They say that a week is a long time in politics, but a week at News International must currently feel like it is being captured by a time-lapse camera.
Enough tumultuous events have taken place over the past few days to last several lifetimes. By the time you read this blog, I have no doubt that it will be out of date. Yesterday the famous five attended Westminster to give their accounts of what happened. Rupert got pied in the face leading to a temporary suspension in proceedings.
The night before that whistleblower Sean Hoare was found dead in unexplained circumstances. A couple of hours before that the Met’s John Yates had resigned. All this on top of the previous night’s bombshell resignation of the Met’s Paul Stephenson and the arrest of Rebekah Brooks.
It is right that certain people have stepped down. The act of hacking into the voicemail account of murdered school girl Milly Dowler while she was still missing, and moreover deleting voicemails, leading to false hope for her family that she might still be alive, was truly shocking and rocketed the care-factor of this debate from very low to sky-high.
Aside from legality, there are myriad issues here; but three that stand out are privacy, free speech and reputation.
Like many, I was growing sick of the band of celebrities and faded politicians whining about the invasion of their privacy, and on top of the recent slew of superinjunctions the debate seemed to only be focused on the rich and famous.
However; that victims of criminals, and then fallen soldiers, 7/7 and 9/11 victims and others were subject to the same intrusion seemed to me beyond the pale.
We should be proud of the fact that we enjoy the right to free speech and have a free press in the United Kingdom. Journalists should be free to investigate stories – of course, but what News International did is just plain wrong, legally and morally.
I haven’t really touched on reputation much. Rebekah Brooks’ reputation is clearly trashed; as is the corporate reputation of News Corp. Some people commented of the timing of the explosive revelations, and there could have been something in that (News Corp has dropped its bid for BSkyB for the timebeing) – but timing aside, it was right that all those involved or even in the know, should have stepped down. News International is being rightly vilified, but you have to wonder whether they are alone in plumbing such depths…
Matters of privacy, free-speech and reputation aren’t always black and white. There are many shades of grey, but there are some clear lines which should never be crossed.
Hacking into the voicemail accounts of the victims of crime, or their families, is clearly one.
The police selling information to a newspaper is another.
The saga is unfolding, or unravelling, at a rate of knots…. where it will all end up, who knows? One thing for sure is that the fallout will continue for some time to come.
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