So far, then. I think 'appalled by hacking into phones of families of dead/missing people' goes without saying, so I'm not going to dwell on that. But there's been a lot of moralising about phone hacking/blagging full stop, and that's been a bit of a joke. While of course there are people who care about it as purely a privacy and/or legal issue, the vast majority of outraged people are outraged because of who the victims were. People were interested, but not especially angry, when they thought the News of the World had been hacking celebrities' voicemails. Much of the ill-sentiment back in January seemed to be aimed at Andy Coulson, then David Cameron's director of communications, and at least part of that was more about politics than anything. I mean, the general feeling just seemed to be that the people responsible had either gone to jail or lost their jobs, the victims were going to be getting compensation to the tune of £100,000, and NOTW apologised. Fine.
The interesting thing about the past couple of weeks is that the new allegations have brought the scandal to a whole other level. The old allegations didn't seem to threaten the BSkyB deal in the least, and the idea that the NOTW would be shut down was beyond imagination. The practices aren't new, but, for the most part, the victims are, and that's part of the difference (the other part being that it appears those old practices were far more widespread than initially believed). And it's not necessarily that there are so many victims, but the stories that were sought. No one can condone illegal activities used to get 'juicy' stories of grieving family members.
But there seems to be a grey area where these same activities don't seem to be so reprehensible if the stories are a bit more in the public interest. The tip of that is the somewhat 'meh' reaction to celebrities being hacked - the idea that the stories generated would just be bits of entertainment gossip, nothing too harmful, and certainly no dead children involved. Going deeper, there don't seem to be that many people fixated on Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband's director of communications, in quite the same was as they were/are on Andy Coulson. That's not to say there's no interest - there is, both among those with a political agenda and those who simply say fair is fair, if Miliband's going to criticise Cameron over Coulson then he should have to explain Baldwin. And it was brought up in the House of Commons by Jeremy Hunt. But that allegation has so far not exactly scandalised the public in the way the NOTW allegations have.
And why not? Well, for one thing, Lord Ashcroft doesn't exactly elicit the same kind of sympathy as Milly Dowler's family does. For another, people don't seem to be especially bothered by the idea of looking into political donations and tax revenues for someone who's been accused of illegality on both counts. I somehow doubt we'd hear the same kind of moralising on phone hacking and blagging if those practices turned up a story that was actually in the public interest. For example, though the information for the MPs expenses scandal was probably illegally obtained, the public (and indeed politicians) were not particularly bothered by the ethics of that fact. So it's worth everyone examining whether they actually think certain practices are wrong, or if they only think they're unethical when they're carried out against certain kinds of people.
So what happens now? The full process of a police investigation, subsequent prosecutions (if any) and parliamentary and public inquiries is likely to take the better part of two years. And what will the UK media landscape look like at that point? Will there be tighter regulation? What will the relationship between politicians and press and police and press look like? What will the Sunday tabloid market look like? Will tabloid readers still expect the same kind of stories and information? Will anything really fundamentally change?
One idea that's been floating around (apologies for that picture of Ed Miliband - what were they thinking?), though it's too early to tell whether it'll amount to anything, is the possibility of changing media ownership laws. This isn't specifically about Rupert Murdoch (or, at any rate, it shouldn't be). Concentration of media ownership should always be a concern in terms of hurting freedom of the press by limiting the diversity of information available and giving too much power to one person or company.
One problem with more stringent regulations, though, is that newspapers are increasingly not profitable. For example: in 2010, News International-owned The Times reported pre-tax losses of £45m, and in 2009 News Corp. announced that its newspaper revenues were down 97%. But News Corp. can afford to continue running their papers at a loss (while making cuts and introducing paywalls to try to offset some of those losses) because their other operations (TV, specifically) are so profitable.
So if we want to regulate and limit media ownership, how picky can be about what prospective owners already own? When the NOTW was abruptly closed down, there was speculation that Murdoch was ridding himself of the paper in order to quash some concerns about media plurality around the BSkyB deal (which had not yet unravelled). Assuming newspapers continue to lose money (and the loss of advertising revenue and competition from online news mean that trend is almost certainly irreversible), if new regulations mean owners have to choose between profitable TV stations or tabloids and loss-making broadsheets, how long will those newspapers survive?
No comments:
Post a Comment