Now it’s all coming out I don’t feel vindicated at all. I don’t feel proud that I’m on the left rallying against the right-wing press. I don’t feel a sense of us and them. I just feel totally and utterly ashamed and let down. I am at that moment in a bad Hollywood film where the protagonist suddenly realises that they weren’t paranoid, that yes there is a conspiracy and they have nowhere to turn.

We can’t trust the politicians to review the press because they are up to their necks in this. We can’t trust the police to investigate News International because some of them (we don’t know who) have apparently been paid off in the past. We can’t trust the press to regulate itself because we’ve tried that and look where we are.

Everyone keeps saying ‘I don’t know’, and somehow that seems to be an OK answer. It seems perfectly reasonable for a massive organisation to print goodness knows how many stories based on information obtained from Private Investigators that were paid to hack thousands of phones without anyone knowing about it. Is that really a satisfactory state of affairs? So no one okayed what must have been numerous payments to the PIs? No one said where did that information come from? No one knew who told any of these PIs to hack phones and yet they still did it? Someone had to know something and just saying ‘I didn’t know’ isn’t good enough, it doesn’t even come close.

There is another sub-plot to all this that I think has been overlooked. We’ve had arrests in this phone hacking scandal, but when the Royal Family were hacked. Then the full uproar only happened when it was revealed that News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone. Prior to that we had plenty of celebrities saying their phones were hacked and everyone seemed to turn a blind eye. Since when was the seriousness of a crime based not on the nature of the crime itself but on the victim of the crime? Why should the Royal Family, Milly Dowler and her family’s privacy be any more important than Hugh Grant’s or Jude Law’s? When was it justice for some but not for others?

I understand why the nature of the victim makes a difference to the public perception of the crime and therefore the ability of the media to drum up interest in the story. These should not be the concerns of the police though. They should investigate a crime to the full extent of the law irrespective of the victim or the perpetrator. If they had done their job properly when reports of phone hacking first surfaced then we might be talking about far fewer victims of crime here. They are not just incompetent, they are partly responsible for allowing this crime to go unpunished.

I don’t mean to be down beat. I do realise that there are some gems in the rough, The Guardian and  Nick Davies, Tom Watson, to some extent Ed Miliband and a few others, but they are spread too thin. I look to our Prime Minister and I see a man who hired a former News of the World editor, I see corruption. I look to the police and I see people resigning left right and centre, I see corruption.

This is supposed to be our chance to clean up the press, dissolve the overly close relationship between the media the politicians and the police. If this is a turning point in history I’m not so sure I trust the people at the steering wheel.

All the gagging order has done is brought more attention to the story than it might have had otherwise. I mean how stupid do you have to be? You can’t manipulate what is said about you anymore, if the papers don’t say it then the blogs or Twitter will. You only have to look at the embarrassment the British Chiropractic Association’s case against Simon Singh has caused them and the now calls for libel reform to understand the power of social networking and the internet. Perhaps this will serve as a lesson to any one in the future that tries to silence the press; you can’t gag the internet.

Have some links:

Guardian Gagged from Reporting Parliament

What The Guardian’s Banned From Telling You

The Parliamentary Question Carter Ruck and Trafigura don’t want you to see

Under the ‘Prevention’ section of the guide it read as follows;

There’s no good evidence that wearing masks will protect you against swine flu. The evidence we found, which comes from the 2003 Sars (sic) outbreak, said masks in clinics and hospitals worked well. But it didn’t look at wearing masks in everyday life, for example on the street or public transport.

This guide was accompanied by a massive picture of a civilian wearing a mask. COME ON! Even if this person had swine flu, which from the picture you can’t tell, did it not occur to the picture editor that this particular picture is perhaps slightly inappropriate and misleading given the information in the text? Did they not read the article?