NOTW

What have I taken from this News of the World scandal? Everyone has an opinion on it and the bandwagon is pretty full of people who are disgusted by it. Maybe I have a little bandwagon-fatigue on this story but I’m not quite as outraged as everyone else seems to be this week. That may be because, in my opinion, this has been a huge story for years now. Thanks to everyone for finally agreeing with me.

The fact that NOTW hacked the phones of people has been on record for a long time. Two people have served and completed prison sentences already. But no one seemed to care about this story when it was ‘only’ the royals, the famous and the politicians getting their phones hacked.

Why is that? Why has it only been since the families of victims of crimes had their phones hacked has it become such an issue? For example, John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Member of Parliament is reported to have been a victim of the NOTW. If a foreign government had been found to have hacked the Deputy Prime Minister’s phone (or even just highly suspected of it) this would be considered a serious act of espionage. Is it because we see him on the television that we don’t consider him to be an actual person?

That’s my conclusion from watching the storm of opinion on this. When the NOTW was hacking the phones of celebrities it didn’t matter because the general public doesn’t consider them to be real people. It was only when victims families, or ‘real people’, had their phones hacked that this became something that the general public cared about. I’m disgusted by the suggestion that the NOTW hacked the voice mail of families of 9/11 fire fighters and of child murder victims. But let’s not lose sight of all of the other victims in this story.

Another example, Gordon Brown may have had his phone hacked, so what, he was just the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who was guiding a G8 economy. He went on to be Prime Minister of Britain, was the phone hacking going on while he was in charge of a country? Should charges of treason start being talked about? The audacity to hack an elected leaders phone makes all of us victims and when our basic democracy is at stake, I’m paying attention.

I was appalled that the police refused to tell people who may have had their phones hacked and disgusted beyond belief that they refused to investigate this criminal activity. Their reasons, as far as I’ve heard, for not investigating it are a joke. It concerns me that the Met police considered it to be unworthy of their time. In today’s world, information is worth more than gold and the police force needs to take the theft of it seriously. But I was appalled and disgusted years ago!!!

Why don’t we consider people who are on the TV to be ‘real people’? This really concerns me. I may not like all of Hugh Grant’s films (although I have to declare a fondness for Notting Hill) but he’s a real person. He has the right to privacy too. The media has conditioned us to treat celebrities as commodities. Doing so makes it easier for us to justify trawling through their intimate details in the gossip section of the paper. Let’s be honest, we all read them and then deny doing so. Sure celebrities use the media to their advantage too and maybe there is a little schadenfruede in them being the victim of a beast that they feed but the fact remains, NOTW was a beast that everyone encouraged.

The celebrities wanted to be in the paper so that they could sell their products and then complain about how they’re always in the paper. Are all celebrities good people? Probably not, but since I haven’t met them all I’m not going to pass judgement.

Be honest, you wanted to know what (or who) that football player was doing when he wasn’t playing football and you only wanted to know so you could berate him for not being a role model. We love to watch people fail and the higher up the perceived food chain they are the more enjoyable it is watching their fall. But that doesn’t make us good people.

But when we realised that the NOTW was also trawling through the intimate details of the victims of some of the worst crimes of our lifetimes we couldn’t deal with that. We haven’t been conditioned to treat them as a commodity. We treated them as human beings, with real feelings, who were victimised by a news organization simply for being victims. We, as a society, reacted in the right way and demanded justice. My gripe isn’t with the publics’ reaction to these revelations, but with the publics’ failure to react in a similar way when it was Sienna Miller’s phone messages.

People only bought the NOTW because it was full of juicy gossip that no other paper had. Now you get to be angry with them because they did naughty things to get the information that you wanted. If people hadn’t encouraged the NOTW then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe we could have stopped them a long time ago by being outraged when it was ‘only’ the famous people who were the victims