United Kingdom: Examining the hacking scandal

The latest battle in “the hundred years’ conflict between the tabloids and the famous” was joined this week, said Dan Sabbagh in the London Guardian. A long-awaited government inquiry started hearing public testimony on phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World, as well as on the general state of ethics in the British press. Both “victims and celebrities”—from the parents of a murdered schoolgirl to actor Hugh Grant—have laid out the often shocking details of contemptuous and sometimes illegal actions by the tabloid press. Elements of the media have displayed such bad behavior that you have to “wonder whether some in the industry have a death wish.”

Fittingly, the proceedings began with the “assured and dignified” testimony of Bob and Sally Dowler, said Martin Evans in The Telegraph. It was the hacking of their daughter Milly’s phone that led to this inquiry. They described being pursued relentlessly by reporters after Milly, 13, vanished in March 2002, and relived the moment they received false hope that she was alive. For days, Sally had been calling Milly’s phone without success, because the mailbox was full. Then one day she got through to Milly’s own recorded message. She called to her husband, “She’s picked up her voice mail. Bob, she’s alive!” But it wasn’t Milly who had deleted the stored messages—it was hackers employed by the News of the World. As we later learned, Milly had by then already been murdered.

The Dowlers’ humble testimony showed “a particular sort of English virtue,” said Simon Carr in The Independent. But in a different register, so did Hugh Grant’s. The “dashing metropolitan cavalier” was bracingly honest in admitting that in accusing the Mail on Sunday of listening to his voice-mail messages, he was not claiming that his reputation had been sullied. “I don’t trade on my good name; I’ve never had a good name,” he told the inquiry. “I’m the man who got caught with a prostitute.” But the high-profile campaigner against press intrusion told the inquiry he still had plenty to lose. He said he’d not even dared attend the recent birth of his own child for fear of turning the event into a media circus, and had been forced to ask a judge to impose an exclusion zone around the mother’s house to stop her from being harassed by photographers.

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“Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand,” said Steve Coogan in The Guardian. But the tabloid press wants total freedom while exercising none of the latter. Unconstrained by ethics or human decency, the tabloids bully anyone that tries to stop them, whether it be celebrities who speak out or governments that try to regulate them. They function “not unlike a protection racket,” driven solely by commercial interests rather than by “any notion of public service.” This whole sordid affair has nothing to do with press freedom, and everything to do with “ethics, common decency, and treating people with respect.”