But is this merely a cynical move by a morally bankrupt management hierarchy to put a stop to the bad news in the hope it will not torpedo their plans to take over BSkyB ? Essentially News International has decided to blame the probably innocent journalists (who allegedly have all been employed after the phone hacking was routine) to avoid blame being placed squarely where it belongs – with the management who permitted such a lax regime at the old News of the World that illegal phone hacking, and potentially even corruption of police officers could carry on.
The odds are that the News of the World team will mostly get jobs in an enlarged Sun organisation which is supposedly going to shortly become a 7 day newspaper. But if any fail to find jobs, is it unreasonable to wish that News International could somehow be forced to pay their unemployment benefit ? After all, the journalists put together a profitable paper, and they have been thrown out of work because of what is in the end a failure of management.
It is clear that the old News of the World was responsible for phone hacking on an industrial scale involving hundreds of victims including not just the famous and infamous, but also ordinary members of the public caught up in tragic events – victims of crime or war. Plus it seems that payments were made to members of the police – not only illegal, but something illegal for so long nobody could claim they didn’t know it was illegal.
With any luck the individuals who were there listening into phone calls, commissioning such snooping, and passing brown paper bags to corrupt coppers will be found and prosecuted with the full weight of the law. But the managers who allowed such activities within their organisation also need to pay a price – they may not have known what was going in (if they were particularly dumb), but they are ultimately responsible for a regime in which such activities could take place.
Even if they did nothing more than profit from the results of the illegal journalism, they all deserve to go. Ever since the phone hacking scandal first burst on the scene 5 years ago, they have been claiming it was just the odd bad apple doing this. They at the very least, are responsible for sweeping the mess under the carpet and trying to conceal the magnitude of the crime.
There are people who are claiming that it was only a tiny cabal of journalists – perhaps 6 – who were up to this. Well we have heard all that before when News International were claiming it was just one journalist and one private investigator up to these criminal acts. Even if it was just six journalists, one thing has been neglected in all the noise about this – the other journalists, the newspaper, and News International all benefitted from the phone hacking that was going on.
Even if it was just a busy phone hacking journalist nodding the wink to another “more respectable” journalist in need of a story – perhaps “look into what celebrity X is up to”, they all benefited.
Our favourite hate figure Rebekah Brooks has commented that in a year’s time we will all know why it was necessary to shut the News of the World down – what other dirty little secrets have yet to see the light of day ? This isn’t something that is going to go away. She claims that it was “inconceivable” that she would know what was going on when Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked – which is completely unbelievable. An editor should know what is going on in her own newsroom – perhaps not who was being hacked, but that hacking was going on.
An editor who didn’t question the kind of information the phone hacking journalists were coming up with is either grossly incompetent, lying, or knew it was too good to be true and chose not to know so she could keep her hands “clean”. Bear in mind that she admitted that News of the World was paying policeman for information in 2003!
You will often hear the pathetic excuse that journalists protect their sources even from their editor. Protecting sources is indeed important in serious investigative journalism, and an editor may well not want to know the name of a source, but will need to know the kind of source information comes from. If Rebekah (and other editors of the News of the World such as Andy Coulson) didn’t query the kind of source behind certain stories, they could be accused of gross misconduct as editors.
And moving on, do we really imagine that it was only News of the World journalists subcontracting phone hacking out to dodgy private investigators ? At the very least some News of the World journalists went on to other papers and quite probably carried on the same old behaviour in other news rooms.
How many other newspapers are going to be closed down by the end of the investigation ?
Now onto the sorry story of the police corruption and the “investigations” that have taken place. The allegedly corrupt officers and the investigations that failed to find the blindingly obvious were both from the Metropolitan Police. One has to wonder if the earlier investigations into phone hacking were carried out by some of those corrupt officers. Maybe it was just incompetence.
However it has serious implications for the current police investigation into what went on – this is also being done by the Met. Which to many people will look a bit odd. Whilst I do not doubt that the current investigation will be carried out fully, it would be better by far if it were to be carried out by a force other than the Met. To avoid disturbing the current investigation, perhaps it could be as simple as bringing in a senior officer from outside the Met to head the investigation.
But most importantly of all, we have yet to give this scandal a good “gate” name in the traditional (at least ever since Watergate) fashion. I propose “hackgate” given the two appropriate meaning behind the word “hack”!