Hacking up a Headline

Ever watched a cat free itself of a troublesome furball? It's a painful, ugly sight as it convulses itself, losing all its prior dignity, in the contortions and hacking needed to produce something that is equally as disgusting as the act of making it had been. Gross, perhaps but a blessed release for the wretched moggie.

I imagine it's like that for a News International employee. All that debasing ones self by lowering the standards of the profession you nearly pursue but certainly don't embody. Playing fast and loose with the truth and then, when imagination falls short of producing the dirt, breaking the law would seem a natural next step. After all, you've sold lies designed to ruin reputations and destroy careers and in the name of news. So, why not hack up a story. You might lose all grace and dignity in the process but in the end you'll have given some relief to that giant chip on your shoulder. Sick it up, just like the hacking cat.

Maybe making the news is like laws and hot dogs: we're better off not knowing how its done. Yeah, making the news. I know, their supposed to report the news but that means actual journalism. These guys make the news. They'd say that we don't want to know what that takes but we owe our freedom to them; for daring to ridicule the great and the, not so, good. Apparently, we'd be overrun by Nazis if we didn't have a press that was free.

Free to dish the dirt on important figures that might otherwise abuse their power. Like, the power to sell cheap frozen foods from Iceland. Somebody who wields that kind of influence must be brought to account, nothing short of a telephoto lens trained on their every bowl movement would better serve freedom. It's not dignified, and you don't want to admit it goes on, but your democracy relies upon these benighted souls.

Apparently, so they'd have us believe, you can't uphold freedoms without disregarding them and you can't honour the dead without exploiting them. At least not when you're chasing the scoops that safe guard democracy. Hold on, you might say, didn't the Telegraph bring MPs to account for their expenses abuses and wasn't it the Guardian that took on the press, police and politics to safe guard the truth in journalism and not the red top tabloid rags?

Ah, yes but, as the Independent courageously pointed out, in defence of balance, we need the red tops to satirise high profile people to "show they're only human." If you don't debase, judge and ridicule people going through personal problems then you'd end up thinking they walked on water. Then you'd fill your freezer with a load of cheap sausage rolls and arctic logs and party snacks that frankly you'd never eat. All the while feeling so inferior and imagining that celebrities' freezers are so much better organised.

Or maybe not, maybe you'd see people in difficult situations being laughed at and criticised and feel less human, less able to cope. Perhaps, the ridicule creates a false idea of what it is to be "only human." After all, wouldn't it be better to empathise with those who struggle and, in that way, suggest that sympathy can be offered, even to those who fall, because, after all, they're only human.

Who knows, if the Wapping crew had cultivated some empathy then maybe they too would be forgiven for their failings. Instead, they preached an unyielding moral standard, where someone's weaknesses or failings lost them all rights and comforts. More than this, they instilled moral outrage as a carapace for envy. Up to a point they got away with it - the lies and law breaking and the pretence of public interest all in the name of press freedom.

Their fatal mistake has been that, while teaching us to accept that public people are loathsome, cravers of attention who deserve only scorn, they also told us that victims and soldiers are off limits. They railed against laws that support fair trials, saying they ignore the victims rights and they castigated politicians who don't support the wars we prosecute by saying they dishonour the heroes who fight them.

A fatal mistake, when at the same time they were spying on the dead and door stopping the grieving. Hacking phones and Facebook accounts of "ordinary" people and heroes was something we couldn't justify even by the code the press had taught us. The moral outrage they normally stirred up to sell their rags or support their causes is now trained on them. And the hacks might find the public very unforgiving. They've slipped up, the curtain has been pulled back and behind it is a convulsing cat coughing up an indigestible furball.

For me, even if they'd never hacked a phone or bribed a policeman or cajoled an easily corrupted politician into subverting democracy, the gutter press would still deserve the ire they're now facing. They've lowered public discourse to the level of gossip, they've been prurient and partisan and destroyed tolerance. They've broken laws to name and shame pedophiles, even when the police and courts strongly advised against it. They've encouraged hatred of minorities and offer no welcome to those who seek refuge within our nation.

Personally, I hope they can't just shrug it off when the next horror story hits the headlines. Even now they've tried to associated the tragic killings in Norway with Islamic terrorism, only to quickly discover the nutcase behind it was white, Christian and right-wing. That maybe his motives were more in tune with the same uncaring press that feeds the EDL in this country.

The press like to claim video nasties and gory games directly affect the actions of sadists, sociopaths and serial killers. These, make believe, entertainments are often attacked for the disturbing influence, it is believed, they have on society. Maybe it's time the press looked within their own pages to find a disturbing influence on society - one harder to separate from reality because it pretends to be in service of the truth.

Now the cats out of the bag maybe the press can rediscover its purpose and reconnect with the truth.