Revealing the true face of British journalism

The national press and their fellow travellers got plenty of airtime (and first billing for their interviews ahead of press victims) in much of the radio and television coverage, in which they gave their full mendacity and duplicity full vent.  In reality, the journalists have cut off their nose to spite their face.  Fighting the politicians answer for regulation tooth and nail, most of the editors refused to compromise (as The Guardian, FT and The Independent urged) and were themselves just as much the author of very distant political interference as the senior bods in Westminster.  Because of their war with the politicians from Leveson onwards, they effectively tied the moderate voices of The Guardian, FT and The Independent in a suicide pact to oppose the Royal Charter.  They were going to lose in the High Court and they knew they were going to lose, but still the editors drove on.  Who were they doing this for?  Posterity?  That didn’t work so well with David Koresh and his Waco disciples. 

But unlike the Republican Party, fighting for their tiny minority of partisans, they did not blink because ultimately no-one would die (well, the The News of the World whistleblower did and a private detective employed by the tabloids, both mysteriously, but that aside).  I heard one former national journalist who lives in the USA now, that, with the Royal Charter, nothing would change but ultimately everything would change.  That’s straight out of the Ministry of Truth.  It’s not the politicians creating a 1984-dystopia with doublespeak but the national press.  Attacking the politicans for their lamentable attempts at self-regulation, he questioned their ability to do the same for the press, ignoring the press’s grievous failures at self-regulations themselves.  He then went on to slate Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan as people now dictating terms to the newspapers because for a loser like this journalist, only elites matter, not ordinary people like the Dowlers and Christopher Jeffries.  He probably thinks that the phone hacking was nothing worthy of comment.  As I listened to him on the Today programme, I’m glad this arsehole has nothing to do with British newspapers – I searched for his name on the running order on Today’s website but it had David Miliband in his place.  Though Miliband is in America, it was not his distinctive voice over the airwaves.

At least Roger Alton, editor of The Times, was consistent in his wrong-headed arguments.  His claim that a hundred years of press freedom was now at an end was, to adopt Boris Johnson’s phrase, an inverted pyramid of piffle.  To change the press charter, a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons is needed, a stiff obstacle to surmount, though it would have been stiffer if Britain had a more proportional electoral system.  His claim that this was not a priority of the British public was fatuous.  The same British public did not view gay marriage as a priority either but a clear majority believed it was the right thing to do.  Further, Alton also cited how this was unthinkable in America.  Why should we emulate the USA in every aspect?  If we must, maybe Alton could explain to his boss, Rupert Murdoch, why it is unthinkable in the USA for a non-American citizen to own an organ of the media and how we must implement such a rule on these isles.  To emulate America of course.

All this hyperbole is against the British tradition of understatement but is the standard modus operandi for much of the national press.  They were only interested in freedom of speech for themselves and the power it conferred on their platforms and not interested in freedom of speech for anyone else (viz, Christopher Jeffries or even their attacks on The Guardian for releasing Edward Snowden’s communications of the National Security Agency on security grounds.  America – there’s that name again – is more concerned than Britain and is investigating the spooks, not the journalists.  In the UK, journalists devour their own).  This power they possessed corrupted them before phone-hacking was exposed.  Like the spoilt child, they stamped their feet and huffed because for once they were not going to get their own way.  It is not the death warrant of press freedom, it is David Cameron keeping his promise to press victims and displaying that, at certain times, he is a man of honour.