Cruel World

For the print media struggling to survive in a world that seems to be inexorably bent on embracing the electronic media, the news that News of the World, London’s biggest selling weekend tabloid, was closing was, indeed, cruel, cruel news. If only for the paper’s longevity, the last issue last Sunday of the 168-year-old News of the World was headline news many times over. The News was an institution in an era of tin-can lives and short shrifts. Until News Corp. announced its closure last week, the News held up the hope that the print media would survive, come what may, against all odds.

But what odds! Accused of hacking and other Gestapo tactics to beat the competition, the News exemplified all the wrong lessons for print media’s survival amid the cutthroat competition from broadcast and electronic media. Ironically the decision by News Corp. owner and media baron Rupert Murdoch to axe the News may have been driven by his multibillion dollar plan to take full ownership of British Sky Broadcasting, which is worth more than all of his print holdings combined. It could be said therefore that print was sacrificed on the altar of broadcast greed. So much for the survival of print journalism.

But should the press survive and prevail through such underhanded tactics as bribing police officers for information, hacking into the voice mail of murdered schoolgirls’ families and targeting the phones of the relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and the victims of the London transit attacks? In short, should a newspaper be allowed to endure through mercenary spunk? Should ethics be jettisoned in the rush for profits?

There’s evidence that Murdoch and the News did not care too much about ethics. Until two weeks ago, the News had fought off hacking allegations. But the long-running controversy came to a head last week with the revelation that it had hacked adolescent victim Milly Dowler’s voice mail soon after her 2002 disappearance and deleted some messages, giving her parents and police false hope that she was still alive and hampering the investigation. Her body was discovered months later.

The final blow might have been delivered last April when the English newspaper New Statesman published actor Hugh Grant’s revelation, culled from a conversation with News editor, Paul McMullan, who boasted that the tabloid had been regularly tapping its subjects’ phones, including Grant’s and deceased soldiers’ families and loved ones of child-murder victims. Since then, the accusations that the News had used illegal means to get its juicy scoops snowballed.

The dramatic revelations have political repercussions. The former editor in chief of the News, Andy Coulson, had been twice the communications director of British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Cameron has been close to Rebekah Brooks, now the chief executive of Murdoch’s British news operations and editor of the News in 2002 when an investigator hired by the paper hacked the voice mail of Dowler. Brooks has denied any knowledge of this case which has disgusted the British public. Eager to save his political hide, Cameron urged an inquiry into Coulson, who has been arrested.

The controversy also has repercussions on media regulation. Cameron has proposed a tightening of limits on the free-wheeling British press. “I believe we need a new system entirely,” he said, adding that self-regulation by an industry body called the Press Complaints Commission had “failed.”

It is farfetched however to apply the sordid lesson of the News to the Philippine press. After all, the British media are one of the wildest in the world, notorious for cavalier treatment of professional ethics and for practicing just about every breach in the book and, in the case of McMullan and the News, flaunting it.

Moreover, it is not as if the News has been wiped off the face of the earth. There are speculations Murdoch would resurrect it under another guise, say, as the Sunday paper of The Sun, its sister paper that publishes Monday through Saturday. A spokesperson for the paper did not categorically deny this, saying only, “It’s not true at the moment.”

What’s true at the moment is that the News of the World sacrificed the truth on the altar of sordid sensationalism, fantastic readership, and mercenary profit-making. The light has gone out of the world and it’s not because of one tabloid’s disgraceful exit. What has gone out is the light of truth.