Monday 1 August 2011

Time to look in the Mirror.. (Pun intended)

Well I very much doubt that I need to explain to you what i'm talking about when I mention the phone hacking scandal. But just for those that arent quite up to date with whats going on in the world and quite possibly one of the biggest news stories at the moment, Ill give you a quick overview.
Basically, News of the World has been shut down for hacking into the answer phones of friends and relatives of murder victims to get exclusive stories that other newspapers wouldnt have. Its all a big hoo-ha with everybody blaming someone else and everyone involved using the famous 'no comment' when questioned.
But really who is to blame? Who is behind it all?

Yes okay, the obvious answer would be Rupert Murdoch (owner of NOTW) and a few of his employee's, but however wrong it was, can we really blame him for trying to out-do the other newspapers and boost his sales?
As the general public, we are the ones demanding more. We buy the newspapers and magazine that have the biggest story, the most outrageous and exclusive not some shoddy paper thats publishing last weeks news. Would it be wrong to suggest that we may possibly have played a part in this god awful scandal? As much as we want to claim that we buy the newspapers for the facts, isnt there a part in everyone that just wants the gossip? As a nation we have this huge craze of invading peoples privacy and wanting to know all the details and the demand for the newspapers to provide this is quite obviously becoming too much.

Now, in all honesty and as contradicting as it may sound, I am 100% against the phone hacking and think that it is completely disrespectful of the suffering families, but I find it very hard to believe that NOTW is the only newspaper that has some unethical way of getting stories. I read an article the other day saying that Murdochs chief executive or whatever she was, Rebecca Brookes had once sneaked into The Sunday Times dressed as a cleaner and stolen a copy of the newspaper so she could publish the exclusive story they had. How exactly do these tabloids, which I must add tend to be made up of total crap, get such exclusive stories when they arent stealing them from other papers? It makes you wonder.

If the demand for wanting that little bit extra from our newspapers wasnt there, would the phone hacking of even happened? I think its time to look at ourselves and they way we demand so much from the media. Since when did it become okay for peoples private lives to be meddled in without so much as an inch of respect for those involved?