Does News International’s Criminality Not Matter?

Not according to Simon Jenkins:

Rupert Murdoch and his son were summoned before parliament, and gave an eerie performance as an ageing father who had vaguely heard his son had done something regrettable in the family woodshed. Meanwhile the British prime minister, David Cameron, was forced to return from a foreign trip, like a tottering dictator called home by the politburo. The country’s top policeman and top counter-terrorism copwere forced into resignation. Two government judicial inquiries have been set up. Two commons committees are in continuous session. The police are everywhere. Journalists and MPs are lying on the floor, kicking their legs in the air with glee.

Has anyone been murdered? Has anyone been ruined? Is the nation gripped by financial crash or pandemic, earthquake or famine? Are thousands homeless or millions impoverished? A squalid surveillance of the sort long conducted by the tabloid press went beyond what in this business is laughably called good taste and constituted a crime.

Errr the News of the World hacked into a dead girl’s mobile and deleted messages to make way for more anguished voicemail messages, which they could then presumably publish and profit from. They interfered in a police investigation, their hacking was seriously illegal, whether practised against her or against Hugh Grant – how on earth does Jenkins feel so comfortable with dismissing this behaviour? The editor of the paper at the time of the Dowler hacking has denied any knowledge of what went on, yet has admitted she paid police for information. News International is still paying the legal expenses of the private investigators already convicted of illegal surveillance. Should we dismiss their motivations and accept their apologies? No – noone’s been murdered, there’s no famine, but civil society’s been thoroughly subverted, corruption is endemic at the highest levels of the media, the police and maybe government; this criminality really matters.

Jenkins worked at the Times, a News International paper, so maybe his attitude towards yesterday’s grilling of the Murdochs and Brooks isn’t altogether surprising, but it still stinks. Check his next rant:

It is unsurprising that Murdoch’s fiercest critics should also be his fiercest competitors, notably the Guardian and the BBC. The Murdoch-owned Sky is the one rival to get under the skin of the BBC’s dominance of the radio, television and online market. The BBC led on the story every day for two weeks, despite the state of Europe’s finances, famine spreading across Africa and Cameron’s challenge to the welfare state. The BBC had its share of hard knocks from the Murdoch press and clearly could not resist hitting back.

Somehow he attributes the Guardian’s and BBC’s investigation of News International to a bizarre form of jealousy. Later in the article he writes everything the Murdochs’ firm has done as an ‘error’, out of ‘eccentricity’. Is the corruption at the top of the Metropolitan Police really just an ‘error’, and News International’s blocking of the investigation ‘eccentric’, where both should get away with just saying ‘sorry’? Neil Kinnock was being typically barmy when he suggested legislating balance of the press – I don’t hear the Guardian or BBC lining up behind him; what I hear is them doing their jobs. Maybe Simon Jenkins could learn from his non-NI employer and get the severity of what’s happening into perspective.