How should our media be regulated?
Two well-heeled businessmen are sitting enjoying a drink. They are intense in conversation. One leans over to the other and says, “Get serious, John, we're talking business ethics not ethics.”
I was reminded of this cartoon by Rupert Murdoch’s swift, unexpected, unprecedented and extremely savvy decision of axe the News of the World in the light of growing public and political anger of the scale and sheer grubbiness of the phone hacking scandal.
Murdoch’s decision has everything to do with business and nothing to do with ethics. Advertisers were deserting the paper in droves and readers were liable to do the same, although for how long was anybody’s guess. The apparent extent of the scandal and its breathtaking immorality were liable to dominate headlines for days, smothering layer upon layer of mud on a paper already thick with it, and threatening to do the same to its holding company. By being so willing to slaughter his sacred cash cow, Murdoch appears to have taken decisive and morally courageous action.
Except that doing so does almost nothing that really matters. Certainly, the News of the World was toxic and the world is a better place without it (although we should not speak too soon before seeing its Sun-day successor looks like).
But it was toxic for a reason. Some – how many? – people working there were willing to authorise and pay for phone hacking into the privacy of Royals, politicians, celebrities, murdered children, British soldiers, and grieving relatives. Axing the paper does nothing to address this. As Geoffrey Robinson wrote in the Guardian, “the issues that need urgent inquiry are not made any less urgent by the closure of the paper."
Indeed, arguably Murdoch’s action heaps injustice on injustice. There is something gloriously anti-Christian about the media mogul’s actions. Not many of us have seen the father, but when we gaze upon the Son we get a pretty good idea of what he is like. And so the Father sent forth the Son to, er, punish everyone who worked for the News of the World, irrespective of whether they had any involvement in phone hacking, so that the guilty – whoever they are – may go free.
MPs – animated by the chance to point the moral guns at those who so gleefully expose political scandal – seem determined not to let this rest. An enquiry into the phone hacking scandal and the relationship between press and police is vital. But so is a wider examination of our media culture and the complete failure of the PCC and self-regulation.
A more or less free market is essential to the functioning of our society, and yet can only exist because it is carefully regulated. Why should a free press be any different?
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
