Phone Hacking: it’s sad, not bad…
Oh how outraged everyone is getting over the bean spilling going on at the Leveson Enquiry.
Yet looking at phone hacking as a morality tale masks the real background story. As the enquiry is revealing, phone hacking was an act of desperation from an industry that has been dying a slow, undignified death for years.
At the Leveson Enquiry, poacher-turned game-keeper Alastair Campbell delivered a moment of clarity when he focused on why phone hacking happened:
“…the advent of 24-7 news and the internet has forced them [newspapers] to adapt substantially from the role they once played. They are no longer the main providers of news, because major events are now covered instantly and in detail, both news and comment on TV, radio and the web
Editors are under enormous pressure. Journalists are under enormous pressure. In most of the newsrooms, there are fewer of them with more pages and online space to fill, and less time to do it…
…some fear for their very survival.”
The relentless march of the Internet as our du jour information provider has meant all older forms of media have had to adapt. TV and Radio have faired well with a string of innovations keeping them up to speed with the new digital environment.
Newspapers have faired worse. While some have tried to cope by hiding behind pay-walls, other titles have resorted to voyeuristic high impact stories rife with malicious rumour and half truths. Most have failed to halt their decline.
The numbers say it all. Take a look at News of The World readership figures below from The Guardian. I have superimposed major phone hacking incidents on top of it.
Source: Guardian Datablog 2011
First, the slide coincides with the global internet boom in the 1990s. The decline continues right up until the NoW’s ignominious closure by Rupert in the summer of 2011.
Second, the first confirmed phone hacking incident was of Sara Payne (mother of murdered schoolgirl, Sarah Payne) in 2001, and comes after the long decline in readership described above. The second and third major incidents (Milly Dowler and Prince Harry) also come during similar, marked declines.
My own perusal through the Leveson Enquiry’s witness statements bring up a similar pattern. Hacking emerges at the beginning of the Millennium and gets increasingly frequent as readership figures start to tank. This goes on until the proverbial shit hits fan in and around 2005/2006 – after someone in Buckingham Palace figured out something was up.
In all honesty this is almost juxtaposition, but put the two together and you can come up with a common sense conclusion to the reality of the phone hacking scandal. It was far from a practice that Brooks, Coulson and their ilk took on with enthusiasm. It was more likely a desperate attempt to please the bosses back in New York, justify their jobs, and try in vain to redeem their livelihood’s slow demise.
In a way it’s not outrageous, it’s sad…
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CONVERSATION FOLLOWING READING THIS ARTICLE BETWEEN ME AND GEORGE:
ME – i agree, it’s sad… sad that people want to buy that content and sad that “journalists” want to give that content as the only way they can imagine getting the industry to flourish again. This world is full of people who live in fear, look down on others and lack the imagination to improve it for everyone!
GEORGE – sure, but I guess as Foucault might say we shold look at the structures and systems in place it was capitalisms insatiable desire for profit, power of institutions etc…
the provoked this perverse behaviour fear of declining sales
by NY HQ Fear of job loss by editors at NoW
ME – well, yes, there is surely the legacy, but some more innovative people might think of using collaborative/artistic/creative drives within their industries in order to get that profit and others think of cheap nasty gossip like Murdoch and all the other dirty old greedy men in power in the financial institutions it’s that ethos too, i imagine
GEORGE – true dat! But maybe the problem is that cultural productivity has no commercial value in an age where everyone can so readily create!
so the powers that be have to resort to that kind of shit
ME – true, the problem is the money value, I am all for destroying money. It is the source of all inequality and evil. And still think that without the extreme, there MUST be other ways to make the evil dough…
DO KEEP IT GOING!!! : )