Demise of 'News of the World' has rivals jumping with glee and pundits talking

Commentators are trying to divine the significance of the implosion at Murdoch’s media empire

THE NEWS of the Worldmay have gone to the great recycling mill in the sky but the gutter press is still with us. Rival red tops have jumped with glee into the space vacated by the Rupert Murdoch flagship, so celebrities who fancy a public snort might want to think again.

The Daily Star Sundayrecorded a circulation of 1.1 million last Sunday compared with its usual sale of 300,000 copies. The Peopleupped its circulation from 475,000 to 900,000, with leading-edge journalism below headlines such as "Ashley Cole begs Cheryl to re-marry" and "Kate too thin to get pregnant?".

In the wake of the News of the World's demise, scores of commentators have been weighing in to divine the significance of the implosion at Murdoch's media empire.

Writing in Newsweek, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame observed: "Murdoch's genius was building an empire on the basis of an ever-descending lowest journalistic denominator. The foundation has little or nothing to do with the best traditions and values of real reporting and responsible journalism: the best obtainable version of the truth. In place of this journalistic ideal, the enduring Murdoch ethic substitutes gossip, sensationalism, and manufactured controversy."

The London Review of Bookswebsite featured this prescient comment from author John Lanchester, written in 2004: "Murdoch's power and success come from his complete understanding of the modern western world's first commandment: thou shalt give people what they want. Murdoch takes what we want, and gives it back to us in a coarser version, and we find that we prefer it that way."

The late Paul Foot described how Murdoch’s tabloids centred their editorial approach on reflecting the views of the bloke who likes a pint and a punt and a well-endowed woman, and wouldn’t be told there was anything wrong with any of them.

Jeff Sparrow, author of Communism: A Love Story, joined the debate, offering the view that Murdoch's populism distinguished itself not so much by the way it encouraged its readers to kick down (against immigrants, homosexuals, black people and so on) but by how it encouraged them to kick up.

“By expressing his outrage against, say, housing specially allocated to immigrants or the light sentences received by muggers, the cheeky chappy of a Murdoch tabloid cocked a snoot against the smug moralisers on his TV or in the upmarket papers.”

In Sparrow’s view, the populism of the Murdoch tabloids is phoney. “Strangely, those who belong to America’s gilded fraction . . . are very much a traditional ruling class, made up of people who look very much like Rupert Murdoch, his sons and the rest of his corporate lieutenants.”

According to Jon Slattery, former deputy editor of the Press Gazette, journalists who worked on Murdoch tabloids were just as much to blame as their boss for demeaning their profession.

“I think the roots lie in a particularly thick-skinned macho image that tabloid journalists have revelled in . . . It prided itself on bending the rules and pushing stories to the limit and is a culture that goes back to the cut-throat competition of the Fleet Street tabloids when ‘getting the story’ meant everything.”

We wuz only following orders, some hacks pleaded to Reuters, which published a detailed investigation of the News International culture this week.

New staff would be given the cold shoulder until they had proved themselves to be “thoroughly disreputable” so their colleagues could trust them.

A former News of the Worldreporter told Reuters: "It was no place for anyone to pipe up and say: 'This doesn't seem ethical to me.' That would have made you a laughing stock."

Reporters were under “unbelievable, phenomenal pressure”, treated harshly by bosses who would shout abuse in their faces and keep a running total of their bylines.

Not everyone is dancing on the News of the World's grave. Guardiancolumnist Suzanne Moore opined: "Those who saw the closing of the News of the Worldas some kind of victory seemed to me terribly myopic. Do we want more or fewer newspapers? Well, go to a country that only has one paper – or even the US where news is surprisingly local – and you will see how media control rests on limited, partial information."

Andrew Gilligan of the Daily Telegraphwrote that nothing could excuse the News of the World's treatment of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and thousands of others.

“It had no imaginable justification,” he said. “But nor can journalism, which has to take on bad people, always be genteel and respectable. And some regulator’s idea of proper, decent standards might stop us targeting people who do deserve it.”

Veteran Fleet Street grandee Max Hastings concurred. “Be in no doubt. If the press is to fulfil its vital role in pursuing wrongdoers, it is sometimes essential to play rough. The other side does.”

siobhan@businessplus.ie