The World's Greatest Newspaper Outrage

When Angus Deayton became the news, his position as presenter of "Have I Got News For You" became untenable. You can't have a news comedy show in which one major item of news might be skirted around (it wasn't of course) and in which that major item is squirming as the barbs come in from both sides.

Deayton was caught in a web spun by the "News Of The World". Like Deayton, when a newspaper becomes news - bad news, really bad news - its position becomes questionable. Newspapers exist to report news, not to be the news. A truism you might think, except that it isn't true.

Newspapers acquired long ago a sense of their own importance to such a degree that they have made and make their own front pages. But when this self-importance becomes so inflated that it causes a break with reality and becomes so arrogant that it strips away any vestige of moral code, then all respect is lost.

This self-importance witnessed its final, appallingly self-congratulatory act on Sunday. "The world's greatest newspaper 1843-2011." How dare it?

Journalists at the "News Of The World" can rightly feel indignant at the paper's closure - those whose methods have not been underhand, that is - but they have reaped the failed harvest of a culture into which they bought. Taking the "News Of The World" shilling meant living by its moral code, or lack of one. Its fall from grace may have been the product of a small and secretive cadre associated with the paper, but this lack of grace had long existed within the paper's consciousness and ethic of nastiness, bullying and arguably anti-democracy through abuse of power.

The Brit bars of Mallorca will now be deprived of a paper that, on Sundays and as breakfasts and roasts were consumed, became ever more grease-marked and ketchup-splattered. Many a Brit bar applies a principle of the LCD and provides for its customers the lowest common denominators of "The Sun" and the "News Of The World". The bars may not have to wait long for a replacement. Rather than titles that have been suggested (and indeed registered two days before the announcement of the closure of the "News Of The World"), why not simply call a new rag "Sunday". Murdoch has aspired to dominate in other spheres, so taking over the sabbath should pose no great difficulty and thus reinforce the arrogance and self-importance.

The LCD principle and its accompanying salaciousness play well among an expat and tourist audience, just as they play well with the inpat (I've invented another new word) back in the UK. This audience no longer has the "News Of The World" to feed its hunger for scandal and the shallow, but it will not cease to have an appetite.

William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of "The Times", has referred to losing touch with the moral codes of the readership, defined - by him - as common sense, goodwill, help to neighbours and decent conduct in general. However, because the audience's appetite will never be fully sated, is Rees-Mogg right? Be the audience expat or inpat, what actually is its moral code?

Amidst all the discussion about the goings-on at the "News Of The World", it was the more sensationalist aspects of the paper's desire for the sensational, the hacking of the phones of dead servicemen's families and those of the parents of murdered children or the children themselves, which informed the expat (and inpat) audience debate as it thumbed through the last copy and sipped a cold San Miguel or a warm John Smiths.

The moral code of the audience isn't offended; rather, it is stripped as bare as that of the perpetrators at the "News Of The World". The audience laps it up and craves more; it requires being outraged by further news of the actions of a newspaper it relied upon to pander to its own outraged voyeurism.

The "News Of The World" could only have ever gone out in one way: the way it has chosen, through one grand act of self-destruction born out of the uncontrolled pursuit of the sensational, out of its disregard for morality and out of its self-importance and viciousness. The audience was not a participant in this final act, but it was a willing participant in all that went before. It feels let down. Not so much by the actions of the paper but by the disappearance of a source to feed its fix of the drug of being outraged.

Edwina Currie, who knows a thing or two about the salacious exposé, having manufactured one of her own, has placed blame for the paper's downfall on the audience being voracious consumers of the questionable or the immoral. But then what comes first? The chicken of the public's prurience or the egg poisoned with the salmonella of journalistic immorality? Both parties are culpable.

The "News Of The World" may have believed that whatever stories might have emerged from its hacking would have had the public on its side. Sadly, it was probably not wrong in believing this. It is the conspiracy between paper and public that is the real moral of this story and how low each will stoop in feeding and consuming the salacious.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.