No stone left unturned

A recent long-distance flight allowed me to finally tackle Keith Richards’ autobiography. And a pretty good read it is too. The cool analytic recollection is unexpected, the pointed expressions of dislike are refreshing and the drollery is surprising and often laugh-out-loud funny. But inevitably, one bell from the past struck again in the present. It’s in Chapter 6, when he describes the infamous bust at Redlands. That’s the one where Marianne Faithfull…

Well, as Keef recalls it, after a ‘hard day on acid’, she had taken a bath. He had a huge fur rug made of many kinds of pelt and she had wrapped herself in that...and possibly a towel. He doesn’t know how the Mars bar got into the story. There were several in the room in case anyone got the munchies but, as he says, “how that connotation came about and how the press managed to make a Mars bar on a table and Marianne wrapped in a fur rug into a myth is a kind of classic.”
He adds that in fact, she was “more dressed in this fur bedspread than she’d been all day”. She was taken upstairs by a policewoman who made her drop the rug. Next thing you know, the evening paper headlines read “Naked Girl at Stones Party”. “Info directly from the police,” comments Keef.
As far as he is concerned, the bust was “a collusion between the News of the World and the cops.” Well, what with the Murdochs being summoned to appear before a House of Commons committee and Rebekah Brooks being arrested, today’s reader says “a-ha!”

A-ha indeed. See, there’s another myth being propagated by the Murdoch spinners. But this one’s not about Mars bars, it’s about the bad apples behind the News of the World’s phone and e-mail hacking, a major news story that may well have screwed the Dirty Digger to the back wall, and a few more with him.
Yeah, for sure there were bad apples at the paper. And furthermore, Murdoch and Co’s acquisition of NOtW liberated these bad apples to truly rot everything around them. But we can’t forget two things.

The first is that the phone and e-mail hacking marked an escalation of the paper’s existing bad behaviour, not a new departure. Far from the good honest investigative journalism that its teary apologists recall, the paper has long been hand in glove with the police in the UK, creating news as well as reporting it. That Redlands bust was in 1967. That’s forty-four years ago. Not for nothing did the Daily Telegraph headline “Goodbye Cruel World”!
The second is that Murdoch came with history and in the NOtW he found a good match. Under his general ownership and Brooks’ leadership, what was in the paper’s genes found full expression.

It’s fascinating to watch. For quite some time, Murdoch’s News Corporation has seemed like one of those all-powerful corporations you saw portrayed in conspiracy theory movies or in Batman. Like Fianna Fáil in the old days, the org had a title for every persuasion. It was almost a movement and there seemed little that could be done to halt its relentless acquisition of media outlets and encroaching influence around the world.

But while hands were wrung at the prospect, other than the Guardian, nobody did anything about it. Indeed, as is becoming clearer by the day, quite the opposite was the case. People were apparently happy to hobnob with the Murdochs and with Brooks including, in a relationship that certainly wouldn’t surprise Keith Richards, the police, who seem to have been very close to them indeed.
As yet we’re largely in the realm of hints and whispers but from the little that we know, and remember it includes the resignation of two of the most senior police officers in the UK and the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, it looks as though the interconnection with, and possibly even the infiltration of, the police of a sovereign state went a great deal further than the News of the World.

Of course, it takes two to tango, as the NOtW itself might say. Whether this indicates capacity to seduce on the part of News Corp or willingness to be seduced on the part of the cops is still a matter of conjecture. But, bearing in mind how political Murdoch outlets are elsewhere, like Fox News in the USA, there seems every probability that we don’t yet have a clear picture of even the tip of the iceberg, much less the full scale of what’s been going on.
There are other questions too. One concerns monopolies. Is it appropriate in democracies that particular companies can dominate the media, companies whose primary loyalty is to shareholder profits and particular ideologies rather than traditional press virtues?

Another is to do with regulation. Since self-regulation seems to be ineffective, shouldn’t the media be subject to some form of external regulation? Like, in their pursuit of what would sell, even at the expense of all standards of decency and moral responsibility – for example hacking the phone records of Mily Dowler’s family – how are they different from the financiers who landed us all in the shits? Don’t the same arguments work regarding regulation?

Press commentators in general have been very quick to put water between themselves and Murdoch’s minions and say that the whole farrago should not lead to diminution of press freedom. When you look at countries where the press is muzzled, you get the point. But there’s a difference between the media, whose freedom we might espouse, and their owners, whose interests may well lie in a very selective interpretation of press or media freedom.

Freedom to investigate, report and comment on the news doesn’t include freedom to invent, distort and manipulate it to suit the purposes of ruling class ideologies and elites, does it? I mean, how different is that to the role of the press in Kazakhstan?