As the cops round up journalists, Trevor Kavanagh’s protest in the Sun has aroused amazement and some scorn. ‘Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’ — ran the headline, and the gist of the complaint among my friends was that it was a self-pitying and self-aggrandising piece of work.
Whatever you think of the Sun or Kavanagh, however, it is worth hearing him out for three reasons.
1. Kavanagh is being brave. We ought to applaud Hugh Grant for standing up to the tabloids even though he knows they will give him a bad press for the rest of his career. (You will have noticed that nearly everyone else in the celeb pack has let Grant and a few others fight their battles for them while they cower in a prudent silence.)
Similarly, we ought to applaud Kavanagh for standing up to his employers — something hardly any journalist or politician has done since Mrs Thatcher's day. His article is a barely coded protest against his proprietors. To save their hides, Rupert and James Murdoch closed the News of the World last year. Now they are handing evidence to the police that detectives can use to prosecute Sun reporters. Their disloyalty is staggering.
Murdoch’s employees bowed and scrapped before him, parroted his political prejudices, and sneaked and hacked to fuel his profits. Their rewards are the dole office and the police cell. Murdoch won business favours from politicians by bribing them with propagandistic coverage. Having taken all he could, he dumped them when they were no use to him. He is giving the same treatment to his journalists.
We all like to pretend that we would behave like brave dissidents if circumstances demanded. But when our employers behave in ways they should not, how many confront them? You do not need to believe that the Sun is much of a newspaper to admire Kavanagh for speaking up. Like Labour and Tory politicians before him, he has learned the wisdom of the Psalmist’s warning to ‘put not your trust in princes’.
Read the rest of the article: http://www.spectator.co.uk/nickcohen/7647868/we-are-all-journalists-now.thtml
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