Presuming to Criticise the Great Oz

Is he a very bad man, or just a good man who's been a very bad wizard? MP's added a session to their schedules to hail the morrow, as after travelling all the way from, er, Oz, Rupert Murdoch, who does not instinctively do humility, announced that Tuesday was the most “humble” day of his life. A new message is coming through loud and clear — “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” This and the truth of Corporal Jones‘ immortal observation “They don’t mind dishin’ it out, but they don’t like it up the rear.”

This is a critical turning point for everyone. For years we have all believed in a monolithic puissant Behemoth called “The Media.” The power that drove its steely flanks was terrible and swift, and derived from owning the means of production — Scott's old joke about a free press in England, as long as you happen to own a press. Now we all own a press, and carry it around in our pockets, and if we don’t like Mr Murdoch and his works he may not listen, but he can't prevent us expressing ourselves, or manipulate the stories we tell without us being able to do anything about it. His value came from a monopoly on the means of production, and that monopoly is busted.

The digital reformation that drives this change has been afoot for a long time. Ironically the Murdoch Bunker in Wapping is a concrete monument to its first wave, when, three decades ago, he rode into town on the tail of Eddie Shah and cleared out old Fleet Street of its quaint Spanish Practices. Now his empire is as obsolete as the older order it displaced. Mr Murdoch has even more humble days to come, no doubt.

As dramatic and iconic as the NI tale may be, don’t let's obsess on Mr Murdoch. For a start, as Rebekah Brooks hinted darkly on Tuesday, the word on the street was that other titles have behaved equally, if not more, unethically than the News of the World. Her attempt to suggest the Home of Dity Tricks was the Observer hardly stacked up, when everybody knows the Daily Mail has led the ruthless pack. The principle holds, however, that the scope of this deflation is far broader than just NI.

So what wll the news title of the future look like, and how will hacks make a living? I suggest, ont heir wit, like they always did. Human beings have an insatiable appetite for words and information — they just don't want it controlled by unaccountable Big Beasts. The market will segment into a variety of models, of which the Huffington Post and Financial Times seem to represent two. HP draws in writing talent from wherever and aggregates it, whilst the FT contains information that’s actually worth the money for its (specialised) audience.

What of the Murdoch staff? They have various dates down the station, whilst the politicians gyrate to dodge the bullets flying around this story. There is a global dimension, of course, given the 9/11 hacks if for no other reason. There is the question of compensation to 9,000 victims who may not feel as obliging and negotable as the first handful did when Rebekah Brooks paid them off, thinking, she says, they were the only ones.

As to the Dinosaur press, I have a Times sub, but if I'm honest must confess I seldom bother to download it any more. It's a reasonable production and I can look back to half a dozen articles this year I have much valued but frankly I find the whining editorial tone, the monochrome thinking and narrow selectivity of narratives the paper brings to every issue boring, lifeless and mediochre. I wade through a load of padding to get to a few nuggets of gold, when my browser would find me stuff I actually wanted to read in a fraction of the time, free to boot. So I keep the subscription going out of a blend of guilt and optimism, but my heart's not in it.

You may say that I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. The future will be different, and I for one will not miss the former contents of the crumpled and deflated green robes over in the corner.

Hacked off or up? News International

One day crisis management textbooks will analyse the flurry on the bridge of News International this weekend. As truth everybody suspected but nobody could pin down slowly emerges, rubbing its eyes, NI’s whole strategy — lying and deceit with an occasional tub to the whale — is increasingly feeling like Niedergang if not Götterdämmerung.

The News of the World closure was a desperate attept at damage limitation, and the question for Ttanic watchers everywhere will have to be whether, in the present media environment, the watertight doors within the ship can hold against increasing water pressure.

This week has seen the dramatic slamming of a big watertight door on the biggest section on board, a title that in its glory days could boast the largest English language circulation on earth. As hapless hacks drown in their section, many of them are bound to harbour less than kindly thoughts towards the Cap’n on the bridge and his senior officers.

They are, after all, the people who went down there to clean everything up after the Glenn Mulcaire hacking scandal of 2006. René Girard says that wherever human beings gather there is an inexorable scapegoat script at work, but why them? They were the good guys. Well, Monsieur Girard would say, in a real scapegoat script the good guys always do get it in the neck.

There was a simple commercial logic to closing the News of the Screws. The brand was sinking fast, as advertisers bailed out, feeling rather slimed by its behaviour. Some of them may be unintelligent enough to think a Sun on Sunday would be wildly different. Many will suspect this is a case of change the name and do the same again.

Conspiracy theories abound. One journalistic friend told me yesterday that the whole thing could be a strategy to confuse investigators by closing down a crime scene. Another explained Murdoch never gets it wrong and was looking for a way out of this particular medium as its circulation wilted, along with that of all conventional dinosaur powermedia.

Well, I don’t know. I do know that as the Police swoop on Andy Coulson and Clive Goodman the position of Rebekah Brooks becomes increasingly untenable. Here is a good and gifted journalist whose newsroom was apparently perpetrating some 4,000 crimes over a few years, the principal evidence for which was the content of stories being published every week. Yet she asks us to believe she, unlike her four million readers, knew nothing. Where on earth did she think all those revelations were coming from. Mystic Meg?

As to the rest of News Internatonal they have just, James Murdoch tells us, given the police evidence of serious wrongdoing down the years. Where did that come from? If they had it why did they not give it to the police earlier? Or even read it themselves and do anything about it apart from shooting the sergeant? The News Internatonal brand is certainly rotten from the head down and nobody outside the organisation yet knows how far down the rot reaches.

Although I have had other things to do with my Sundays down the years, I shall miss the Screws. Its cheeky chappie antics were essentially end-of-the-pier stuff, although politicians quivered before its chickenshit right wing hufflepuff, and that of the Sun, in all kinds of subtle and no-so-subtle ways. Shame on them that they walked in fear of it, but that can hardly be blamed entirely on the papers. Big media used to be very powerful, we all believed.

There is a sting in the tail, like the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Night of the Vampires, where the nubile miss he has rescued from all the vampires in Transylvania bites the vampire slayer. Readers of Flat Earth News will remember Neil Davies section on this kind of carry on, in which he reveals that the involvement of the Daily Mail in such dark arts was, in the teeming summer of such behaviour, probably more extensive than that of News Internatonal Titles.

Yesterday’s Mail openly defied the Fleet Street convention that dogs never eat other dogs. Its headline crowed over the demise of “The Newspaper that Died of Shame.” This could be the Acme of the Daily Mail’s famous hypocrisy. The soft but insistent niff of rotten rat in its own basement is better concealed, but no less inherently pungent.