Tuesday, December 02, 2008 

Tracking tabloid hypocrisy.

The thing about arguing against the excesses of the gutter press is often that those they target are little more pleasant than the papers themselves. Even when you consider the utter hypocrisy of the tabloids attacking Paul Burrell for making money out of his relationship with Princess Diana, something they've been doing for over two decades, there's little doubt that going from the princess's rock to helming reality series' in the US and Australia and promoting "Royal Butler" wine is somewhat plumbing the depths. That doesn't however mean that you should be allowed to get away with printing such trash as "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" by paying his brother-in-law to "remember" conversations they had 15 years ago, and then fail to allow the man himself to deny such scurrilous allegations.

Much the same is the case with another bastion of good taste, Simon Cowell. There's nothing quite like making a good amount of your yearly wage out of humiliating those who have the temerity to believe that they have something resembling a talent - which, after all, is conspicuous in its absence in Cowell himself. There has been at least one recent case of someone who auditioned in front of Cowell subsequently committing suicide, although the woman in that instance was apparently more "obsessed" with another female judge. Nonetheless, however much of an arrogant git Cowell might be, he has the right like everyone else to a private life. Hence the apparent revelation that a "tracking device" was attached to his car, in a letter sent around to media organisations by his lawyers Carter-Fuck, is another sign of the kind of desperation which is still afflicting the tabloids in the media environment.

Paul Dacre, of course, just a couple of weeks back told us that "[U]nder the auspices of PressBoF, we have produced a guidance note on DPA [Data Protection Act] that has been sent to every paper in Britain." Fat lot of good that obviously did. In the same speech Dacre boasted about how he, along with representatives from the Telegraph and News International had successfully lobbied the government to drop the threat of journalists being jailed for obtaining information via deception, i.e. using private detectives as almost all the press instutitions in this country had to get information from government databases. Tracking devices are just as illegal as getting the likes of Stephen Whittamore to break the law for you to track the activities of celebrities and their relatives. It would be nice for Paul Dacre to explain how the use of such a device would be in the public interest, and how and why the journalist responsible for attempting to spy on Cowell shouldn't lose his job as a result.

It is after all the same newspapers responsible for such intrusion into private lives that so rail against the state doing exactly that. The ones currently screaming blue murder over the arrest of Damian Green and how the arrest of an opposition politician means we are living in a police state, but who when not fulminating against the government think nothing of indulging in almost identical practices to that of the police and security services just to be able to be ahead of the game when it comes to the celebrity exclusives which in Dacre's terms now provide the press with the means to be able to report on politics at all. Take away the scandal, he more or less argued, and you can forget their contribution to our democracy entirely. Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (criticised by Dacre) argued that the Whittamore case had came very close to bringing down the entire edifice of the media's "dark arts", and that it was only continuing now under far more cover. Doubtless then the discovery of the "tracking device" on Cowell's car will probably give them further pause for thought, at least for a while. Then they'll be back to harassing celebrities for our amusement.

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Monday, December 01, 2008 

News of the Screws in telling lies shocker.

The Press Complaints Commission adjudication into the News of the World's super-splash back in June, headlined "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" is another wonderful insight into the world of Sunday tabloid journalism, if not tabloid journalism in general.

A classic story of one man's word against someone else's, Burrell in making the complaint accepted that the PCC could not rule on whether the report was accurate or not. Instead, he complained that the newspaper had not contacted him to put the allegations against him. The Screws argued firstly that it feared Burrell would attempt to get an injunction to stop publication, which is the latest excuse for not putting the claims to the person about to be drawn into a firestorm, and secondly that Burrell was a "self-confessed and notorious liar."

That tells you how much the paper cared about the actual veracity of the claim. If Burrell's such a notorious liar, why should we believe the claims of his brother-in-law about a conversation the two had 15 years ago? The Screws claimed that it had the backing of an "anonymous source", as well as the backing also of Burrell's brother-in-law's son, both of whom had signed affadavits. This though was irrelevant to actually putting the allegations to the person in question, who, as the PCC ruled, should have had the opportunity to deny such prominent claims against him, with the possibility that readers would have been misled into believing he accepted the allegations by there not being any denial.

The entire story was one which the like of the News of the Screws dream of. Completely impossible to prove, and also completely impossible to disprove, while being sensational and completely lacking in any integrity whatsoever. Who after all cares if Burrell had been having sex with Princess Diana, or indeed he hadn't? The only people who do would have been Diana herself (and possibly her sons, who have in the past made clear their distaste for the necromancy the papers practice), who is still very much dead, and Burrell, already disgraced for admitting to lying to the Diana inquest, meaning the paper could say whatever the hell it liked. The News of the Screws after all has never ever been about journalism or investigations; its number one priority is to make Mr Murdoch pots of money, which it still does. Anyone who gets caught in the crossfire is completely inconsequential, as this ruling will be, just as the collapse of the trials involving the "fake sheikh" and the recent victory by Max Mosley were. The ends always justify the means, and until the PCC can do more than just force newspapers to print their adjudications, they will keep on having complete contempt for the self-regulatory code they signed up to.

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