Hacking: a hack has his doubts


Those of us who have rattled around a bit in the world of journalism know that there is a squad of freelances who dance along the margins of truth and legality to get whatever stuff they can and sell it in whichever marketplace will buy, sharing tricks and techniques as they go.
That’s why I find it impossible to believe that the phone hacking scandal is confined to the News of the World and News International.
The Guardian and the BBC would seem to want us to believe this is the case. But then, it feels like The Guardian has cast itself as a virtuous newsprint Perseus on a mission to behead the evil Murdoch Medusa, while the BBC has loathed News International ever since Rupert Murdoch, in a surprisingly nervous performance (which I witnessed) at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 1989 delivered a MacTaggart lecture in which he denounced the then TV establishment as “an integral part of the British disease” and made it clear that he detested the licence fee as an anachronism and a brake on free enterprise.
(Son-and-heir James Murdoch renewed and expanded hostilities from the same pulpit twenty years on, describing the BBC – I paraphrase – as a monolithic, state-sponsored, competition- smothering, Orwellian newspeaker.)
Thus civil war in Libya, mutiny and mayhem on the Ivory Coast and murder on a Royal Naval submarine all got shoved down the BBC news agenda a couple of nights ago as the full repertory of relevant correspondents topped all bulletins with the latest hacking “revelations” and their analyses thereof.
It’s pretty obvious why other newspapers are keen to quarantine the hacking virus inside Wapping, and I suppose it must be part of Murdoch’s defensive strategy not to start hurling infected ordure over the ramparts.
No, I don’t work for News International, never have and don’t want to. I just hate it when news begins to stink of politics; particularly when the stinkers are so sanctimonious.
Do you really believe no other British newspaper has carried stories based on voicemails filched from mobile phones?
Hmmm.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Westward, TSW and the Cadbury ghost

Image
[Archaeology: Westward/TSW complex, Derry’s Cross, Plymouth, 2011. Rubble covers the old studio and transmission areas; I used to work in an office by the four windows at the back; the canteen and bar ended where two vehicles are parked; new executives arrived triumphant and departed bruised just beyond the upturned tray, old drink can and squashed plastic bottle] It annoys me that I never met Peter Cadbury. I arrived at Westward TV shortly after his final defenestration, which was rather like going on an exchange to a foreign family who’d just concluded a vicious divorce. On one side were the remaining and new management: the parent left in possession of the home. On the other, the staff: his orphaned children. Enmities. Flashes of inexplicable anger. Sarcasm. False smiles and denial. I’d never before experienced anything like this (nor have I since). What was it about? “There is, I suppose,” I’d said to Ronnie Perry, the MD, at my interview, “no chance that you’re going to lose this
Read more

The murders, the mirror and the serpentines

Image
A detective called Erik Lönnrot is a man of prodigious intelligence; one of a type we love, and whom we imagine solving fiendish crosswords in minutes and secretly writing perfect sestinas and villanelles. He believes the solution to a murder is hidden in the arcana of ancient Hebrew theology. Perhaps through vanity, he throws out clues to his theory and modus operandi in a newspaper interview and names an obscure volume which an opportunist bookseller immediately finds and prominently displays. A second and a third murder (although the third in the series is perplexed by the absence of a corpse) seem to confirm his conjectures. But the interview, clues and the book have furnished the assassin with the means to construct the otherwise absent mystery for himself, and thus conduct Lönnrot through the second and third murders to the fourth, where the assassin gets a revenge which has eluded and frustrated him for years by shooting the detective. Lönnrot’s prosaic superior, Treviranus, has
Read more

On spring, sapphires and electoral silence

Image
We walked for six hours, at first beside a narrow river and then climbing high into the Chiltern Hills. When we set off, there were scarcely any leaves on the trees, but the sun blazed and temperatures climbed, and by evening buds had opened and shoots had shot, butterflies were dancing, fish jumping, and the world was sprinkled green and bright. It was as if, at last, someone had found the keys to the kennel and the hounds of Spring, unleashed, had burst out in a frenzy. I’m picking books at random off the shelves, at present, letting my fingers make the choice for a re-reading. Before the walk, last Thursday morning, they reached me down for my journeys on the underground the formidable American critic Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism . These fingers, perhaps, are curious to see whether their mental equivalents have more luck grasping the meaning of the book than they did first time around (A: only a little). Bloom writes of the Sefirot (the interlinking orbs of the great figu
Read more