THE News of the World is dead. Long live the Sun on Sunday.
Having registered the name of the News of the World’s replacement two days before he announced the News of the World’s demise, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has clearly signalled its cynical intent to change the name and do the same.
We have known about the phone hacking scandals within Rupert Murdoch’s media empire for five years now and — until recently — most people didn’t give two hoots.
The police knew this original case was not an isolated incident. Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates took the decision not to pursue the matter, a decision he now says was a "pretty crap" one.
It was clear that some of the Boys in Blue were accepting illegal bungs from the News of the World and other newspapers. That’s the only place some stories could have come from.
But it wasn’t until it emerged that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked and some of her messages deleted (to make room for new ones so that the News of the World could get access to them too) that most people started to wake up to the enormity of what had been happening.
Then came further revelations. It wasn’t just celebs and it wasn’t just Milly Dowler. It was the relatives of victims of terrorist atrocities and of those who’d died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And all of a sudden it was not OK any more. It was very not OK.
The truth is that, for many years there has been a deeply unhealthy relationship between our politicians, our Press Complaints Commission, our police and one man’s news empire: Rupert Murdoch.
And I use the word "Empire" advisedly.
The thing is this: Murdoch is a man of enormous power. He has more power than governments. It is Murdoch who, largely, determines who is elected in Britain and who is not.
Ah, you say, does Lorraine Mann really think we’re so stupid as to vote for whomever the Sun and the Times tell us? Does she really think we are bought and sold for Murdoch’s gold, to paraphrase the bard?
But the fact of the matter is this; in most elections and on the first-past-the-post electoral system it takes only a tiny percentage of people to shift their allegiance to have a seismic effect on the political landscape. No guarantees, of course, but the number of people who are affected by the Murdoch group’s newspapers is — usually — enough to do the trick.
And Murdoch knows it. On the morning of April 11th 1992, as John Major woke up to the fact that he’d beaten Neil Kinnock whom all opinion polls had put in the lead, the Sun ran the headline: It Was The Sun Wot Won It! Similar allusions greeted Tony Blair’s election victory five years later, after Murdoch had switched his allegiance to New Labour.
Blair and his public relations entourage had flown half-way round the world to meet Murdoch. They successfully convinced him of the truth about New Labour; that its policies were, in fact, Thatcherite Tory to the core. That being the case, Murdoch felt able to teach the real Tories a lesson they’d never forget.
Murdoch’s papers employ two tactics. On one hand, they rubbish the party they don’t want to win. On the other, and particularly if it’s Labour they don’t want to win, they try to reduce turnout by why-bother-voting-they’re-all-the-same stories and celeb splashes.
Murdoch’s media outlets play on our romantic notions of a "Free Press".
In fact, our press is far from free. When it comes to the higher echelons of the Fourth Estate you have to be very rich indeed to be an owner. What we have is not a free press; it’s an unfettered press.
Apart from the dear old BBC — much derided by the likes of Murdoch — there is no requirement for anyone to be impartial.
Moguls usually own papers to further their own interests. In News International’s case that includes — effectively — determining who will run countries.
We can have a "Free Press" or we can have democracy.
If there’s one thing Murdoch has proved, it’s that we can’t have both.
