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.

A lot of noise and a real scandal

I don't think there will be a single journalist out there who isn't concerned in one way or another about the hacking scandal.
It involved practices which are indefensible, often beneath contempt, and saw ordinary people suffer unforgivable intrusions and prominent people dragged through the mud for no good reason.
Journalism is a trade where gossip is a way of life, and at least a few of the 'revelations' about News International didn’t seem to me to be revelations at all (not least because quite a few of them – notably Gordon Brown's 'allegations' - appeared in a book published three years ago). Neither are they confined to News International.
Before mobile phones came along, hacking was preceded by private inquiry agents going through the rubbish bins of celebrities and politicians. Dark corners of the Metropolitan Police would exchange information for drinks or money as long ago as the 1960s. And Fleet Street's favourite bars have regularly been propped up by numerous fixers, fraudsters and chancers.
So this modern scandal is, I'm afraid, only the latest iteration of tabloid journalism's eternal desire to find ways of teasing out private, often embarrassing and shocking, information. Sometimes they have done so by routine inquiry, forensic guile or simple luck.
Hacking was not routine or forensic, though. It was brazen law-breaking. In particular, the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was despicably warped.
Beyond its extremity, the problem with hacking is the dirty 'principle' which lurks underneath it: for entirely commercial reasons, the end justified the means. The News of The World played with fire. Rightly, it got burnt.
The fall-out from this issue is not black-and-white, though, for three reasons.
First, the accusers.
No journalist will enjoy the spectacle of politicians wagging their fingers at the media and offering sage observations about the shameful decline of professional ethics. In that respect, many of them are long-term residents of glass houses and really shouldn't be lobbing boulders (and that includes Mr Brown, whose serial scheming and media manipulation is documented in Andrew Rawnsley's book The End of the Party).
Similarly, it is difficult to take seriously the lofty pronouncements of other media, not one of whom is a disinterested party. Some have unpleasant skeletons of their own.
Yet while their observations may be hypocritical and partial, they are all true.
What I do take huge exception to is the sly suggestion that if national newspapers did this then may be locals did too? This is self-serving nonsense for which there isn't a shred of evidence.
Local newspapers don't need to engage in vile subterfuges because they don't operate at a distance from their community. They depend on a long-term relationship built on respect, and any newspaper which stomped like a hooligan across its circulation area would pay a swift and heavy price. For the regional press, there is no logic on any level in tabloid bombing raids.
The second issue is where you draw the line in terms of privacy - which is, I suspect, what politicians will surely try to do.
Politicians and regulators have grappled with this issue many times before, struggling to come up with a definition which doesn't compromise the right to know or the right to privacy.
The issue has become more complicated still in the online era, where rules in one part of the world have been rendered meaningless by online publication in a different part of the world of the world which is available to all.
The third issue is one of proportion.
It is a clear matter of public interest when a prominent part of one of society's major institutions – in this case, the Press - behaves in an anti-social manner and betrays public trust.
But it is only a part of that institution. The direct impact of its activity is confined to a comparatively small number of people. The indirect impact is that millions of newspaper buyers were unaware of the basis of some of the stories they read.
Nevertheless, the News of The World is now history, so are the practices associated with it. An inquiry into Press ethics might usefully outline the bounds of acceptable conduct and how they should be policed, but I suspect it will draw conclusions recommending practices which are routinely followed by most of the media already.
The day-after-day prominence of the hacking scandal reflects not its importance to peoples' everyday lives, but the navel-gazing tendency of the media and politicians - whose desire to exert influence over the media is riven with self-interest (especially in the wake of their own expenses scandal).
The relationship between public, media and politicians does need to be a healthier and more respectful one. And the phone hacking scandal is a lousy reflection on media standards - perhaps another example of a period when the chase for financial reward led up a disastrous blind alley.
But this 'scandal' will not cause long-term damage to the social or economic fabric of Britain. Communities will not be devastated by it, no one will suffer enduring hardship.
My last blog was about the disastrous decision to deny Bombardier a rail contract. That is a scandal and it will cause lasting damage.
Yet in London, little is being said.