Things are going rather well.
The phone-hacking affair offers much entertainment to the humble onlooker: the BBC’s lofty pretence that it is an innocent party above the struggle, for example, rather than a lamed bureaucracy battling for its future against a more focused adversary; the pleasurable sight of the flames licking at the feet of oily fraudster Piers Morgan, ex-editor of the London Mirror; the sudden appearance of Queen Elizabeth I in her beloved parliament and, of course, the use of the words “shocked” and “shocking” by innumerable media hacks, as if they could be shocked by anything except their own redundancy notices.
Queen Rebekah Brooks
But that doesn’t alter the fact that good things are happening. The cosy relationship between the media and politicians rests on a simple foundation, one of considerable significance to web readers and McCann affair followers: democratic politicians believe they have to put forward a sanitised and infantilised version of themselves and their views, otherwise the media will ruin them one by one.
The result is a mild conspiracy against the public in which politicians have to pretend to share the childish and totally synthetic world-view of the rags, even though they reveal the truth about themselves by rubbing shoulders daily with the journalists who eat in the same restaurants and share the same private gossip-net.
Their extra-marital affairs, past drug taking habits, politically incorrect after-dinner conversations, bitching about colleagues – weaknesses that the rest of us share – are all known to journalists, in accurate form or otherwise, and can be used by them at any time to whip up a dishonest and hysterical campaign aimed at their destruction – if, and only if, their proprietor agrees.
So all politicians keep in with the proprietors and attempt to bully the editors.
Only the rest of us, the poor fucking public, are left out of this charade – because we’re not mature enough, apparently, to be trusted with the truth.
Now all that’s up in the air and nobody knows how the pieces will land.
At the Bureau we’re optimistic.
The phone hacking affair gives the politicians the chance to distance themselves without retaliation, the expenditure cuts have led to the loss of hundreds of government press officers’ jobs and there seems to be a real desire among politicians to change the relationship in their own and the public’s interest.
The losers are the overground media which now find themselves caught in a vice between politicians and the internet with the terrifying possibility that the good times are over. Isn’t that great?
And it’s difficult to see the hateful influence peddlers of the PR business continuing in quite the same way in future: if Murdoch or the chairman of the BBC has to use the front entrance to 10 Downing Street once the committee of enquiry reports then so will the PR lobbyists. But we’ll have to watch the bastards in case they try to turn the situation to their own advantage,
Finally, another good sign has been the reaction of the Bureau’s current favourite Louise Mensch to an attempt to smear her following her comments about Piers Morgan in parliament.
Once upon a time the “charges” against her, mailed to her party chairman by a so-called investigative journalist, would have been enough to get the media ruin machine running: past drug taking, drunken dancing “in front of a journalist” and writing her first novel on her employer’s computers, thus nicking electricity.
Shameful, we say, [machine cranks into action] MP ADMITS DRUG CHARGES, no, not just shameful, CALLS FOR MP TO RESIGN,[machine running nicely] SHAMED MP PLEADS FOR HER FUTURE, [engage brainwash gear] on page 14 why Louise should stay, Tony Parsons, not just shameful but – TEARFUL LOUISE GOES – shocking!
But Louise didn’t deny the accusations or try to wriggle out of them: instead she dared to treat the public as adults and said, yes, the accusations were probably true, with the result that the machine wouldn’t start. A small victory and a hopeful augury.
Even better
How appropriate that this clean-up of the stables is being accompanied by the disintegration of the lie machine called Team McCann, the latter epitomising the squalor into which relations between media, government and public had descended under Labour.
Gordon Brown was a fine bully of editors but was terrified of what the proprietors could do to him, given the rumours about his inadequate paranoid personality and closet homosexuality.
Gordon Brown attempting to flex his anus and relax
When the overground media turned the McCanns into helpless martyrs Gordon joined the party, anxious to show that he was a human being with human sympathies rather than a tight-arsed, tight crutched, Scotch intriguer with a cucumber stuck up his rectum, well worthy of the therapist’s couch.
As usual his decision making was wrong, his insight into people zero: he not only backed a couple of lying chancers but he failed to see that the Madeleine affair – the so-called “biggest story of our times” – was in fact a death ride for the press and a tipping point for the rest of the overground media.
Whether you foolishly supported the McCanns like Brown, or saw through them like we did, it was all the same: the media had abused their power in a grotesque and disgusting manner, either by using their near monopoly position to push their fictional sob-story to the whole nation and drive some of us crazy (our view) or by libelling the couple with wicked stories (the foolish view).
The House of Commons turned on them, if for the wrong reasons, and began a process of clipping their wings that continues today. Things will never be the same.
Guess what Keir, we’re going to jeer at you
Quite what the impact will be on the media when the inevitable happens and the parents are unmasked – courtesy of Amaral and Leicester police – we do not know.
Individually they will manage: neither Keir Simmons nor the rest will lose their jobs and others will simply slip by, hoping the public will forget what they once said or wrote.
But the fact that their great rivals, the wicked people of the internet, the fantasists, the haters, were nearer to the truth than the supposed experts of the overground media, will deliver a nasty blow to their credibility, and hence their wallets, at roughly the same time as the new measures regarding relations with the government and the police are introduced.
Goodness, it will be such fun to mock them.
