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An
awful lot has been said and written about Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World
phone-hacking scandal and tabloid journalism as a whole. From the superb work of
some
to the stupid,
fame-hungry actions of others, the scandal really has been packed with
drama – which is sad, in a way, because the main story should not be an
80-year-old man having a pie thrust into his face; it should be the terrible
intrusion from certain people in the media into the lives of innocent people
and the sickening actions of some journalists which has brought this story-obtaining
method into the public eye – which hopefully will result in change.
Clearly,
the tabloids in this country are very popular, in terms of sales of newspapers
and hits on their websites. In January 2011, The Sun sold 3,001,822 copies;
Daily Mail 2,136,568; Daily Mirror 1,194,097; Daily Star 734,311. If you
compare that to the broadsheets such as the Daily Telegraph (651,184) and The
Times (457,250) and then, somewhere in between the two formats, The Guardian (279,308),
it’s clear to see that, based purely on circulation figures, tabloids are
popular and so fine just the way they are and so there is an argument to say
that the tabloids are just giving the readers what they want; it’s because of
the public that the ‘gutter press’ has developed.
In
fact, many tabloid journalists, over the past few weeks, have put forward the
notion that they do little wrong in terms of the stories they write and the
privacy that they continually invade. ‘The public clearly want to see who Katie
Price is sleeping with because, with that on our front page, sales grow
massively’ is the general argument.
But
there is a difference between actually wanting
something and being quite happy to take it. Don’t get me wrong – when the Ryan
Giggs-Imogen Thomas story broke, I was straight on the Daily Mail website
to find out the latest, searching his name on Google every so often just to see
if there were any new revelations. But if that information wasn’t there, I
wouldn’t be thinking: ‘Hmm, I’d really love to know who Ryan Giggs is sleeping
with’ or ‘I’d love to see loads of photographs
of women in bikinis with snide comments just below them either commenting
on the person’s weight
or the bikini they have chosen, or maybe even making massive assumptions based
on their facial
expressions which could be easily manipulated thanks to a split-second
photograph. Because I am that much of a cock’.
To
a certain extent, then, the public is
to blame for the current state of tabloid journalism. We keep buying it and
lapping the information up so they keep writing these pointless, slightly
offensive stories – and get away with it. Nae, profit from it daily. But no one
– in their right mind - would complain if the clothing choices and sex lives of
celebrities were to suddenly disappear from the ‘papers.
The
public could, if they were that enraged, stop buying all tabloids until the
culture changes. But that doesn’t mean that the public want to know about sex
scandals (as long as they are reasonably harmless to the public) or celeb
holiday photos – they’ll happily take the information but their lives would not
change in the slightest if the information wasn’t there.
On
Murdoch, there seems to be a lot of dismay (and, from some, anger) that Rupert
Murdoch did not know about the evidence that Rebekah Brooks gave in 2003 and,
although he did become aware of it later, News International did not
investigate further.
Rupert
Murdoch is an 80-year-old man who is worth around $7.6 billion. The list
of assets owned by his company, News Corporation, is so long that I can’t
even be bothered to count them. There are a lot – enough to render the News of
the World pretty insignificant in terms of the day-to-day business of News
Corp.
Many
have said that the book must ultimately stop with Rupert Murdoch because it’s
his company – how could he possibly not know what is going on inside his own corporation?
To a certain extent, this is a fair comment but, as Murdoch says “the News
of the World is less than 1% of my company, and we employ 50,000 people... I
appoint people who I trust to run it.”
It would simply not be feasible to know all the
ins-and-outs of every company that he owns and it is not implausible (and, I
think, not a particularly negative stance for Murdoch to take) to think that he
doesn’t know everything that goes on inside News Corporation and the many businesses
within that. In an ideal world, maybe he would know every little detail, but
Murdoch relies on the people he employs to keep him informed. The problem isn’t
that Murdoch doesn’t take a hands-on approach to all his businesses – the
problem is that the people he has trusted have let him down.
Far be it from me to defend Rupert Murdoch, but
there is a difference between owning something and running it. He pays other
people to run the companies for him while he overlooks events from a general
point of view. People are right to be slightly taken aback by Murdoch’s lack of
knowledge on certain events (if indeed it is a genuine lack of knowledge) but anyone
who believes that Murdoch should know (or, want to know) everything about the daily
happenings of News of the World is living in an unrealistic, almost fabricated world
– a tabloid world, if you will.
