Old and Best Dead
News of the World finally fell victim to its own perverted overreach, but there's nothing to give hope that it won't soon produce a clone
On Sunday, 10 July, the News of the World, a 168-year-old British newspaper, published it 8,674th and last edition. To its seven million-plus readers, the paper admitted it had lost its way, an uncharacteristic understatement for a tabloid famous for its love of the lurid. The end was sudden and singularly graceless, the paper collapsing under mounting proof of the unsavoury and illegal extremes to which it went to gather the salacious gossip on which it thrived, on which, indeed, it became what some maintain was the most widely read newspaper in the English language.
For years NotW had been hacking into mobile phones, stealing pin codes that enabled it to listen to the voice mail of people central to the paper's piquant mix of sex, celebrity, sport, royals and crime. Six years ago, the British royal family became suspicious of the level of detail in stories being printed in the tabloid about Princes William and Harry, about the arcana to which the paper appeared privy. Phone messages began to appear as old when in fact they were new and the intended recipients hadn't yet heard them, leading royal security to conclude phones were being tampered with, and leading, in 2007, to four- and six-month jail sentences, respectively, for the News of the World's 'Royal editor' Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired to hack into the phones. NotW editor at the time, Andy Coulson resigned, and News Corp, the paper's parent company, Rupert Murdoch's world-bestriding media leviathan, suggested it was a rogue reporter acting alone without the knowledge and collusion of his superiors.
A police investigation into the phone hacking was hastily concluded after the imprisonment of Goodman and Mulcaire, bolstering News Corp's spinning of the scandal as an isolated incidence of bad behaviour. Two years later, in the summer of 2009, The Guardian began publishing stories asserting that the phone hacking was widespread, that NotW was eavesdropping on the phone messages of public figures ranging from the manager of Manchester United to the Mayor of London. Politician John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister and beloved of the tabloids for his distinctive syntax, quick temper and appetite for luxury, accused the police of neglecting their duty by failing to inform him that his phone was tapped. The police responded by saying there was no evidence of phone-tapping. In April 2010, The Guardian reported that Andy Hayman, the officer in charge of the investigation in 2007, had left the police to write columns for such Murdoch-owned sister publications of the NotW as The Times.
By this time it had become clear that the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire were token gestures, that phones were hacked with the knowledge, approval and financial backing of editors and executives at NotW. But people have long become inured to invasions of privacy. The catch to the outsize rewards of celebrity in media-saturated cultures is the erosion of public-private boundaries, the apparent consensus that the lives of public figures are lived entirely in public. Had NotW's phone tapping been confined to the likes of Prince William, Sir Alex Ferguson, Hugh Grant, politicians, minor television starlets and the like, it could likely have ridden the storm. There would have been outrage, disgust directed at tabloid antics—as there was when the paparazzi were tried and convicted in the court of public opinion after the death of Princess Diana—while the sales of these tabloids, filled with tittle-tattle and hysteria, rose unabated.
What precipitated the vertiginous fall of NotW and necessitated the decision by News Corp to amputate the gangrenous limb was another article in The Guardian, this time alleging that the tabloid had hacked into the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who was kidnapped and murdered nine years ago. NotW had not only listened to the messages on her phone but deleted some when her inbox was full so that new messages could be left that their journalists could listen in on. The covert interference gave hope to the Dowler family, who naturally assumed it was Milly deleting the messages. Her body was discovered months later. As evidence emerged that NotW had hacked the phones of the families of victims of the 7/7 bombings in 2005 and those of the families of other murder victims, the conduct of its journalists, it became clear, was not just cynical but depraved.
In the wake of the Milly Dowler allegations, politicians vied to express their disgust, advertisers pulled out and News Corp, in the midst of trying to buy outright control of the broadcaster BSkyB, came under increasing pressure. NotW, in the words of former editor Rebekah Wade, in charge during much of the period in which the phone hacking took place, had become "toxic". Wade is now the chief executive in charge of all News Corp newspapers in Britain. A Murdoch pet, she has kept her job while 200 NotW staff, none of whom unlike Wade herself is connected to the phone hacking, have lost theirs.
The Murdochs—Rupert and son James who signed off on hundreds of thousands of pounds paid to buy the silence of prominent figures such as Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, whose phones were hacked—are now claiming to be fully cooperating with and aiding the new police inquiry; full cooperation, of course, after years of obfuscation, denial and misleading (even if unintentional) testimony. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports allegations that executives at NotW have been deleting millions of emails from the archive.
Aside from the amorality and greed of the journalists and executives involved, the NotW scandal has exposed, as every such scandal always exposes, the cosy, mutually beneficial relationships between politicians, editors and media magnates and their prominent business partners. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see cabals and cliques everywhere. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, with his "we have all been in this together" comments, admitted as much, acknowledging the lengths to which politicians have gone to appease powerful media. Cameron has no choice. After all, he hired Andy Coulson, after the then NotW editor resigned weeks before the arrests of Goodman and Mulcaire, as his director of communications. Cameron claims he thought Coulson deserved a second chance. Nothing to do, then, with Coulson's contacts at News Corp's powerful British media holdings, the support of which could once practically guarantee electoral success.
Few people doubt that Murdoch has shut down NotW because it is expedient, necessary if he is to salvage his bid to control BSkyB; few doubt that a Sunday tabloid of much the same character will duly emerge to replace the profitable NotW. If something more edifying is to happen, as with the Radia tapes, it will require a public aware of and less willing to tolerate power broking and profiteering masquerading as journalism. Only a public angered rather than titillated by the bluster of British tabloids, or for that matter Indian news channels, can change what has been a very profitable status quo for the likes of Murdoch and their political courtiers. Paul Weller had it right back in 1978 when his band, The Jam, released a single titled News of the World: "Each morning our key to the world comes through the door / More than often it's just a comic, not much more." A 168-year-old newspaper died on Sunday. In its way, News of the World was a triumph of mass literacy, of democracy, betrayed by owners and editors contemptuous of the people they were meant to serve.