Womanly Tales

What a dramatic month for the United Kingdom! To use a very English word, this is truly been an ‘Extraordinary’ story.
We have a villain - a businessman (and kith and kin) who only know the color and smell of green – ie, money.
We have a hero - An ‘inexperienced’ leader of the Labour Party who is hitting sixes like he has (and indeed hasn’t) anything to lose.
We have countless victims - The ones who’s phones were hacked; The ones whose’ stories when published in News of the World for broadspect titilation cost them their lives; And a Prime Minister caught between choosing the wrong kind of friends and personal risk;
We have a clown - A Mayor of London who’s striking his own opportunistic path to fame and glory. Boris Johnson, for Prime Minister, here he comes!
To the delight of all those tuning in to this story is the PLOT. Every other hour it seems like there’s a new event in that plot that once again metaphorically tosses all the players into the stratosphere only for them to then seconds later fall to the ground, with only a few capable of finding their feet.
To me there are three themes to this saga:
1. Hate the crime, not the sinner. I am apalled by the vindictiveness in the media, amongst the politicians and others towards the people in the wrong. Yes, we want those in the wrong to admit and take the responsibility – however we cannot let that take away from the crime itself.
2. We will not ever know the full picture. The United Kingdom is famous for its investigations. Every problem or story is investigated and these investigations cost a lot of money and time. At the end of it all I am not even sure if any corrective steps are indeed taken. With the media story, the fact that the Murdoch empire was alloted so much power is NOT news. The British have known this for some time with a few people trying very hard to bring about this change. So the huge hue & cry today seems quite pretentious to me because this issue of the need for media regulation and to not afford one person or corporation so much power was known but not addressed.
3) The most important thing about this whole sordid story for me is this – Each of us – you, me and our neighbours (the big society as Cameron would say) needs to own up to personal culpability in this. We have become part of a society that absolutely adores reality television. The more we can sneer and lift our holy-than-thou rear ends to the private turbulences in the lives of the rich & famous – the better we feel. We have consumed the trashy, immoral stories published by the News of the World and other similar publications. We are increasingly watching the same trash on television. We are contributing the the Murdoch’s of today. If there are people who committed suicide after seeing the news of their personal and private turbulences published in this newspaper, their deaths are in part caused by us.
Let us please use this time to reflect on our own tastes and stop feeding off this immoral gossiping that is rife in this business of media and entertainment.
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The BBC website had this email shared on their page -
Robert Gilmour from Ayr e-mails: This is about bringing the media into line and making them transparent and fully accountable, first and foremost, not about gunning for the prime minister – Miliband as usual has lowered the tone of the whole debate here. Also I was mortified that at the press conference in South Africa yesterday, greedy UK journalists could not resist/refrain from asking the PM questions about the hacking scandal in front of the SA press and president. How disgusting and embarrassing, they really score so many own goals for the UK don’t they, they are just saturated and obsessed with self interest and have zero national pride I’m afraid.
I read this and smiled at the ‘national pride’ sentiment. This is really rubbish. Western-Anglo media have always made it their business to turn up their noses on the turbulences occuring across the world. There is no shame thus in having your own dirty laundry put out on display because that is really the method you have upheld as the ‘free and fair’ way of doing things. The Prime Minister does jolly well need to answer these questions whereever he is at the moment – my only regret is that this question was not put to him from a foreign correspondent. Then again, South African journalists are perhaps way more courteous than their fellow peers in the United Kingdom.