a different view to the NOTW fiasco...

Any public anger that is not started by the daily mail but still manages to cause up a fuss large enough to make normal people angry over something they don’t understand and would be hard pressed to recall any of the actual facts that have been reported gets my vote!

Of course this is all about the News Of The World who have been accused of dirty underhanded tactics of the most dastardly acts in the world of reporting.
Phone hacking as it is known seems to involve a newspaper hiring a private detective (yes they actually exist!) to snoop around.

The private dick get his hands dirty looking for juicy gossip and passes it on the reporter for some cold hard cash.

It’s all very noir in its own way. It’s also quite seedy and as the facts of the NOTW case are creeping out – rather horrible as well.

A few weeks ago newspaper were full of how the NOTW had been suspected of (god knows
how...) listening in to celebrities phone messages and as a collective we all said “tut tut, it’s a shame....” some of the more mentally unstable would have said “It’s big brother gone mad...” and so on and so forth. But underneath it all this bit of water cooler gossip was the closest any of us really wants to get to matter concerning freedom of speech and personal privacy.

It didn’t really matter to us because the people being “hacked” were famous people and we ALL know that famous people actually love having their deepest darkest secrets and private conversations splashed all over the front pages of every red top paper on a slow news day.

But then on Tuesday, something happened.

Things got a little bit nasty.

It seemed that somebody connected to the NOTW had been listening to the voice messages of a young girl who had been murdered.

Not only that but as reports became more involved it appeared that not only had they been listening to these messages, but they had been deleting them to allow more
messages to come through.

This gave the police the idea that the young girl in question may still be alive and gave her distraught parents hope of seeing their little girl again.
It’s horrible. Nobody in their right mind would suggest otherwise. But let’s take a step back and look at this story from another angle...

That’s it. Just a bit more.

Okay.



Let us all think back to around two months ago when the whole world – mainly twitter though – was up in arms about freedom of speech and how disgraceful it was that a highly paid sports star could hide his shame of cheating on his wife by splashing his cash in the courts...

Flip back to now and the story is almost opposite – people are again up in arms but this time about the fact reporters have found news stories....

Yes, I agree what they did was wrong, immoral, and without excuse.

But it is these people who are paid by the money you spend on gossip mags and shitty newspapers, who are employed to go out and find a story for the next edition to sooth the public’s ever increasing thirst for gossip and shocking stories.

It is an unfortunate side of journalism. I for one think it is wrong, but I have to laugh at the way the news on TV reports this story as one of horror when they were demanding the right to be able to tell the story of Ryan Giggs etc...

As for the public – they are the most fickle and outrageous group of hypocrites.
All I can see on twitter and the like are people both famous and not, thumping their keyboards to oblivion over the anger and shock of these allegations, while not 2 months ago these very same people broke the law themselves by naming Ryan Giggs while an injunction was taken out banning him from being named in any wrong doing.

As a side note – I have been asked five times to order the NOTW for tomorrow. Normally only get one request.

What does that tell you about the great British public eh?

(Idiots.)