Will #HackGate lead to real change or just more of the same?

I'd love to believe that the revelations about what the News of the World did lead to more significant changes than the closure of that one paper. We all know News International is not the only organisation tainted by the historically common dodgy practices of the media. It's just unfortunately the one bearing the weight of the scandal. Wouldn't it be wonderful for all the dirty laundry to be aired now so perhaps our media can move on to improving the way they work, what they report and the very nature of their business?

But alas I, being ever-increasingly cynical, believe that all that will happen is the politicians and media will bore quickly of the subject and move on to their next "bee-in-a-bonnet" issue. We only need to see what happened with the expenses scandal: a lot of MPs standing down at the 2010 election, a few scalps taken by criminal trials and... then we all forgot about it.

Do you remember how everyone in the country was said to be so angry about at all the expenses scandals? There was almost a feel of revolution in some of the media reports, as if the citizenry might rise up at any moment and overthrow the political class. Of course what was really the case was that whilst the chattering classes (including people like me) were all aghast, most people seemed to just shrug their shoulders, announced that all politicians were corrupt anyway and got on with their lives. Whilst the Coalition that followed the 2010 election was quite unique, the actual votes cast on the day hardly showed any huge backlash against the traditional power structure.

The same appears to be happening with Hackgate. Whilst the politically aware are arguing over Government interference in the media industry and the morals of hacking private individuals phones, the vast majority of the country has expressed a typically British mild disapproval along the lines of "Well that's just not on" and carried on buying their regular newspaper.

Whilst, like the expenses scandal, I expect this to have effects on individuals as well as particular newspapers and organisations, I really cannot believe based on past evidence and an almost universal lack of public anger that this story will change anything in the long term for the industry as a whole. In my opinion this will be just another storm in a teacup, dancing round the edges of a much larger issue.

I hope I'm wrong, and that this spirals into an earthshatteringly pivotal moment in the history of the media, British politics and our country where the way things are done gets better.  But I seriously doubt this will result in anything beyond cosmetic changes such as the News of the World being replaced by a seven day Sun newspaper.

Nothing to see here.

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Britain's "Broken Society" Myth

Things such as the current buzz phrase "Britain's Broken Society" drive me potty. Broken suggests that at some point there was a prior working society and that our current society is not working.

Occasional stories, such as the current media child torture porn frenzy over events in Edlington, are served up to show how dysfunctional we all are.

Of course this is all poppy cock. I'm not saying things aren't bad now, but I am saying they are much better than they once were. The fact child abuse stories are now being shown more often does not mean they are happening more often. It means 1) they are being covered up by authorities less, 2) found out more often, and 3) reported more often by the media for both worthy and unworthy reasons. Do these people really think that how we treated children was better in the past (based, of course, on what we consider a "good" upbringing now)? Have they no concept of history? Do they think things like this didn't happen in the '50s? Of course they did! They just weren't reported, weren't detected or, worse, were covered up just as the Catholic Church still likes to cover up it's abuse cases.

And then Victorian Britain. Do I really need to discuss Victorian Britain?

Of course the Broken Society moniker is used to refer to other facets of our culture. Such as alcoholism. Ever heard of Gin Lane? Britain has always had a love/hate/death relationship with alcohol. It's not a new thing. It's been a part of our society for a very long time. So it's hardly something that's suddenly come about and can be fixed quickly! I wish journalists and politicians would read more history!!

Crime? Try living through the Blitz when burglary and the black market reach heights unknown previously (and subsequently). Crime is a constant, going up and down but never disappearing.

I have no problem with politicians and the media suggesting there are ways to improve our country and our culture. I support progressive ideas. But what we are seeing with this "broken society" rubbish being spouted by just about everyone is not progressive suggestions for improvements but a faux nostalgia for a time in the past that doesn't exist. These are conservative ideas of control and imposing the nanny state upon us all rather than solutions to problems arising from the human condition.

Here's a quote from David Cameron:

“I don’t think it’s right every time one of these events takes place to say that it is just some isolated incident of evil that we should look away from and forget about.

“Are we going to do that every time there is a Jamie Bulger or a Baby Peter or a Ben Kinsella or a Garry Newlove or what has happened in Doncaster? We shouldn’t, we should ask what has gone wrong with our society and what we’re going to do about it.”

Note it's not what we can do to stop this from happening again. It's what has "gone wrong" and what are we going to do about it. As if this sort of thing never happened in the past (hi Mary Bell!). Looking back, rather than looking forward. It might seem to be such a minor thing, but really it's not. We can learn from history and move forward. But we cannot hope to replicate a history that never existed. David Cameron has no solutions. Given he is almost certainly going to be our next Prime Minister, this should worry us all.

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Rubbish Media

There used to be a difference between bloggers and the "old" media. Bloggers were depicted as ranting nutters who obsessed over the most inane and pointless things whilst the old media held itself up as the defenders of liberty through truth and intrepid reporters from whom nothing could be hidden.

How times have changed. Whilst the new media has evolved, even if it does still contain plenty of us ranters!, and now the old media seems to be relegated to reporting what we are saying. Who publishes the things the old media (other than perhaps the Private Eye) is too scared to? We do. Who has the time to truly research a subject and report on it in depth whilst the old media is too busy chasing readers/viewers and always looking for the next big thing? Us again.

Yesterday someone I follow on Twitter, @brumplum, made a very innocuous tweet about Stephen Fry's tweets being somewhat boring. @stephenfry took offence to this and major Twitter butt hurt occurred as per usual. After bandwagons were set off and idiots aroused, all was resolved and everyone should have moved on.

But despite this the BBC, the Guardian, the Times et al. decided this rather pointless exchange warranted prominent reporting. We live in a world in which hundreds of thousands of people languish in North Korea gulags, in which people are murdered on the streets of London just for being gay, in which elections are rigged and yet, in a sector crying poverty at every possible opportunity, time and resources are wasted on reporting a storm in a teacup.

The worst part is that. whilst I'm under no illusions that the old media has ever been the paragons of virtue, reading foreign media shows just how good reporting can be when done well. It's a shame that our media falls further and further behind the standards one would expect of them.

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