Andy Coulson, The News of the World, and Liberty and Justice for All
Britain has always been proud of its Free Press, laissé faire libel laws and untrammeled informational liberty for all, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; but when combined with a capitalist market approach to media, you end up with just a few very rich individuals (Murdoch, Barclay Bros) in a position to control the flow of information available to everybody else. And because market dogma preaches that any government regulation is evil, they quite logically assume that little things like the law of the land are meant for other people to follow, or are an unfair and evil restraints on the freedom of the public to know what they want it to know and so forth.
Now personally I don't think the 2-3,000 people whose phones got hacked into have been particularly liberated by that fact, and I'm also not all that excited about the News of the World's brave efforts to free me from the iniquitous injustice of not knowing what Nigella is saying to her mother in law on the phone right now. Deregulation and rule breaking are never, and we should all so know that by now, about benefits to the consumer/public. It's about cheap shortcuts to profiteering for organisations whose aims are centered entirely on their own fortunes, and hang the consequences either to the public's mortgages or their level of informedness about the complicated world they live in.
Information is power everywhere, that’s why state censorship exists in the first place. But it's more powerful still in a democracy, which is why freedom of the press and democracy always got hand in hand - people are usually clued up to the fact that you can't have without the other, but they tend to get it backwards and think that it's the press that's dependent on the benevolence of the democratic regimes in not suppressing it. Well, that's bollocks - because when people have to make electoral and other policy choices, those choices have got to be informed. It's meaningful democracy that's dependent on the proper operation of the press, not vice versa. Otherwise you end up with government by a few rich king makers (Murdoch is notorious on both sides of the Atlantic as someone to keep on side at all costs during elections, Alan Sugar has just jumped the shark completely by getting appointed to the actual cabinet), which is oligarchy with an electoral rubber stamp.
So even though I don't have my knickers in a big leftie twist about Cameron having hired Coulson in the first place (I'm more or less prepared to believe that he didn't know about the NotW shenanigans), I think we the public should definitely care about whether Coulson goes or not - he needs to go, and he probably needs to go to jail without collecting his $100, because there's no way he didn't know what was going on in his newsroom as editor of the rag. Still, that's just not the real scandal here - the real scandal is that for so long the pathetic excuse for a regulator that is the PCC has allowed the Murdoch Mafia to keep this shit under wraps by simply looking up and whistling, trying to pretend it can't smell the rotten eggs under its nose. That's where the real head-rolling should happen.
Again, we should totally all be on board by now with the idea that regulation is good, not bad. Using emotive terms like "freedom" to describe mercenary mercantile immorality only gets you so far before the economy and the rule of law come tumbling down round your ears. If you’ve been reading the papers recently, even if it was the News of the World, you’ll know that the tumbling has been rumbling and no mistake.
Whether or not this realization should give anyone pause in voting the Tories into power next cycle is a tough question - after all it’s not as if New Labour have shown themselves to be such champions of public safeguards. Nevertheless, it’s worth keeping in mind that the latter at least have a reason to pay lip service to ethical oversight of the media, whereas the former are ideologically invested in its no-existence.
If the Tories get into power on the back of Murdoch’s hatred of Labour, then he and his ilk will use their power to make sure they stay there for as long as they see fit, meaning that there will be little to no proper oppositional oversight f the government by the media. That’s a very different bathful of bruskis to a government that has a less cozy relationship to the media, or to the current antithetical situation of a cabinet utterly paralyzed by unremitting media criticism and generated political panics is no picnic, either. Walking the middle path between those two extremes will require a press that is overseen by able and empowered noncommercial bodies.
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Feminists are always being accused of fear mongering and over-reaction about the extent of media bias on women's issues. And yeah, if it were the case that the press was as chaotic and individualistic as it likes to portray itself, then my thesis that there is something akin to a conspiracy going on to deny half the population (half the human race, really) adequate, fair, and balanced representation in the media would require extraordinary proof. But what this Andy Coulson business pushes in front of the public eye is the open secret of just how few people actually control so many of our news outlets, and how far their ethics and biases percolate downstream into the organisations they preside over.
It's an extraordinary claim that every single journalist on the Murdoch payroll is a sexist; it's Dog Bites Man to say that Murdoch himself probably is. We saw the Telegraph publishing what amounted to misogynistic, rape-enabling fantasies not so long ago - does anyone really believe that if this didn't reflect the biases of the organisation, all the way up the food chain, it would have gotten through to print? However lax the editorial process is in these publications these days, with cutbacks and restructurings and ad revenues and circulation falling and all, if that piece said something like "socialist gay marriages only remedy for society's ills, scientists claim" you betcher sweet sitter that some alarm bells would have gone off somewhere.
I'm tentatively linking the News of the World phone hacking scandal to my meta narrative of capitalism being a misogynist ideology anchored in the systematic oppression of half the population, and I know that in the details that is perhaps not the best test case here (most bloggers are gleefully concentrating on what the link with the Tories tells us about the latter’s ethics, especially in light of Cameron's recent promise to deregulate the press even further by de-toothing Ofcom, and too right - it's the first bit of electoral good news lefties have had all year). But if I ever end up writing a book, that's what it will be about, so for my on memory and thought process I just need to summarise it again: a capitalist press is not a free press, and an unfree press is an instrument of oppression against all disadvantaged groups, women first and foremost.
I’m going to stop before I reach the 1,500 word mark, and leave it for a later day to compile an inventory of all the woman-hating, victim-blaming, violence-glorifying assholery that passes for news and comment in our press every single day. For now y’all are going to just have to trust me on that one, and wish like hell I don’t go another month without venting my feminist spleen so that next time my polemic might be a little shorter.