MPs and bankers didn’t clean up their acts. Nor will the hacks

16 July 2011

I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible.

I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I mean, next in line for the national outpouring of bile and contumely. My closest friend is an art therapist and his smugness is beginning to get my goat, especially coming from someone who wanders around loony bins at my expense with a bag of crayons and a head full of post-Freudian idiocies. So, 2012, remember, let’s take it out on the art therapists. I’ll start the Twitter campaign in November, you ring the Guardian.

For the moment, though, it’s journalists, and fair enough I suppose. Just as with the loathing poured upon the bankers, and then the politicians, the fury has its confected elements for sure, and it is given momentum by schadenfreude, spite and political opportunism, not to mention social networking sites. But there’s no doubting that the massed public revulsion is genuine enough and perhaps overdue. I felt, as we all rounded with glee upon the MPs two years ago, that sooner or later we would cop it, a feeling of foreboding compounded by my trade’s astonishingly sanctimonious outrage that we were having a privacy law imposed upon us by judges. The super-injunctions, as it turned out, were useless. But in those arguments marshalled every day in every national newspaper, the demands that we have a right to investigate who is shagging who and then to tell you all about it, in the public interest, in the service of fairness and openness, as part of a democracy and so on, repeated ad nauseam, our right to let you know that Jeremy Clarkson or someone from The Saturdays might be having marital difficulties — well, the hypocrisy stank. And I thought, I’m not entirely sure we have the public with us on this one.

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A. MacAulay

July 21st, 2011 7:09am Report this comment

It's the overblown self-importance of all of the reviled mentioned that causes, well not exactly despair but disenchantment. This is the Establishment? Then God save us all!

It would have been better if the Select Commitee had thrown cream pies at the Murdochs. It might have raised the chances of a deranged passer-by wandering in and asking, "What f*ck do you lot think you're doing"? The only sensible question that no-one wants to hear asked.

Herbert Thornton

July 21st, 2011 6:33pm Report this comment

Well said, Rod.

My own opinion is that the best course is to leave Fleet Street alone, have a General election and vote in a House of Commons that contains not one Tory, Liberal or Labour member and then privatise the BBC by selling it to Murdoch on condition that he resurrects the News of the World.

John

July 22nd, 2011 1:35pm Report this comment

‘’For the moment, though, it’s journalists, and fair enough I suppose.’’

No, it is tabloid ‘journalists’. Not journalists. Important difference. And you’re free to fantasize that Assange is as big a bad ‘un as Murdoch if you makes you feel better, but the rest recognise bullshit when we smell it.

Sniff.

WetherspoonThree

July 22nd, 2011 7:57pm Report this comment

Its quite enjoyable, watching the hacks beat each other up. What upsets me is the depressing news that Chakrabarti will earn £150,000 a year for her part in Leveson jolly which is even more than she earns on Question Time!
You've been unusual quiet Ron. I thought for a moment you had fallen victim to an early morning knock on the door from Inspector Knacker.

Mike

July 23rd, 2011 9:17am Report this comment

Lets get one fact straight, Wikileaks didn't do any hacking they published what was handed to them. That is the difference and you can call them irresponsible if you like but Julian Assange is no computer geek capable of hacking a government web site.

soccer doc

July 23rd, 2011 11:12am Report this comment

Re the Julian Assange comment, has Rod forgotten two things
1. the public interest defence. I would imagine should Mr Assange ever be brought to trial that he will use. Does Mr L consider it shouldnt be open to him? As a member, almost certainly of the left, the he refers to, I have no problem with material obtained by stretching the bounds of legality, if the story is in the public interest - for instance criminality. The notion that who is shagging who is only in the public interest in that the public are interested (pruriently). Does Rod think there should be no such public interest defence, or only not for Julian Assange
2. Does he remember that a year or so ago - during the MPs expenses stushie - he assured me that he personally had never fiddled his own expenses and indeed knew on other journo who had. Was this because you were busy breaking the law otherwise?

RocketDog

July 23rd, 2011 9:44pm Report this comment

Rod
I don't think that the problem is that banksters, politicos and hacks are necessarily bad. They are and ever have been.
The problem is that they are locked in an embrace of cronyism that beggars belief. Part of this is probably down to technology making it easy, but most of it is down to public standards. A fish rots from the head down. Also, you forgot to mention lawyers ...

chameleon

July 25th, 2011 5:12pm Report this comment

The rot starts with second rate journalists. Bankers and Mp's would never have been able to reach the current levels of deceit and corruption in evidence today had everything been exposed in a timely fashion years ago. Instead, "over the fence" gossipers deal in rot and some of them think their rancid opinions are worth airing.

Minnie Ovens

July 27th, 2011 3:58pm Report this comment

I'm wondering what the nearly 8 Million readers of the NOTW (National Readership Survey, ABC state 2.5 Million purchased))feel about losing their newspaper?
Do they blame Murdoch since he closed it down or do they blame the Establishment.
Personally I think the stench pervades Westminster, Whitehall and Wapping but then the first two live with that all the time.
Once more the public loses out as the hypercrites and sociopaths lower their morality and principles to the lowest of the lowest common denominators.
Phew!

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