News That Makes The News
I did not shed a tear when I learnt of the demise of The News of the World, which is to close next week with a final edition after 168 years of publishing.
It was never my newspaper of choice, being rather light on actual news and rather heavy on the kind of moronic celebrity gossip designed to keep the plebs occupied rather than focused on anything meaningful or important.
Yet, it is highly unlikely that The News of the World will disappear all together, with News International PLC almost certainly planning to re-launch the paper under a different brand. Furthermore, the same journalists working at The News of the World will simply transfer across to the new paper or indeed another paper – so nothing much or substantial will have changed in that regard beyond the image.
However, the fate of The News of the World is not actually the really important matter, but instead the manner of its downfall and what was subsequently brought to light (and I am not referring to the alleged phone hacking – which is rather unimportant and a matter for the police and the courts).
The so-called phone hacking scandal is firstly an absolutely classic example of Westminster-village journalism, and illustrates just how the news corporations make the news and set the public agenda to the exclusion of much more important stories and events outside of the political classes’ bubble. As Richard North observed, did our MPs ever demand an emergency debate over the banking crisis, or more recently the Euro zone and debt crisis in Greece, as they have over phone hacking? The answer is, of course, er, no…
Predictably, the Labour Party (full of brain-dead morons like Chris Bryant) have obsessively attacked the Murdoch paper over phone-hacking, in part as revenge for the paper’s favouring of the Tories at the General Election, and in part because it directly affected them – nothing vexes the political class more than an attack on their own bank balances, privacy or privileges. But when they spy on us, force us to carry ever more draconian forms of identity, tax us into oblivion and destroy our lives, economy and society, then that’s absolutely fine – no problems. End of. Anyway, more importantly, as Autonomous Mind notes:
The phone hacking scandal, while criminal and disgusting, is nothing more than a rider for a campaign where something far greater is at stake – maintaining the left-liberal media consensus that holds sway in this country…
Unsurprisingly, the efforts of the BBC and the Guardian in exposing News of the World misdoings coincide handily with the decision-making process of the Culture Secretary on whether to allow News Corp to buy the sixty one per cent of shares in BSkyB that it does not already own. Thus, the real agenda is not focused on phone hacking but the potential future make up of the broadcast news.
While I do not share Autonomous Mind’s view that Rupert Murdoch is especially conservative or has intentions in that direction with his pursuit of the BSkyB deal, then I think he’s spot on to highlight the widespread coverage of the issue as being induced by the liberal-left media’s fear of competition for control of the airwaves and digital arena. The argument goes that if the image of News Corp and its entities can be sufficiently tarnished, then the Culture Secretary may come under significant political pressure to snub the takeover, thus safeguarding the liberal broadcast monopoly.
Only then does it become clear as to why the media have expended so much time and effort into bringing the phone hacking to the fore. Vested interests and bread and circuses once again rear their head.
