Rebekah Brooks, former lynchpin of the Murdoch empire, was arrested last week as part of the investigation into the News International phone hacking scandal in the UK, on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. It would have been major news a year ago. Now, it’s just another step in the fall from grace of the once all-powerful corporation.

This blasé response is explained by the constant stream of revelations emerging from the Leveson Inquiry (levesoninquiry.org.uk). The inquiry has two prongs. The first examines claims about phone hacking at the News Of The World and allegations of illicit payments to police by the press. The second reviews the culture, practices and ethics of the British media.
The evidence to date has been pretty grisly. Not unlike the banking sector in the UK, the USA and here, a culture had developed within which people felt they were above the rules. We await Lord Leveson’s report to be sure, but it seems that the boundaries between the media and the police were very permeable and many untoward things were done and condoned at a very high level.
Competition between media meant, first, that ever-increasing quantities of news were required to keep the beasts fed; and secondly, that journalists felt no compunction about straying beyond acceptable boundaries in order to get the story.
Almost anything constitutes news in celebrity culture. In its pursuit, phone hacking, cash-for-leaks and invasions of personal privacy became the norm. The veil between public and private was blown away. Intrusion was rampant. Fact and fiction melded.
It was seedy, sordid, tawdry – and often hugely damaging to the victims. It’s easy to point the finger at Murdoch’s minions and pretend that it hasn’t seeped into all corners of British society like poison gas. But it has.
Clearly, a free society needs good investigative journalism – and that is now under threat as a result of the execrable excesses that became prevalent.
A central theme among the submissions to Leveson is that there was a cavalier disregard for solid old-fashioned journalistic virtues, like methodical research, solid evidence, careful analysis…
The same might well be said in Ireland, but for quite different reasons. Here too a culture has grown, in which there is scant regard for privacy or principle, for deep research or time-consuming trawls for evidence. Media here have moved well beyond reportage too and, are now engaged in news-making.
Here, the impulse to go beyond reportage and into news-making has its roots in the widespread frustration felt at the slow pace of political movement in Ireland. There’s also the need to compete with web-based news platforms and social media...
But making the news happen (as opposed to reporting it) and becoming self-styled game-changers takes the media way beyond the safety of long-established good practice. Controversy can be pursued for its own sake. The boundary blurs between news and entertainment. Ratings rule.
As we know, the Broadcasting Authority recently upheld Sean Gallagher’s complaint about how RTÉ’s The Frontline handled the bogus tweet during the final presidential debate. It was an unfortunate error and certainly should not have happened.
There have been other allegations about grooming audience members, though these have been robustly addressed by RTÉ. And in this instance they are right. It is standard practice for programme makers to work with the audience – or indeed with contributors to a programme – to ensure that questions are well framed, to the point and test the mettle of the politicans or others who are up for questioning.
Leaving aside any issues to do with the programme itself, however, there is a growing awareness of the degree to which the media in general have loved social media not wisely but too well.
Many of the characteristics of social media, and Twitter in particular, are perfectly tuned to the habits of news and gossip junkies. A whisper becomes a babble. ‘Trending’ is the objective, even before anything is known for sure.…
The process can be just as cavalier and invasive as intrusion by News Of The World hacks – and that’s before you get into the sheer viciousness of so many tweets, comments and chats.
Journalists and programme researchers need to work harder for their stories. Just because it’s been tweeted doesn’t mean it’s true! Being on Facebook or Twitter doesn’t add any virtue to malice or bullshit.
If you trust social media, maybe you should look up the story of Tyler Clementi. He was a gay 18-year-old American college student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge in New York last September.
Just before he died, his roommate Dharun Ravi allegedly used a webcam to spy on him having sex with another man and used Twitter to encourage other students to watch.
Apart from homophobia, casual use of terms of abuse, lack of empathy and so on, there also seems to be a complete lack of awareness among Ravi and friends that their comments are actually in the public domain.
This is a consistent problem with all social media and internet posts.
For the same reason, Twitter poses a huge risk of misinformation going viral and being seen as truth, as happened in the case of the bogus McGuinness tweet. Many tweeters, journalists among them, move the story right along asap without pausing to check…
Facts and truth can be elusive. Research is slow and painstaking. Sometimes it goes nowhere. But you need proof before you can accuse. No matter what the hurry, you can’t just make it up, any more than you are entitled to hack private computers or phones.
Leveson is likely to take care of the worst of the UK media’s excesses.