Moral Compass

One day Rupert Murdoch is about to take over all of UK broadcasting, the next he's had to close down News of the World and his son might be investigated by the US authorities. Wonder what jail time would be like for someone involved in hacking the phones of 9/11 victims? JK is worried this is one of those very realistic dreams you get by eating a lot of cheese before you go to bed, which on occasion he has confused with reality, started telling someone then realised part way through he was describing his dream, a very disturbing one involving Cagney from Cagney and Lacy, custard and an awkward position from the Karma Sutra, was about to mention the explicit content and had to spill a drink on himself to avoid social armageddon. No, JK doesn't get asked to parties much. Turns out this is not a dairy product hallucination and the maudlin, mob justice tattle rag has disappeared for good.

A refuse truck worth of  garbage has already been spouted about how sad it is that the NOTW has gone, usually from moral cowards keen to brown nose Murdoch.  Notice the relative coverage given to the loss of 1,400 jobs at Bombardier, a UK train carriage manufacturer screwed over by the madness that is PFI, to the loss of 200 jobs of print journalism. Bombardier lost out to Siemens, not on the merits of its bid, simply that it was unable to offer a PFI style financing deal. Way to go on the manufacturing recovery George!

Back to the phone hackers at the not-mourned-at-all-NOTW, a question occurs to this simian typist,  in the 168 years that the NOTW existed, name one positive contribution to British public life....take all the time you like...no rush...anything at all.....no...really...not one? In case you're wondering the Sarah's Law campaign does not count, it doesn't prevent child abuse and is more likely to send paedophiles into hiding. Plus the really dirty secret is over 80% of abuse is in the home, forget Sarah's Law, it's dodgy Uncle Pete you should be worrying about. But it seems The News of the World and the truth or ethics were never close friends, perhaps fuckbuddies when it suited them.


I think the best some commentators  managed was that the paper was un-PC. Perhaps Toby Young and Piers Morgan would prefer to turn the clock back the 1970s when you could call a spade a spade; the rest of us, who have mentally rather than just physically passed through adolescence, disagree. Now that even worse acts have come to light, such as obtaining confidential medical data about Gordon Brown's sick child - words fail this ape. They also seemed to have failed the useless idiots who were cheerleading for the poison rag only days before. No witty contrarian comebacks now lads?

What is most interesting about this sorry episode of phone hackers, lax editors, bent coppers and supine politicians, mute and compliant media is the complete absence of a functioning moral compass amongst the lot of them. A moral compass is your very own Sat Nav for life, telling what's right, what's wrong and when you're getting into dodgy areas. But for your moral compass to work, you must calibrate it correctly (if you'll go with the analogy) otherwise like a malfunctioning GPS system it will lead you to a dead end or the wrong part of town - like those van drivers you see on You've Been Framed who have ended up in a lake because their TomTom told that was the quickest route back to Chipping Norton.

So consider the journey The News of the World took from a regular tattle sheet reporting crime to committing crime and not just minor offenses, serious breaches of the law - bribing the police, hacking victim's phones, compromising royal security. All of this slide into criminality happened because senior management and staff lacked boundaries and failed to set limits on what acceptable in the pursuit of a story. They broke taboos that are there for a reason - leaving grieving parents in peace, not paying police officers, obtaining confidential medical records and see what it has done to them as people.

It is also an invaluable lesson in the nature of evil which is not confined to a wild-eyed photo of a serial killer or a grainy film of Nazi atrocities, it is  also what happened at that paper and the consequences of that deep and profound amorality. Whilst the outgoing editor might have nothing to do with the worst offenses committed under Brook's tenure, name checking Orwell in the final, cringe-making  edition of The News of the World, shows that there something terminally rotten in the State of Wapping.  Orwell mentioned the rag is 'The Decline of English Murder', he wrote about many subjects from Stalinism to football, none of which count as an endorsement. How desperate, how lacking in humility or self-awareness do you have to try a stunt like that -  attempting to bracket the greatest writer of the 20th century with your wretched paper?  The NOTW was the Scout Master caught messing with the boys' woggles - walk away in shame and silence, don't start mumbling about famous writers.

JK was pleased to see the Twitter campaign made advertisers pull their funding, but there are plenty more papers in the News Corp stable. This is not over yet. Shame the real villains have yet to be called to account and we all know who they are.