If phone-hacking is a turd pie, there’s a lot of people with smelly fingers

"I have deactivated my emotion chip, father. It has no market value."

The phone hacking scandal staggers on like a hen party at two a.m, carving a swathe of destruction through the city centre and leaving nothing behind but a glittering sea of splintered WKD bottles and tattered pink bunny ears. And like frightened barstaff, quivering in the face of an oncoming stampede of L-plates and cellulite, newspapers and Met policemen desperately try to divert the oncoming swarm: “No, you don’t want to come in here – we’re closed! There’s nothing for you here! Why don’t you try that place across the street, they’ve got loads of shooters for a pound! No – what are you doing? Get…get out of there! Please! I can’t serve you all at once…you…you’ve been sick all over the optics, you animals!” Some find themselves dragged under by a furious storm of cackling middle-aged bum-pinchers, but others are managing to largely avoid the attention. Who they, then?

Well, there’s The Daily Mail for starters. The Mail is very keen to deflect attention away from the issue, claiming that the complete collapse of trust in British journalism isn’t really that important, and even if it was – which it isn’t! – then they had nothing to do with it anyway, and hey, look at Tyra being strange! Ha ha, oh Tyra. What were we talking about again?

The Mail has reason to twitch nervously – in 2003, the Information Commissioner’s Office raided the offices of Steve Whittamore, a private investigator suspected of trading in illegally obtained information. They stumbled into a goldmine – Whittamore had kept detailed records of all his jobs and who they were for, and when the officers had finally finished sorting through the whole sordid lot they totalled 13,343 separate requests for information from 305 different journalists, who wanted to get hold of everything from address details to criminal records. The biggest single source of these requests wasn’t the News of the World – it was the Daily Mail (though the Times, Evening Standard and Observer were also amongst Whittamore’s clients). The ICO’s report – from an investigation started a full eight years ago! – goes as far to declare rather fruitily that “this was not just an isolated business operating occasionally outside the law, but one dedicated to its systematic and highly lucrative flouting.” The Mail in particular seems have dived in with more gusto than the rest –  Nick Davies, the lead investigator on the Guardian’s phone-hacking coverage, claims to have spoken privately to Mail hacks who’ve admitted bribing police and civil servants in order to gain access to sensitive databases containing social security records, Scotland Yard’s casebook, and even medical histories.

The Met, meanwhile, are definitely taking a righteous kicking for how they’ve behaved, with P45s flying out everywhere as if Rebekah Brooks just cast a Resignatio Curse on the Yard, but there’s more to this than the fact that a few coppers were on the take. They simply shouldn’t have been able to sell the info in the first place, because government systems are supposed to be securely audited, with every query recorded so that suspicious access – regardless of the user – is always investigated. So what happened? Given the ongoing drive towards bigger and more closely linked databases, there are questions to be asked about how good these systems really are. Since a small group of blaggers, bent cops and BOFHs managed to milk the government’s info-teats without anybody noticing, we have to wonder: are the companies responsible – big firms like Accenture and Thales – fulfilling their lucrative contracts, many of which were drawn up by people who still have a lot of sway in government affairs?

Ah yes, those guys. Initially, the political class were having a gay old time of it, painting themselves as a repressed bundle of paupers finally freed from the oppressive clutches of an evil Murdoch press which bludgeoned and blackmailed them into silent acceptance. Like dwarves suddenly realising that the Eye of Sauron wasn’t peeking into their bathrooms anymore, they danced, they sang, and they strongly protested that they always hated Murdoch’s lot and had nothing to do with any of their naughty games. Except! While they didn’t condone all the illegal stuff (though Peter Oborne thinks otherwise) they were hardly the beleaguered peasants they’ve made themselves out to be – even as the papers continued their merry muckraking in private databases, the political PR machine effortlessly manipulated their coverage. With journalists having far less time to check stories in depth, political offices and lobby groups can steer a story’s course from the start by controlling its vocabulary in their initial press release: thus Guantanamo detainees are labelled “terrorist suspects”, the adjective implying guilt, police can crack down on “anti-social behaviour” without really knowing what it is, and abortion is considered as a “pro-choice” or “pro-life” issue.

Failing that, you can just disseminate a lie: constrained by both time and the need to be ‘neutral’, news organisations fall back to simply reporting what is said rather than checking whether it’s actually true. In 2005, the Washington Post reported that “a senior Bush official” had said that the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, “had not declared a state of emergency” following the hurricane that demolished New Orleans in 2005. This claim was utterly false, but the Post’s story was technically accurate: somebody had said it. The truth of their statement was irrelevant (though a correction now appears on the Post’s website, it didn’t emerge in print until after the story had been picked up and spread like Marmite across the web and other papers). In the UK, it’s even easier for this to happen: with tighter libel laws, it’s riskier to accuse someone of lying, and it’s common practice to run a story without naming sources or even the writer. People can spend years just making stuff up and getting away with it (step forward Johann Hari, who looks like Harry Potter would if he packed in the wizarding and became an insurance broker).

Right now, there’s an uneasy alliance between a diverse range of newspapers and political groups united by their mutual hatred of Murdoch’s mucky media empire, with everyone teaming up to heap shit on crusty Uncle Rupert and the terrifying James, who comes across like a robot sent back in time to terminate charisma. While it’s undoubtedly great fun to watch corrupt cops and wrinkly media barons getting sprayed with farm-grade slurry, we need to ask: who’s pointing the hose, and do they deserve a bit of a turd-blasting themselves?

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P.S. Hello friend, and thanks for stopping by at the Thursday Bucket. If you made it all the way down here, that probably means you like reading things on the internet, in which case please let me heartily recommend that you take a peek at the  ”Bucket Pals” links on the right. They’re really good, Steven. Thankyoubye!