hold a broadcasting company in the wake of these allegations? It is not like the NOTW was a small part of his company in Britian, it was the biggest selling Sunday paper. This could not have come at a worse time for Murdoch and co.
I remember a couple of weeks ago a relative of mine declaring that they would never have Sky because (and I quote): "It would be like having a huge bucket of s**t in the corner of your room". For years my family have refused to buy into the News International brand so we have avoided The Sun, The Times and NOTW and we have always refused to have Sky. We have Freesat so that we would not be putting money into the pockets of Murdoch et al. There was always something unseemly about the whole company and it was something that we wanted to avoid. After all this time of boycotting the company on moral grounds it turns out that our gut instinct was correct. We were horrified by the details of the hacking as they came out, but we were sadly not surprised that the company was capable of this.
The true test of public opinion on this issue will be shown in what happens next. There has long been talk in News International that they would like to produce a Sunday Sun. The closing of NOTW leaves this open as a distinct possibility. The likely hood is that the NOTW staff will be employed to work on this paper in the same offices. Will the public go out and buy this paper the way they did NOTW? Will they believe that things really have changed? I would like to hope not and would like the paper buying public to restore my faith in them.
The issue that has come out of these events as far as I can see is how we look at the media. In America and France this sort of 'investigative journalism' simply does not exist and they cannot understand how our papers have been allowed to report the stories they have. It is time that our papers just stuck to reporting the facts and not invading the personal privacy of everyone from "celebs" to grieving families. There needs to be some regulation of the papers as the PCC is obviously not working in its current form. Also there needs to be a separation of politics and media in this country. We are supposed to be intelligent people. I know that I can look at all the party policies and make my own decisions on who I vote for. I don't need a paper to tell me what I should and shouldn't do/follow. With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter and 24/7 news the way we rely on newspapers has changed. Maybe we should be asking ourselves questions about what we want from our papers and whether we are all partly to blame for the dealings of NOTW, etc. After all, if the paper buying public hadn't bought the papers then we would not have been offered the stories they tried to sell us. It is a case of supply and demand. Maybe we need to think about our own grim fascination with the stories they printed and we need to re-evaluate our thirst for information we do not need.
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