Bonfire Of The Vanities

The first thing to say about the spectacular collapse of the News of the World is that it added another tranche to the lengthy list of innocent victims, damaged by the newspaper.

My first reaction was to think about the people who work – or worked – in Ireland, for Britain’s most successful Sunday newspaper. Of course you find all sorts in journalism, and the News of the World is no different from any other media organisation in that respect. But there are good people involved, particularly in the music space, who were earning their living, and going about it in a spirit of hard graft, with honest values and a sense of decency.
Their future has now been thrown into turmoil as a result of the wrong-doing of others. It is not right or fair. But then that is true of so much that has happened in this appalling saga. The problem is that rightness or fairness had ceased to matter to Rupert Murdoch and those close to him a long time ago.
The list of charges against the senior management and editorial team at the News of the World over the past decade is a daunting one. The former Royal Correspondent Clive Goodman was jailed for four months in 2007 for illegally hacking phones to get stories on the Royal family. Goodman’s accomplice was a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who was also jailed in 2007, for six months.
The initial response of News International figures and senior News of the World editorial staff to the hacking scandal had been that this was the work of just one rogue reporter. This, it now appears, could not be further from the truth.
It is currently estimated that Glenn Mulcaire alone hacked the phones of at least 4,000 individuals on behalf of the News of the World. But this is just the beginning of the revelations: his work, and that of Goodman, are, it is emerging, just the tip of the iceberg. The feeling of invulnerability, of untramelled access to power that could be wielded against anyone who tried to stand up for themselves led to practices within the newspaper that can only be described as an appalling betrayal of journalistic standards.
The news that they had hacked the phone of teenage murder victim Milly Dowler, and erased messages, was the game-changer. It stunned British people, turning public opinion – and crucially advertisers – against the News of the World to a degree that was unprecedented.
The fact that messages had been erased was taken, at the time, by the police carrying out the investigation into her disappearance, as confirmation that Milly had not been murdered. For a period of time, the distraught parents of the missing girl were offered false hope, believing her to be alive when in truth she was dead. What could give newspaper reporters the right to interfere in such a way with a criminal investigation? And to do it in a way that heaped further distress on a grieving family?
Faced with these revelations, and the impact they had on public opinion, the stakes were extraordinarily high for Rupert Murdoch and his closest lieutenants. The deal giving Murdoch’s News Corporporation complete control of BSkyB was imminent. The timing of the crisis could not have more unhelpful: six weeks later and that game might have been over, a new licence to print money in the Australian magnate’s swag bag. Now, the entire play, and the political and financial muscle that would accrue to News Corp and by extension News International with it, was in jeopardy.
The decision to close the News of the World, a paper with a tradition going back to 1843, can only be seen as an utterly cynical one. It was motivated in the first instance by the fact that advertisers had deserted the paper – and that what had been a cast-iron moneymaker for the company for years would, for the foreseeable future at least, become a drain on shareholders’ funds. But even moreso, it was driven by a feeling that shutting the newspaper might just be the dramatic gesture that was needed to effectively draw a line under a controversy that was beginning to engulf the News of the World’s parent company.
For Rupert Murdoch and his son James, the Chairman and Chief Executive of the parent company News Corporation, the 220-strong staff of the News of the World didn’t matter. They were treated in the same ruthless manner as the subjects about whom some of them at least had been writing. They were expendable. So was the newspaper itself – which could after all be replaced by launching the Sun On Sunday as soon as the furore had died down, presumably taking up where the NOTW left off in terms of generating massive profits.
Others, however — including the Chief Executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, under whose watch so much of the corrosive abuse of power had been allowed to fester — have, at least at the time of writing, still clung onto their jobs.
And this is where it gets extraordinarily interesting. Because, as the ongoing avalanche of revelations seems to confirm, the even more uncomfortable reality is that, almost certainly, we only know a fiftieth of what has been going on.
This much we can say. Private investigators were hired to get information on targets by fair means or foul. Phones were routinely hacked. Police were paid for information. Bank accounts were covertly accessed. Victims of phone hacking who threatened to sue were made to feel doubly vulnerable.
The spotlight has shifted now to The Sunday Times, with accusations mounting that, there too, all manner of underhand and sometimes illegal activities had been allowed. And similarly, though unconfirmed, the word is out too that the New York Post – another Murdoch vehicle – may have engaged in similar hacking activities in the US. Right now, there is no telling just how high up the ladder of corporate responsibility this will go, or who might end up facing charges as a result.
In Britain, a public inquiry is being initiated into what happened at the News of the World. But how far reaching will it become? And how many other newspapers and journalists will find themselves being dragged uncomfortably into the spotlight?
The truth is that a sickening abuse of the power vested in the media has been facilitated by the hugely aggressive culture within sections of the media, and especially within tabloid journalism in Britain, with all manner of gratuitous and prurient intrusion into people’s private lives being taken for granted. No one newspaper was responsible for this. In terms of salvaging the hopelessly tarnished reputation of News International, their best hope for now is that the contagion continues to spread till what we are confronted with is a complete journalistic bonfire of the vanities.
And then what?