I have
had this book for several months but have been reluctant to open the cover, not
because it was likely to be turgid or boring but because I feared that the
content would both sadden and sicken me in terms of the conclusions I would be
forced to draw about the decline of standards in public life. Although none of
the content is now news, to read it collected together is an emotional rather
than intellectual feat. It truly does describe, as its subtitle claims, how
News International has been permitted through cowardice and greed to corrupt
Britain.
I often
think of involvement in politics as being a continuum that runs from truth to
power. Anybody involved in making political decisions is forced to compromise
and then tells their story about why that happened. So even Gandhi would have
been hard pushed to claim he was entirely at the truth end of the spectrum. But
British politics today is entirely focused on power, and money used as a tool
to obtain greater power. In this world the perverse statement by James Murdoch to
the Edinburgh Television Festival (August 2009, p. 90) creates no sense of dissonance:
'There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a
better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of
independence is profit.'
The Murdoch press
used phone hacking not primarily to garner stories that would sell newspapers.
It was a strategy to gather dirt on the rich and powerful and to blackmail them
into submission. The aim was to gain even greater control of the market for
information by bullying Cameron and Hunt to allow News International to control
40 per cent of national newspapers and the UK's largest broadcaster (p. 89). The
Murdoch family needed to get control of
the remaining 61% of the company’s shares and they needed to prevent
politicians from blocking this. It was only the timely breaking of the scandal
by The Guardian that put the wholly undemocratic and anti-competitive buyout on
hold.
It helped
me to have read Jon Ronson's book on psychopaths during the same month as Dial M, because it is apparent that many
of those involved in this story are incapable of experiencing remorse or shame
and spotting how these people abound in public life makes their behaviour seem
more like a disability than evidence of moral decay more generally. But as a
society we must find a way to protect ourselves against such people. In
response to suggestions of press regulation, those who thrive in the murky and
corrupt world of British public life raise objections around liberal values and
human rights but, like James Murdoch's suggestion that what Sky is seeking to
achieve is media competition in the public interest, this is deceitful guff.
Tom Watson makes clear that the way he and Nick Davies ferreted out
the truth about the underbelly of the British media establishment was by using
the mantra ‘follow the money’. Hence the inevitable conclusion of the Murdoch
saga is that we urgently need
to get money out of politics and competition into the media. The Office of Fair
Trading exists to prevent exactly the sort of monopolistic domination that Sky
has achieved in recent years, while the failure of successive governments to
limit donations to political parties feeds into the same incestuous and corrupt
relationships between politicians and media executives.
In spite of the
work of lawyers and the courage of witnesses a year on from the publication of his
report, Lord Leveson’s Inquiry has come to nothing. Politicians claim
that they are forced to consider the press’s plan for self-regulation equally
alongside Leveson’s independent proposals. Sky still dominates our media and
the BBC, that should be our defence, has made a cowardly retreat in the face of
political threats. Alan Rusbridger is still fighting the establishment but his
paper is lonely and isolated, as it was throughout the years of Murdoch
dominance. This autumn will be a watershed in our democratic history with the
trials of Brooks, Coulson et al. We should be watching carefully to see
whether, in the end, truth or power holds sway.
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