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lism. / media law, news international, news of the world, phone hacking, press complaints commission, ranting, the media / 7 Comments

A couple of months ago I was finally, for the first time in my life, able to use the word “journalist” as my job title without resorting to finagling or reliance on my unpaid pursuits. In some sense it felt like the culmination of everything I had been working towards, since that time in high school I let somebody else take the work experience slot on the local newspaper (she’s a teacher now, so she probably needed to see what it was like in a news room more than I did). I might not work in the mainstream media, but I work under the guidance of one of the most passionate and principled journalists I have ever met so that doesn’t really bother me. I am a journalist. It says so on my business cards, so it must be true.

The last couple of weeks have not made it easy to be proud to call yourself a journalist.

A couple of days ago I thought it might be a good idea to put some of the thoughts I’d been having about the phone-hacking scandal and the sudden closure of the News of the World into writing. I thought today, the day the last issue of that 168 year old paper comes out as a flurry of self-congratulatory pullouts, would be a good day to post them. But then I saw this week’s Observer columns in my feed reader and I realised that if I, with a genuine out-of-hours interest in media law and ethics issues, am sick to the back teeth of reading about this stuff how must the rest of you be feeling?

But hey, I have half-cooked opinions and my own blog. The two are designed to work in tandem.

I have never read the News of the World, beyond a few clandestine glances at the sports pages at my dad’s, and I am certainly not going to start today. When my mother was a girl it was on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and so we never had it in the house – this was long before the paper decided that every Catholic priest was one of they paediatricians, proving that the Church has long recognised a bad egg when it sees one unless said bad egg is employed within its ranks. My sympathies today lie with over 200 people whose future employment is now uncertain. Regardless of any proposed new News International titles (and I wouldn’t be so sure there will be – there can hardly be action here until a decision is made on the company’s proposed BSkyB takeover, by which time the old paper’s readers will have moved on or abandoned print media altogether) or redeployment, there are very few things more horrible than losing your job in the worst economic conditions most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. This does not appear to be a popular point of view. Perhaps you yourself need to have had that conversation, to have been told that the thing which defined your 9-5 is no more and to have no idea where your next rent payment is coming from. As this is not a conversation I would wish on anybody other than certain chief executives and politicians, I don’t mind and I am not going to argue the point.

I like to think that life has made me pretty cynical but when the news emerged that, in addition to targeting an ever-increasing list of public figures, a national newspaper had paid a private investigator to tap into the voicemail of a missing 13 year old girl who would later be found murdered – and that that investigator had deleted older messages to make room for new ones, giving the girl’s family the false hope that she was still alive – I was genuinely shocked and sickened. My mother was surprised by this, thinking that my position and my interests would give me more of an insight into the realities of tabloid newsgathering techniques. Now though, it’s open season. If the newspaper that saw itself as our moral guardian, bringing us news of philandering footballers and homosexual politicians as if this was somehow in the public interest, and the protector of our children from the most evil things that adults could ever do to them, thought this was acceptable behaviour then I am pretty sure that there is no level to which they did not stoop, and I doubt that the editorial boards of any other publications have any grounds to sit there and pat themselves on the back while public outrage claims a scalp or two.

And no, that’s not me saying that I honestly thought tabloid news desks sat on Google Reader and the AP wires all day, waiting for scandal to come to them through any network of anonymous sources. As traditional media has floundered while breaking news makes it to the fast and free-to-air means of twenty-four hour news and the internet, newspapers have had to find other ways to keep readers, to make their papers worthwhile to advertisers, to guarantee continued circulation, to gain more readers. To do this, they have to feed us with the most titillating exclusives. While I have never met anybody who will admit to caring what David Beckham did to the nanny, if these stories did not sell papers then the papers wouldn’t be printing them. I am not quite so cynical to believe that we, the public, brought this on ourselves but this is what the media has conditioned us to want. And so standards have been getting worse to feed us the more desperate non-stories which we have been conditioned to think that we want, while our generation’s Watergate or thalidomide babies can only find an audience on the internet. The so-called journalists who work for these publications become pressured to dig out these scandals using any means necessary – and remember, in the case of News International papers, without any union protection.

When the news broke on Thursday that the News of the World would cease publication this weekend I was stunned, then briefly celebratory, then I turned to Twitter where the people I was following had blown holes in the entire story already – pointing out suspicious domain name registrations, and previous statements on plans to turn The Sun into a seven-day operation. There is no question now that the axing of the paper was a cynical move, designed to placate the public and salvage the BSkyB bid. In the first of these I am certain it has failed, and whether it has succeeded in the second remains to be seen.

My colleague and I had the conversation a couple of days ago, before the paper’s shock closure was announced. “You just wouldn’t, would you,” we agreed. No matter how desperate you were. As with most things I believe you can’t really ever know until you are in that situation yourself, but the fact that two journalists who had previously lost jobs in an industry in terminal freefall said this about a globally famous publication speaks volumes.

So this is what I hope comes out of the revelations of recent weeks: the return of ethics and good practice. The death of this prurient interest in who’s sticking what into who. We have more important battles to fight. I do not want to see the end of my beloved newspapers. I do not want to see the end of the Press Complaints Commission and self-regulation, although I agree that it needs a serious rethink. A free press cannot be under government or judicial control, but if we cannot be trusted to police ourselves as right-thinking human beings I have no idea where we can go from here.

Twelve months from now, I do not want to think about the profession I’ve dreamed of working in since I was a child with a little toy typewriter and feel sick to my stomach.