Can there ever have been a paper with a more misnomerous nomer than the News of the World? Its foreign correspondents must have been about as busy as Gadhafi’s FourSquare account. In its seventies’ heyday its parish was home county sex parties, kitless Wiccans and naughty vicars. In the eighties, its coverage grew a little darker, with vicars getting far naughtier and the word paedophile dominating its lexicon.
Over the last 20 years, the paper has reflected and nurtured the cult of celebrity, with dogging dull unless it involved a premier division midfielder and coke only a matter of alarm when a Hollyoaks role model partook.
Despite this it remained a quality product, in much the same way as the Daily Mail or the NOTW’s own stablemate, The Sun. Quality at least in terms of killer subbing, precision readership targeting and an ineffable affinity for zeitgeisting. And now it’s gone, with many queuing to claim its head.
Half-twits
The self-important twitter brigade has, of course, been digitally slapping each other on the back with nauseating smugness. Given a choice, I would far rather have a pint with a News of the World journo than most of these self-satisfied twats, sat in their mum’s back bedroom and communicating, with masturbatory glee, their ill-informed outrage in 140 characters (or less).
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| "Welcome back Mr Co-Op!" |
Then you have the advertisers – Ford, HSBC, Vauxhall etc– who have claimed the moral high ground by pulling their DPSs with a mixture of censoriousness and fanfare. While there is, no doubt, a degree of toxicity by association for any company paying to appear in the NOTW’s pages, there is also a great deal of commercial opportunism here. Had the paper survived, how many of these advertisers would have subsequently crept back in, at reduced rates, having once deemed the publication’s days on the naughty step well and truly over?
Much the same happened back in 1987, when Tesco and the Co-Op were among many to pull out of the disastrous, but brief, Daily Star-Sport amalgam, which saw even Star readers appalled about just how downmarket the combined title had become. Christ it must have been bad. Still, just a few weeks after the demerger, the Co-Op and Tesco, were back, nestling between 16-year-old Linsey Dawn Mackenzie’s tits, and probably several points lower down the rate card.
The Only Way is Ethics
In terms of would-be executioners, there was also the shareholder lobby. Most vociferous here was the Church of England’s Ethical Investment Committee, which threatened to pull its £4 million funding from News International. This does beg a fairly obvious question: “Why the fuck was the C of E’s Ethical Investment Committee unethically investing in News International in the first place?”
Perhaps, with Guantanamo Bay on the closure list, the CofE’s investments in Orange Overalls International PLC looked a little shaky of late? Or maybe all ills in contemporary society had been remedied and giving cash to an Australian billionaire seemed the most virtuous route left available. If only there was someone left to wire-tap the Lambeth Palace confessional then we might, one day, know for sure.
Divine Retribution
Then there has been the celebrity lobby, led of late by Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan. Despite their rightful and righteous indignation about appearing on the phone-tapping list, it is impossible not to see a more self-seeking agenda here. Hugh “Nobbing Hill” Grant is obviously still seething from the 1995 News of the World frontpage that saw Divine Brown, the prostitute who dealt his career an almost fatal “blow”, dressed in the same Versace dress made famous by, his then fiancée, Liz Hurley.
Coogan, too, has been a long term target for the tabloids, with stories of his affairs with lapdancers and his love of cocaine being front page staples since the mid-nineties – not that any of this seems to have done his career any harm and, in truth, there’s no reason why they should have. His performance on Newsnight suggests differently. Here was a man set on revenge. Only an event of the extremity of hacking Milly Dowler’s phone could ever have given Steve Coogan the moral high ground and, God, did he enjoy it.
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| "To err is human, to forgive..." |
He was helped by the fact that his sparring partner was Paul McMullen, a man of such unbelievable fuckwittery as to defy belief. Against McMullen, even Levi Bellfield would be in with a shouting chance of gaining public sympathy. Although the last seven days have left many questions unresolved – How involved was the Met? Do other newspapers have similar practices? Would you shag Rebekah Brooks if you got the chance? – there can be no lack of doubt as to McMullen’s utter unemployability. He has all the air of those sad individuals who confess to murders they didn’t do in order to grab a few fleeting seconds of fame and self-glorification. Against the cast of brutal, threatening figures in this ever-spiralling soap opera, he has revealed himself as the Billy Mitchell of Fleet Street.
Undoubtedly, though, despite the right-to-smite given to both Coogan and Grant by the NOTW’s phone-tapping escapades, their actual agenda is completely different to the one espoused – and transparently so. Under stricter privacy laws, the pimps of the Sunset Strip would grow ever richer without affecting Grant’s boxofficeability, while the class A cleavages frequented by Coogan would result in him suffering fewer costly divorces.
The Angus Deayton Syndrome
For the real reasons behind the “End of the World” (© Seemingly every single still-employed sub in the English-speaking publishing world), we have to look to another tabloid-targeted celebrity – this time Angus Deayton. Back in 2002, Deayton fell foul of (perhaps both ironically and predictably) the News of the World. During his tenure as the host of Have I Got News for You, his predilection for prostitutes and cocaine proved the multi-functionability of the many £50 notes (reportedly £50,000 an episode) he got paid by the Beeb.
The subsequent front page revelations about his private life made him far more risible and, crucially, possessing of double-standards, than the individuals and institutions mercilessly mocked by the programme every week. His position was untenable and he was swiftly, and predictably, untenned.
It was then, ultimately, the Angus Deayton Syndrome that brought down the News of the World. Imagine the daily editorial conference, with the poor sweating hacks desperately in search of a front page…
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| A sausage: long-hidden by vicars and other members of the clergy |
“NAUGHTY VICAR PLAYS HIDE THE SAUSAGE WITH VERGER’S VEGETARIAN DAUGHTER,” says one.
The editor shakes his head with a weary: “No, we’ve done worse than that…”
“EX-BROOKIE BABE’S NIGHT OF GERBIL SHAME,” proffers another.
Another shake of the head: “No, we’ve done far worse than that, too.”
“WAG SLAG SHAGS FAG HAG IN DRAG,” says a third.
“You’ve just made that up, “ says the editor, “but we’ve still done worse than that…”
In short, unless a nun was gang-raped on her birthday in the intensive care unit at Great Ormond Street, it would have been very difficult – in the short term at least – for the News of the World to take the moral high ground on anything at all really. With self-conscious outrage its stock-in-trade, it had left itself open to the most basic of playground comebacks – “You’re a disgrace to society and an affront to all right thinking people!” - “Yeah, but so is you, man”.
Brave New World
Could new staff, new beginnings and something of a hiatus have overcome that? Undoubtedly. The Daily Mail used “I love Hitler” toothmugs as promotional giveaways in the 1930s and still blames rickets on inherited genetic weaknesses among the poor, yet still they thrive. I suspect a re-invented, conspicuously contrite News of the World with a credible figurehead could still return to popularity. And, inevitably attributed to “reader demand”, it may still. I suspect that this would be more acceptable than any “Sun on Sunday”, which would be seen as both an affront to readers, treating them as naïve and media unliterate, and possibly leading to increased contamination of the daily mothership by the NOTW brand.
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| Brooks: Would'yer? |
At any rate, a return, in any guise, would be impossible while Rebekah Brooks remains at the helm, at no matter what distance she is placed. Like many, I’ve been puzzled by her apparent indispensability. There are many theories, one has even suggested a close relationship with a senior political figure – though I can’t see how that would bequeath her any invulnerability. In all likelihood, I can see only two possible explanations for her continued presence. Firstly, she is being kept on to save the neck of Murdoch Junior and has already been designated for the chopping block when the next –presumably worse – tranche of allegations emerge. This seems a bit odd, though. Surely, she would have gone now with the paper itself saved to be the Ultimate Sacrifice.
There is another theory – simply that, in terms of Murdoch’s empire, she knows where too many bodies – presumably only figuratively – are buried. It is more expedient to keep her on the inside pissing out. How much water, as it were, this theory actually holds remains to be seen. Should she depart, she would, no doubt, be at least as keenly looked after as other ex-Murdoch lieutenants, such as former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie, whose bid to buy Talk Sport was at least partially bankrolled by Rupert, removing him from the clutches of the rival Mirror group.
Just Shut It
A couple of final thoughts for those gleefully can-canning around and claiming the demise of the News of the World as a digital scalp on their twitter accounts…Would you feel the same if your activities had resulted in the closure of a pram factory in Humberside, with the loss of 200 jobs? Even if it was a pram factory that had, five years ago, produced a faulty model that killed a child? If that pram factory, today, despite having admittedly the same owners, had an entirely different staff, a new manager and different designs and safety protocols in place? I doubt you would.
The News of the World didn’t kill anybody. It was crass beyond belief and insensitive to an unparalleled level. Of late, I’ve heard and read people saying the paper did “the most evil thing ever” with regard to Milly Dowler, quite forgetting that that particularly dubious honour must go to Levi Bellfield.
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| Bellfield: slightly worse than a phone-tapper? |
With thousands of journalists laid off in the UK in recent years, is the demise of a profitable newspaper – no matter what its past evils – really a cause to celebrate? I doubt it. I similarly doubt whether we’ve actually seen the end of the News of the World brand. It could just prove that all this public outrage merely plays into the hands of News International, which can now initiate any levels of internal restructuring and cost saving it chooses and attribute all of its actions to external factors. Could be that we’ve all been well and truly had.
Vacancy Vacancy
For those journalists looking for a new job post the News of the World closure, you have my sympathy. It’s undoubtedly never been a tougher time to be a journalist. I was a guest lecturer for a group of student journalists at Hong Kong University a couple of weeks back. The idea was for a few of us to give them some advice about their chosen career. I only just managed to resist the temptation of trimming my advice down to just one power point slide – one which simply said “Change to a law degree while you still can”.
Sadly, one of the things that will hamper UK journalists in getting new jobs is the piss-poor nature of two of the leading platforms for journalism recruitment in the country – The Press Gazette and holdthefrontpage.co.uk. About a month ago, I emailed the two of them looking to place a paid recruitment ad for a new features editor here in Hong Kong. From HTFP, I got an automated out-of-office reply. From the UKPG, I got absolutely nothing.
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| HTFP and UKPG: Both a bit shite frankly |
Five weeks on, I’ve had no responses from either of them. Maybe they’ve been deleted from my voice mail.
