17.12.2015

The great escape

As a line is drawn under the phone-hacking scandal, William Kane looks at the lessons

They say a week is a long time in politics, which would make four years some kind of geological epoch.

In the middle of 2011, the greatest and most political scandal in recent British history was unleashed - by a dead teenager. After sustained investigation in TheGuardian, the revelation that journalists on the late and unlamented News of the World had illegally accessed the voicemail messages of Milly Dowler, who was found dead a few days later, hit the British establishment like the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs.

We stress that this was a political scandal, rather than merely a matter of corporate criminality, like - say - Bob Maxwell’s monstrous frauds. David Cameron’s government was pulled into the chaos directly; eminent officers of the law followed him. There was then a period of general chaos, with all participants in the scandal thrashing around, trying to offload the blame onto the next party along.

Today, we can say - with almost total certainty - that ‘a line has been drawn under the affair’. Fences have been mended. The incestuous relations between press, government and state core have been tentatively re-established. It is back to business as usual.

For, this week, something significant happened. The last of the extant legal proceedings against individuals in connection with phone-hacking concluded. It was announced that no-one else from the Mirror - the rival paper to which the scandal had most rapidly expanded - would face a day in the dock. They have run out of people to try and lock up; and they are in no mood to find any more.

An ocean of money has been spent on prosecuting persons both eminent and insignificant; and her majesty’s success has (quelle surprise!) been roughly in inverse proportion to the defendants’ eminence. A good handful of lowly hacks have eaten a charge. A few middle-to-upper-ranking figures in the NotW/News International hierarchy have been found to enter guilty pleas: notably Neville Thurlbeck and Greg Miskiw, who received a perfunctory six months in the clink per head.

Among the people who really mattered, of course, only Andy Coulson - NotW editor turned Cameron spin-doctor - was put away. Others who the less charitable might have thought had something to do with it (principally, Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch) have got away scot-free. The trial of Brooks and Coulson (and others, including Thurlbeck and Miskiw) racked up a £60 million bill in the end.

It is not so much that there is very little to show for all that money, but the fact that so much seems to have been so rapidly forgotten. Long ago, the most important victory was won by the British establishment - the essence of the scandal was suppressed, and instead the issue was portrayed as purely the bad behaviour of certain men and women of the press, and consequently the need to find a more robust regulatory framework to prevent such delinquency in the future. Now even that aim is in limbo.

After all, one of the consequences of the cessation of legal hostilities ought to be the return of Brian Leveson to the public view. Those with very long and detailed memories may recall that his initial inquiry was hampered by the fact that so much of the material relating to the phone-hacking scandal was sub judice, thanks to all the tabloid hacks being piled into interview rooms. It was agreed that the first part of the inquiry would look rather nebulously into press ethics and regulation, and a subsequent leg would look more precisely at phone-hacking: how endemic it was and who had a hand in covering it up.

Now that all the criminal proceedings are out of the way, Lord Justice Brian has a free hand to do so! Except, of course, he does not. Somebody will have to find the money to spend on another interminable judicial inquiry. Someone will have to give the say-so. That someone is ... the government.

I grant you, dear reader, politics has taken some surprising turns of late. Yet I cannot imagine a less attractive proposition to David Cameron and his cohorts than green-lighting Leveson 2. It would amount to a declaration of war on Rupert Murdoch - Cameron was basically bounced into such a battle by sheer force of events in 2011, and has no such propulsion behind him now, least of all with a rocky road ahead of him this parliament.

There is also the small matter of how the Murdoch papers were allowed to get away with this stuff for so long, given that industrial-scale phone-hacking was a straightforward fact for all with eyes to see by 2009 at the latest (and really, by 2006, when Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire first went down for it). Have senior Tories colluded in this? We want to find out - but Cameron certainly does not. So Leveson looks like a wash-out.

Back where we started?

There was one other potentially intriguing legal possibility: that of corporate charges against News UK - again something that had to be left until the present moment. It would not, to be sure, hold the satisfaction of seeing people sent down for hard time; but it was by far the most feared outcome in Murdoch boardrooms. The United States department of justice takes a rather dim view of those involved in criminality abroad who try to do business in the US, as the eye-watering fines against HSBC et al attest. Murdoch’s empire, as they all do, has a capital city, and that city is New York. Every step they have taken thus far has had the primary goal of isolating the troubles in London, and keeping New York out of DOJ crosshairs.

Happily for Rupert, it seems they have succeeded. No corporate charges will be brought. The new old boss, Rebekah Brooks, can be forgiven for thinking herself the luckiest woman alive.

It appears, then, we are back where we started. But not quite. For a start, four years is a sufficiently long time in economics for us to be measurably farther down the road along which the press as a whole is going. We know that, ultimately, large-circulation print newspapers will cease to make money. We know, equally, that digital distribution has - with the exception of one or two examples of successful paywalls - failed to pay its way. Ad rates are abominable, and with the rising availability and popularity of ad-blockers, getting worse; and, while people will pay for stuff they cannot get elsewhere, very much of the papers’ output is stuff you can get elsewhere.

In short, then, the power of the mainstream press is being eroded. We should be very precise as to what we mean by this: while the wider news agenda is still set just as unilaterally by large media corporations as it ever was, and even relatively independent online alternatives are just as dominated by that agenda, the economic basis for these corporations’ power is rotting away. Perhaps they will find a way to establish it on a new basis; perhaps not, although they will not be replaced by anything better automatically. There is a deeper structural need for something to do the job of misdirection and misinformation currently so ably performed by the bourgeois media.

Secondly, though the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry for a move towards statute-backed regulation of the press ended somewhat in a stalemate - with press barons and their muck-raker enemies joining together in boycotting any ‘approved regulators’, and choosing instead to relaunch the toothless Press Complaints Commission as the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) - its most egregious features were tagged onto the Defamation Act of 2013. Principally, there is the legal provision for an official arbitration service and, while use is ‘voluntary’, insisting on defending a defamation claim in court outside of such ‘arbitration’ will lead to costs awards against you, even if you win.

This repugnant, illiberal legislation was made possible by the hacking scandal: by the fact that the loudest voices raised in defence of free speech were those who had been most egregiously shown to be crooked and corrupt.

Thus is our situation. The state has grown more powerful, and allowed critical voices to be cowed by the threat of extreme financial punishment. Meanwhile, the press has recovered. Murdoch’s papers have a free hand to spread fanciful nonsense, promote the most repulsive chauvinism and fight a war of extermination against the left.

Not a great result.