David Davis
Having sounded off yesterday about News International’s decision to shut down the “News of the World” as some sort of reaction to a police investigation into alleged “phone hacking” of public figures, relatives of soldiers killed in action and even the family of a murder victim, I think you’ll have gathered that my reaction was one of disgust at what public taste in today’s broken (deliberately) Britain has come down – literally- to.
In the course of today the Chimpanzee Type-Writers have been reflecting on the possible can-of-worms openable by this precedent. That is to say: the Chimps are worried that powerful big-business-media-owners could begin to think they can cosy up to governments with certain propositions…..The propositions could be like “OK, we’ll shut down the odd paper as a fall-guy for something it gets fingered for – what’s one paper among many anyway, hey? – and only lower class white scumbags read it and there’s no votes for you there any more, hhaha! – but your police have got to look the other way when we employ, shall we say….certain “methods” to get our news leads. OK guys?”
Far be it from me to even suggest that someone like Rupert Murdoch, an old Worcester Man after all, would stoop to get his hands dirty in such a way, but I just wondered. He would not, perhaps be averse to getting one of his attack-bitches, such as the “fragrant” Rebekah (Wade) Brooks to do stuff? She’s hung onto her head this time, which is more than the miserable employees of the NoW, and those fellows today who’ve just had their houses torn apart by the Police.
The abiding worry is that a collusion of (is that the right collective noun here?) big media owners and governments can now feel the way is open to “manage” the media in a more “proactive way”. All very worrying. And what adds to my suspcicons is that prissy self-regarding prat Hugh Grant has just set himself up as what we knew he wanted to be all along: the Arbiter of the tastes of the (smelly) “lower classes.” I recall that he’s just said somewhere (I can’t find it) that the “Taboild Press ought to be regulated”. I don’t know about you but i’m not really in favour of the Press or Media being “regulated”, by people calling themselves a government, in a free nation, leaving the awful BBC aside, which takes Public Money anyway via a compulsory poll tax. The BBC is the least of our worries: any incoming British libertarian government has already given public notice that its first act will be to close the thing down, probably pulling the plug on all channels and stations within about three seconds of taking power.
