Last Sunday, News International, the newspaper company owned by the Australamerican magnate Rupert Murdoch, successfully brought professional disaster to the career of the English rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio with a piece of journalism of quite breath-taking nastiness. That same day, the reputable wing of News International, The Sunday Times, published a deeply intimate photograph of the former taoiseach Charles Haughey passionately kissing the journalist Terry Keane. As an act of personal treachery, it vastly exceeded any of the revelations we have heard about the man.
The two scoops had more in common than the grubby fingerprints of Rupert Murdoch. Both of them involved betrayal. The Keane-Haughey photograph was never intended for publication. It was a private moment, either recorded by a friend or by themselves on a camera-timer. She is semi-recumbent on the floor, he kneeling down and kissing her deeply on the mouth. This was not my business; it was not the business of anyone outside their families (and God love them this hour); for merely to see such a photograph transforms even the inadvertent viewer into a voyeur.
Personal hurt
I felt soiled by the picture, not because a deeply intimate and private act had been turned into a public event, but because though not enriching me in any degree, it must have emotionally impoverished the families of the two participants hugely. Grave personal hurt must have been done to people who had no part in the affair; and that, no doubt, was the intention. The purpose of the Dallaglio revelations was slightly different. It was to wreck his career as England rugby captain: and as they say in another code, game, set and match.
This mucky affair was stagemanaged by the now commonplace tactic of having a young woman approach the intended target pretending to be other than what she in reality is: a perfectly vile journalist rummaging around the bottom the professional barrel of our trade. (The worst kind of tabloid journalism is nowadays almost a female preserve: by jove, ma'am, that must make the sisters proud).
In poor Lawrence's case, the hackette pretended to be an executive of a shaving-products company trying to get her victim promote its goods. In the course of a "business" meeting, the entrapping sleuthette spoke of her own drug-habits, the better to provoke her victim into doing likewise; and the poor dolt duly obliged. Thus the News of the World got its story, and England a new captain.
I am not at all sure which newspaper is the more reprehensible; the News of the World because it is a vile rag? Or The Sunday Times which has so degraded itself with the publication of such a personal photograph? The latter probably, because it sets high standards for itself, and its Irish staff are without exception first-class journalists who generally speaking are a credit to the business.
Incomprehensible
Which makes the decision to publish this photograph all the more incomprehensible, all the more inexcusable, and on the face of it, all the more inexplicable.
But of course it is not inexplicable. Somewhere above the Irish staff there is a line manager close to God, i.e. Rupert Murdoch, whose duty is to ensure that the demands of vulgar and tasteless populism, in which the decent bourgeois standards of reticence, decorum, and restraint are repeatedly violated, are pandered to throughout the kingdom of God.
For Rupert Murdoch is an ideologist. He hates the class system, and he detests in particular those values which he associates with the middle-classes of the imperial Australia of his childhood. He especially loathes the British monarchy and the value-system of the social system of which it is the pinnacle. So, just as all state organs in the Soviet Union had party hacks at every decision-making level to impose a secretly divined politburo policy, so News International has its Murdoch-commissars, ensuring that the base appetites of populism are regularly stoked, in order that they can then be slaked.
Celebrated sap
In this terrible world, the principles of privacy are extinct; in this terrible world, young women, with fluttering eyelashes and whirring tape recorders concealed within some perfumed crevice, flatter and deceive that they might bring personal ruin to some celebrated sap; in this terrible world, the minor indiscretions of life are shaped out of recognition into the front-page fare of tabloids; in this terrible world, there are no standards or rules which prohibit disclosure; in this terrible world, the discretion which makes life endurable, which divides the properly-knowable from the properly-concealed, is eradicated. All of our lives become a peep-show for others' delectation. In this terrible world, all honour is dead.
It is not just the famous, or the families of the famous, who are potential victims of this abominable culture which wrecks lives and reputations. At a pinch, anybody will do. Short of a film-star snorting coke? Then a GP, a teacher or journalist will do. Three-in-a-bed romp? Spice it up, and even a brickie's mate, plus, of course, two other mates, will suffice, regardless of the distress being caused to the blameless uninvolved. The story's the thing; all other standards may safely be disregarded.
Journalism is sinking into a vat of manure; and the Lord of this journalism is Vatman himself, Rupert Murdoch.