An interesting idea in yesterday’s Times from Helen Rumbelow, who got it from crime writer Anne Holt: if you want to know all about a new place you travel to, buy ‘a crime novel & an interiors magazine. That will give you all you need to know.’
Helen Rumbelow went to WH Smith to investigate what this could tell us about Britain.
“I found … us brooding on sex offences, in which the victims follow the gentlemanly code: women & children first. It made me wonder: as a nation … are we worrying about the wrong things?”
To which my response, later that evening, was a very, very loud YESSS.
BBC News (on radio at least) was leading, even on The World Tonight at 10pm on Radio 4, with the ‘emergence’ of the fact that Sara Payne’s phone number had been found in the records of the private detective who may, therefore, have been hacking into her voice mail. Fortunately they seem to have thought better of it by this morning – I even had a bit of work to do to find the item on their news website.
There are so many things wrong with this judgement by the BBC that I hardly know where to start.
First, it is old news at a time when, despite the season, there is plenty of new news about.
Secondly having it trumpeted every hour can do nothing to ease the ‘great distress’ that this revelation is said to have caused.
Thirdly, there are at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are also being told now that their phone ’may have been’ hacked, so why are they not equally newsworthy.
And fourthly, far from being yet one more fact which incriminates News of the World management, it adds weight to the idea that they did not know.
Obsession? Paedophilia? Child murder? What can you mean?
