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.

Dickens Lives! Bullies Rule OK!

Back home from Germany to distressing telly — Paul Kenyon’s BBC Panorama Undercover Care: the Abuse Exposed. Joe Casey spent five weeks undercover as a care assistant at a private hospital for people with learning difficulties seemingly run along similar lines to Guantanamo Bay.

Watching it was not easy, but the film demonstrates exactly what public service investigative journalism is for, and deserves major recognition:

The project was planned after a professional nurse blew the whistle on bullying behaviour among some of the care assistants at Winterbourne View, near Bristol. Particular attention focused on a great bullying bear of a carer who had seemingly built a whole culture of harassing those weaker than himself for his own amusement. Let none be deceived. The assessment of oft very limited service users can be challenging work, involving occasional need for physical restraint. This, however, was simply torture.

What do we learn?

1. About Bullies
   There is deep in some people a need to exploit others' weaknesses for their own gratification — to wind people up until they snap and then bring down the panoply of the rules upon them. There is a cruel, bullying streak in our culture at every level. An archbishop of the last century was told his broadcast on the subject of the abdication of Edward VIII had not gone down well with the public because it had appeared to be kicking a man when he was down. “But what’s the point of kicking him if he isn’t?” mused his Grace. Bullying behaviour, even in Church, happens on various levels, and should always be called out for what it is. Go along with the bully and you create the culture in which such behaviour thrives. Indulge them and you will have hell to pay. Remain silent and you collude.
   
   
2. About Hospitals
   The hospital’s owners had a large chest of what turn out to be fatuous awards and service gongs. You cannot legislate compassion and humanity by guidelines and targets. Whilst it’s good to know Wayne and some of his cohorts are currently helping the police with their inquiries, and shooting the sergeant is a classic response to failure, the systemics of their own operation allowed the owners to ignore clear distress signals from their own whistleblowing employee, employ several wildly unsuitable care workers, remain ignorant about what happens on their own property, ignore several injuries amongst the service users — all of these are management and governance failures, in which Wayne played but a walk-on part.
   
   
3. About Regulation and Safeguarding
   The same whistleblower approached the Care Quality Commission — the Government’s regulatory body — and they also ignored him. This raises profound concerns that, again, transcend one official’s judgment in this case, poor as it obviously was. CQC had inspected Winterbourne View three times in the past two years. How did they miss all evidence of wrongdoing, and how can we know that there is not widespread undetected abuse going on elsewhere?
   

Church of England Newspaper Seasonal Pic n’mix

The Church of England Newspaper front page reports that Canon Paul Williams has been appointed Bishop of Kensington, with picture. Wrong Canon Paul Williams. The cleric pictured looks egregiously unlike Paul. Here is a selection of men called Paul Williams. In this season of party games I invite CEN hacks, using their own prejudices and fantasies, to select the one they would most like as a Bishop:

PS Boring conventional journalists would check the Church website rather than just googling aimlessly. And if they did google search, they'd at least check their source. It was only their front page, after all.

PPS The Times reported my present appointment as Birmingham, not Buckingham. Birmingham, Buckingham, what the hell’s the difference? Bit like Iran and Iraq, really.

PPPS The genuine next-Bishop-of-Kensington Paul Williams is one of these people (Right). But (Tough Poser for Professional Newshounds) which one?

Curse you, Ruth Gledhill... ?!

...as a direct result of your journalism, within hours of arriving back from France, where, among other excitements, the Boulogne harbour authorities arrested the cheapo ferry on which we were booked for allegedly not paying port dues, I feel I have to get straight back out to the pas de Calais to see the Anthony Caro Chapel of Light in Bourbourg.

... when you see what the 84-year-old former pupil of Henry Moore has done with light, water, steel and wood you appreciate the logic of the commission, for this is not so much a repair job as a work of art. The church was a victim of friendly fire: according to local legend, during the Second World War, a British pilot on his way home suddenly came to the awful realisation that his plane was going to crash. Rather than land on the houses, he steered his aircraft at the church, crashing into the choir end of the nave. The main body of the church was restored but the choir was left in ruins.

Ruth’s blog & video, references a fabulous Times article, interviewing Caro about the piece, his life and work. Rolls Royce journalists ask the questions you would want to, and open things out in a way which leaves you longing to know more.

I first encountered Anthony Caro’s work when preaching at Christ’s College Cambridge, where he studied engineering. I stumbled on a piece of his in a corridor; at the same time Tate Britain were running his Last Judgment, and I got hooked.

“We are living in an extremely materialistic world,” says Caro. “I think it is very important to help the spiritual side of our lives. So for this reason it is good to have a place where one can go and allow that side of one’s life to flourish. I hope people of all religions will use it to allow themselves to think and be tranquil and find that side of themselves.”

This wonderful commission was initiated (according to the French law of laicité) by Françoise Dubois of the Ministry of Culture. France has long had a very much more secular society than England, and, considered as a congregational entity, the Church there has terrible struggles and challenges compared to the C of E in the South of England. There are some very courageous and resilient Christians keeping faith alive in a secular cold climate. One local lay person described the comparative postion with England where she was as “half the numbers, and no fringe; most see the Church as little more than a eucharistic sect.” There is also a crisis about ordination numbers. It’s great to see some really creative work going on in this hard context; another green shoot from which God can renew his people.

Nothing for it, but a trip back to France on a day off sometime soon...