I heard Steve Hewlett (who is in great demand as a sane & sensible expert on the media just now) say that there are an awful lot of people trying to perch on the moral pinnacle just now.
Some of them will fall off.
And think this through – if not NewsCorp & NewsInternational, then who?
One tenth of all households in this country still took the News of the World, many of them lifelong readers. They probably won’t switch to another paper.
What will be the effect on small newsagents? Often these are the only legal businesses in some of the tougher areas.
I do worry about how this might end, with so many people who have always felt distaste for ‘the Murdoch empire‘ taking the revelations about the behaviour of some journalists & managers on the News of the World as proof that they were right all along. I suppose they think that we would all be in a much better place now if he had lost his original British takeover battle to his then rival – one Robert Maxwell.
I even find myself – once again – in a position of feeling as if I should support someone I neither like nor agree with – Rebekah Brooks – just because she is a woman. Perhaps she did do something wrong, but the level of sheer outright misogyny in the comments being made about her. The sisters cannot carp & moan about the lack of women at the top if they then fail to challenge this kind of thing instead of thinking dark thoughts about why a media mogul should want to demonstrate such public support for the only woman ever to have edited the largest circulation newspaper.
As to the supposed massive outcry from the public – well I detect no signs of it out & around. Twitter & Mumsnet are hardly representative of the general population, particularly not those who have a Sky subscription & used to pay for their own copy of the News of the World.
Of course they want the phone hackers punished, but right now there is a feeling that, as with bankers, it will be the ordinary people who will pay the price.
