The country’s two main right-wing newspapers, the Telegraph and Daily Mail, have taken very different editorial lines on the phone-hacking scandal and the crisis in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
As several commentators have noted on Twitter, the Daily Telegraph‘s leader today is in thundering form, calling hacking “a scandal that has diminished Britain”. It excoriates Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron, Rupert Murdoch and the Metropolitan police.
After the revelations of the past week, the whole world has learned the shameful truth about modern Britain: that its leading politicians and policemen have been lining up to have their palms greased and images burnished by executives of a media empire guilty of deeply criminal – and morally repugnant – invasions of personal privacy. . .
David Cameron should have dismantled this quasi-masonic circle, with its conspiratorial deal-cutting and back-scratching. Instead, encouraged by George Osborne, he invited the circle into Downing Street, giving Mr Coulson an undeserved second chance. Mr Cameron is paying the price for this and other cynical moves. At a time when he is supposed to be navigating Britain through both the domestic and global debt crises, the Prime Minister is desperately trying to align himself with public opinion and distance himself from the News International scandal. Government has given way to the shallowest form of crisis management.
The Mail, however, considers phone-hacking to be a diversion from “the real problems facing Britain” – the financial problems in the Eurozone, the worries over the US’s credit rating, soaring fuel prices at home. In Friday’s leader, it declaimed:
In a sane world, politicians would be working round the clock to help rectify these dire problems. But sadly, they are far too busy enjoying a frenzy of vengeful score-settling against the Murdoch press.
Even though the News of the World has been closed, the BSkyB takeover bid withdrawn, and Rupert Murdoch has promised to co-operate with the judicial inquiries, the bloodlust – orchestrated by a vastly subsidised BBC – continues.. . . The stink of schadenfreude from Britain’s chattering classes is overpowering.
It remains to be seen who is most in touch with the public mood on this.
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