Saturday, October 12, 2013

Hear, hear …

… Tom Stoppard: Information is light | Stage | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

When the phone-hacking story broke, a former newspaper executive said it was just a case of a rogue reporter. When I read that, I knew this wasn't a bad cough, it was cancer. Nobody could hazard something so unlikely without reason to believe that it would be colluded in by others. The nexus of politicians, police and newspaper executives, the poison fruit of, respectively, fear, corruptibility and remorseless commercial competition, was a fall from grace at the very heart of the freedoms hard-won long before I was a schoolboy agog with pride at being British. Had it not been for a handful of reporters on the Guardian, who had a place to stand, would that triple nexus ever have been levered apart, given the politicians' fear of the press, the goalkeeper's fear of the penalty? As the denials unravelled, only the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Independent were keeping the story alive until it could not be ignored.

No comments:

Post a Comment