I Heart Murdochgate

So, as I mentioned in the post below, I'm obsessed with Murdochgate and the News International phone hacking scandal at the moment. It's huge - with repercussions for the media, politicians and the police. I don't think the magnitude of this scandal has even sunk in yet.

Of course, many people long suspected the tabloid press (and even the more respectable outlets) of operating such underhand methods to gain information - only now what was before just suspicion is now fact. Large swathes of the press have been under Murdoch's control for my entire life, and as a result I have always hated (in particular) the tabloid press. Not only do they try and enforce a redundant, boring, hetero-normative and unrealistic view of "real life", but no-one, I mean NO-ONE asked them to be the moral guardians they claim to be. Sorry, but selling up to 8 million papers of a weekend DOES NOT mean you get to decide ANYONE'S moral code, let alone who fucks who or what they were wearing while doing it. As much as they would like to think they represent the common man, the tabloid press are always a good 2-3 years behind what the public finds acceptable, and it generally takes a controversy or a backlash to make them see this.

Why should the real majority of this country's population cow to the ethics of a group in Fleet Street (and their paymasters around the globe) who wrongly claim to represent them? I've never seen the tabloids as anything but a scourge, a scourge that decent folk have had to put up with for the sake of having a "free press". As Steve Coogan put it on Newsnight last week, the press constantly use (the less-than-1% of the time) occasions when they actually reveal an important public interest story as an excuse to dish damaging bullshit that in reality has little relevance except to their bank accounts.

But now the thin veneer of respectability the tabloid press have cloaked themselves in for so long has vanished, and it is great. And look how they squirm in the sunlight! You would have thought that the people whose supposed jobs it is to make "moral" verdicts on other people's private lives would know how to react when their own wrong doings are reveled. But no, still they accept no responsibility for their actions, throwing blame everywhere but themselves and generally revealing themselves to be the true cowardly bullies they are. It seems hard to believe, but they don't seem to have realised just how hated they are by people in this counrty.

It feels great to finally have the scummy tabloid press as the centre of a huge, sordid exposé, it's the kind of thing i have idly daydreamed about for most of my life. Sure, the papers will continue (even though this scandal signals a major shift of news sources from oldstream to online, such as the Guardian's blog and some specific Twitter accounts) but their powers have been stripped from them. And if this keeps growing at the rate it has over the past week, if the US media pick up on it as seems to be happening, then the entire Murdoch house of cards is likely to collapse. HURRAH!