[/caption]Michael Cosgrove - British newspaper the News of the World is to close after 168 years. Its owners - Rupert Murdoch's News International - made the announcement today. Sunday's edition will be the last and the paper has finally fallen victim to the hacking scandal which saw it hack the phones of thousands of personalities.
Revelations that the paper hacked into the phone of a murdered girl as well as those of Afghanistan war widows and people suspected of murder set of the firestorm of public rage that has led to the paper's demise and this event may well change the face of the British press for ever.
The British like to say that their press is both the best and the worst in the world and there is arguably some truth in that. The reasoning goes that gutter journalism, although unpleasant, is the price we pay for having a free and unfettered independent press which also includes some of the most vigorously investigative papers on the planet such as The Times and The Guardian.
But the scandal of the News of the World phone taps and hacking is set to change that perception if it hasn’t already done so.
The scandal first surfaced in 2006 when a News of the World editor and a private investigator were caught hacking into the voicemail of members of the royal family. They were jailed in 2007 but that episode was to be only the beginning of a scandal which would ultimately reveal that the paper may have intercepted the phone and other messages of up to 7000 people.
Victims include senior politicians including Tony Blair, celebrities, sporting personalities and almost any other category of famous person. The information the paper obtained was transformed behind the smokescreen of ‘sources’ into juicy stories about anything from adultery to fraud and criminal activity. Many lawsuits have been filed against the paper, more are sure to follow, and it has already paid almost a hundred million pounds in compensation to victims in exchange for the dropping of charges.
The public has been aware of this for a few years and a police investigation – the second - is ongoing but recent revelations have opened up a new and highly disturbing chapter in the story. So many new allegations have been revealed over the last five days that the British public is being overwhelmed by their revolting character..
The scandal re-ignited earlier this week with the news that the paper had hacked into the mobile phone of abducted schoolgirl Milly Dowler just after her disappearance and that messages were deleted from her inbox in order to make way for more in the hope of getting a story. That her voicemail box continued to accept messages led her distraught family to believe that she was still alive whereas she had been murdered days before. The police suspect that some of the deleted messages may have contained crucial clues to what had happened to her.
Since then the police have revealed that they are investigating evidence which indicates that the paper also tapped the phones of Afghanistan war widows, that it followed the conversations of two men who were suspected of murdering a business acquaintance, that it snooped on the phones of ongoing criminal trial victims, suspects and jurors, that it paid policemen for information concerning criminal activities and suspects, and that it may have hacked into the phone of Lady Diana’s lawyer as well as that of an ex-lover.
It is also alleged that the paper tapped the phones of relatives of at least some of the 56 people who were killed in the ‘7/7’ triple terrorist bomb attack in London on July 7, 2005 as soon as their names were known. Other alleged victims include high-level terrorist informers, a senior London police commissioner, the parents of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann, who was abducted in Portugal in 2007 never to be seen again and senior politicians in Ireland.
The British are aghast at the sheer magnitude of these horrific revelations, the list of alleged victims is growing longer in rolling live coverage in all the major papers even as I type these words, and the unanimous revulsion of the public has finally forced the government to come out of its embarrassed silence and take action.
The tsunami of bitterly angry protest has meant that Prime Minister David Cameron had no choice but to cave in yesterday during PM’s question time, during which he announced that two inquiries are to be set up immediately – one into the News of the World’s activities and the other into the wider question of the future of media regulation. The British media is largely self-regulated and its senior watchdog is the Press Complaints Commission, which is also under heavy fire due to its alleged inability or unwillingness to confront serious abuses of journalistic ethics not only at the News of the World but also at many other major papers.
A long list of major advertisers have already announced that they are to stop doing business with the paper, some journalists and even an editor have left it, retail outlets are announcing in droves that they will no longer sell it - thus depriving it of much-needed revenue - and calls are mounting for the government to put a hold on plans by Rupert Murdoch – the paper’s owner- to buy BskyB, which is Britain’s largest satellite broadcasting company.
It would be easy to gloat over the News of the World’s come-uppance, but that would be most unwise. The British press has been laboring under accusations of sleazy practices for years, and almost all the major dailies have been involved in similar scandals in the past – albeit on a smaller scale.
Britain is extremely angry today and that is understandable. But once the dust settles it will be time to take a cold hard look at what is to be done about the scurrilous journalistic practices which have now been proven to have reached limits that even the most cynical of press observers would not have predicted as recently as last week.
The government has promised two inquiries and that is a start, but the scope of government action must not stop there. Several people have already either served or are serving prison sentences for crimes of hacking which were uncovered years ago but the latest revelations must result in rigorous and open police investigations into the paper’s editors and journalists’ implication in this scandal which must result in more trials and more prison time. That in itself will be difficult because of alleged collusion between certain top policemen and corrupt journalists who are believed to have paid for information about criminal trials but the government must do its job here, which is to ensure that the police and the courts do their jobs properly.
Even more importantly, it is high time that the British press’ self-regulating status was put under the microscope. The British press is quite rightly proud of its self-regulatory system but it is now clear that certain aspects of that system have failed to deliver. If the British press cannot demonstrate that it has finally decided to bite the bullet and root out the rogue elements within it then the law should take over and impose government control and supervision over certain areas of its practices.
That may sound draconian – and indeed it is – but after years of unheeded warnings and admonishments the British press must be forced to understand that we, the British public, are no longer willing to tolerate the shabby and sordid criminal activities that have poisoned it for far too long.
