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.
There are interesting similarities in the consecutive eviscerations of the bankers, politicians and journalists. The suspicion, for a start, that each of them had it coming. The fact that in each case they were abiding by established practice which they believed, rightly or wrongly, was part of the deal of being a banker, or an MP, or a journalist. The fact that their excesses in each case were known about long, long before everybody started getting really angry. We knew the bankers and the finance houses were taking inordinate risks which seemed to defy the laws of physics, never mind economics. That MPs played fast and loose with their expenses was widely known and, indeed, the MPs argued in public that it was a quid pro quo for being badly paid, a deal which everyone was signed up to. And as for the journos — that most egregious of transgressions, bribing the police; you will have seen footage of Rebekah Brooks explaining to a Commons select committee that News International had, in the past, bunged loads of money the way of the old bill. Nobody took much fright back then. It wasn’t quite our time to feel the wrath descend.
In each case too, the political left has been the most vengeful and driven, even if it was the Daily Telegraph which broke the expenses story (by, er, procuring hacked information. But that was OK). But it has been selectively vengeful, of course, which is why almost all of the odium is poured upon Rupert Murdoch rather than, say, the Daily Mail or the Daily Mirror. As one commentator noted this week, Rupert Murdoch is the left’s Voldemort, an embodiment of everything it loathes. Partly, one suspects, because he has a rather surer grasp of what it is the downtrodden masses really want than did, say, Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. The public, I suspect, is more even-handed in its contempt; we are, for a while, all the same, just as were the bankers and the politicians. But of course there are inconsistencies there too; while they seem to believe that the hacking of phones is wrong, the sales-sheets tell us that the newspapers which have done the most hacking are the most popular with the public. And there were no complaints from the public about bankers when the economy was spiralling upwards as a consequence of their injudicious (as it turned out) ‘investments’ in debt.
And then there are the inconsistencies of the left, epitomised by that walking, talking inconsistency Julian Assange. There is no great moral difference between hacking a phone and hacking a computer file. The justification for both is that the perpetrators wish to reveal to the public stuff which individuals wish to keep secret; one will claim defence of the ‘public interest’, the other — if they’re honest — commercial interest. Is it in the public interest to know what diplomats say privately? Is it helpful? I’m not sure. Let’s face it, the whole of WikiLeaks was based on the illegal or unethical acquisition of secret information. At least the News of the World sometimes used methods which lay within the law. But the left is too busy trying to exonerate Assange from those sexual assault charges to worry.
The question now is whether journalism goes the same way of those other two subjects of public loathing. In other words, what are the prospects of Fleet Street reflecting upon its misdeeds and putting its house in order, banning for ever the employment of rat-faced private investigators, illegal hacking, bunging wads of wonga to the filth and so on? The bankers haven’t changed one bit, although they told us they would at the time. The MPs also told us that things would be different from now on, God forgive us — it is time for a new, clean and transparent culture within Westminster, how appallingly have we let you down, etc, etc. Well, they are now claiming even more in expenses than they did when all that fuss occurred, and are quietly removing the checks introduced to stop them robbing us blind. So don’t bet on Fleet Street being terribly different a year or two from now.
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