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July 12, 2011
The unfolding consequences of News International's abuse of power keeps getting worse. Royal protection officers suborned! Gordon Brown's bank details and son's medical records allegedly blagged! Scandal spreads to the Sunday Times! News International is fighting a desperate battle as one by one another body is thrown to the pursuing wolves and hungry beasts.
The crisis in Britain---what is being uncovered is the systemic corruption between media, the political class and the police in British public life---is now damaging the wider Murdoch empire. Melanie Phillips is just not happy about some of the celebrity critics of this corruption.
Martin Rowson
News Corp's current defence strategy is to say that it was very, very happy to have the BSkyB deal referred to the Competition Commission in order to keep the bid alive. The Cameron Government, which had done everything in its power to avoid the referral, said it would do so. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, is urging News Corporation to drop its bid for BSkyB altogether. Labour calls for Murdoch to drop his bid for 100% of BSkyB.
The media does appear as the least accountable and most corrupt profession in the UK. In Australia journalists profess to hold commercial and political power to account, but the journalists, especially those who work for the concentrated power of News Ltd in the mediascape, are actually employed as the enforcers of corporate power. Their conservative commentary denounces those people who criticise the interests of corporate power, stamping on new ideas and bullying the powerless. Who would expose News Ltd if one of it's tabloid newspapers did engage in phone hacking in Australia?
Janet Daley in the Telegraph begins to lift the covers on the relationship between the media and politicians, and the way that politics works as a club in the UK.
The truth is that for all its adversarial and investigatory strengths – which are considerable – British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong. There is a degree of cosy camaraderie between the press and the governing class in this country... It is considered part of my job to take politicians to lunch regularly, and to cultivate them in a way that encourages confidences – just as fraternisation with the media is regarded as an essential aspect of any ambitious politician’s game plan...
Like so many spheres of life in this country – the art world, certain areas of academia and the higher reaches of the legal profession are examples that spring to mind – it is almost impossible to survive in political journalism as an outsider. Which is not to say (as is sometimes thought) that you actually have to have been to school or university with the people you are trying to engage – although that can help – but that you must adopt the manners which prevail in any club: the coded vocabulary, the discreet understandings, the accepted attitudes.
When politics is run as a club, it is so much easier for them to escape challenge or genuine scrutiny of the kind that comes with critical distance: from the outsider’s eye and the voice that can speak without fear of being excluded. Daley adds:
It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy.
British journalism as a trade is at the crossroads. Will it be replaced by PR companies?
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The tabloids aimed at a mass market have been locked into providing entertainment rather than information.In the overlapping age of the internet, information is being consumed on screen rather than in print.The market for newspapers as print shrinks.