The Great, the Good and the Ghastly at an inquiry losing the plot

I don’t normally like writing about my trade. I’m a reporter and I’m not meant to be the story.
The past year has made that difficult, though. Reporting of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards is everywhere.
Personally, I’ve had enough of it – not the issues it raises, but the inquiry. Its grim relentlessness now has an almost medieval quality, with people and behaviour being pulled apart on a rack to no beneficial effect. Outside London medialand I think the rest of the country has probably had enough, too. I make no comment on the rights or wrongs. They are self-evident and were established months ago.
But the one thing you have to remember whenever you see the reporting of the Leveson inquiry is that not one of the national newspapers or broadcasting organisations continually putting it at the top of their news lists are disinterested parties.
Other national newspapers would love to see News International given a commercial caning because it opens the door for them. Some have behaved no better.
Some of the brickbats being hurled in the direction of NI and its employees past and present also have a political dimension. Murdoch & co clearly cosied up to the current government, so that relationship is also being used as a stick to beat a stumbling coalition.
It was at the insistence of a former Gordon Brown aide, Tom Watson MP, that stinging personal criticism of Rupert Murdoch was inserted into a Parliamentary report, transforming a rational judgement into cheap politicking.
The BBC, too, has given the inquiry a prominence which doesn’t always reflect levels of public interest. One of its main competitors is Sky, in which Murdoch-controlled News Corporation is the largest shareholder.
It isn’t bias. But it’s certainly navel-gazing, probably a bit self-satisfied. And it’s now tedious.
The Leveson Inquiry has properly dwelt on some shocking behaviour by newspapers. But nothing new is now emerging, and it rumbles on and on, day after day, with counsel cross-examining witnesses in a manner which has at times descended to the level of gruesome parody.
The giggles which greeted the ‘revelation’ that David Cameron signed off texts to an editor ‘LoL’ sit ill with the ghastly truth about the hacking of a murder victim’s phone. Has the inquiry lost the plot?
While ordinary people were genuinely shocked to hear about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone after she had gone missing, they are less concerned about politicians and celebrities (at least one of whom is now known to have made an error of fact while giving evidence to the inquiry).
Politicians have long felt they get a raw deal from national newspapers, who sit waiting for them to trip-up, demand instant results from policies just out of the oven, and make a three-course meal of minor problems.
The boot is now on the other foot and is being used to administer a good kicking. Which tells you that the two are, arguably, made for each other.
Similarly, celebrities who have benefited financially from fame driven at least partly by press publicity have decided they want the publicity strictly limited. Is that fair or is it hypocritical?
Celebrities are often very ordinary underneath. Ordinary people are fallible. Fallibility is part of everyday life. You can’t seal it off. But nor should you go looking for it with a zoom lens.
The press faces many problems. Frankly, its conduct is not the biggest challenge because outside the goldfish bowl of London most newspapers behave well and do a decent job.
Its biggest challenge is the disruptive change wrought by the internet, and the apparent belief that news costs nothing to produce.
That side of the industry is where do or die decisions will be made.
About that, the Great and the Good and the Ghastly who have paraded, performed and pronounced at the Leveson Inquiry have had nothing to say.