News of the end of the News of the World

I have to admit to feeling a twinge of sadness that the News of the World is closing. It's not because I had any great respect for the paper and it's not something I'd expect any non-journalist to share: more just that someone-walked-over-my-grave feeling that Dagenham Ford workers must have got when MG Rover went bankrupt.

Still, the fast-moving cynicism of the move is fairly breathtaking. After all, was it really the 158-year-old paper, per se, that people were outraged about? Or the sordid methods employed by some of its journalists and--though they won't admit it--surely endorsed by senior management? If you've ever opened the pages of the NotW, you could hardly argue that its brand is now irreparably tarnished--it's been a gutter rag since it was reporting the Jack the Ripper case, and it's never been short of amnesiac self-justification. The problem here is a culture--clearly accepted and likely encouraged by its then-editors Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson, who have and will continue to go far--that encouraged journalists to break not just ethical norms but the law, and to have no qualms about callous disregard for the most basic aspects of humanity in pursuit of a story.

The fact that News International is clearly gunning up to replace the NotW with a Sunday Sun really completes the cynicism of the exercise. My sympathy goes out to the poor damn journalists who had nothing to do with this and are now paying with their jobs. Newspapers employ a lot of people and these sorts of activities seemed to have involved a relatively small number of "investigative reporters" who left five years ago, plus no doubt a cadre of editors and managers who remain or have moved on to greater things. I'm not sure why everyone else gets to suffer.

I realise that this sounds a lot like the "few bad apples" theory of corrupt police officers, famously overthrown when the Stephen Lawrence inquiry found there was a culture of "institutionalised racism" within the Metropolitan Police. But I don't remember anyone suggesting at the time that the Met be closed down before eventually being replaced by a bunch of people transferred from some other institutionally-racist police force. What you need to do after an event like this is sack a lot of managers who have enabled this culture and any reporters who participated in it, and replace them with new journalists who will inculcate a culture that deems the former behaviour utterly, unequivocally unacceptable. The fact that it's hard to imagine any Murdoch Sunday tabloid that represents that sort of culture tells you all you need to know about how long this particular mea culpa will go on.